Kia Corthron: Moon and the Mars

Kia Corthron’s debut novel, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, was the winner of the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. She was the 2017 Bread Loaf Shane Stevens Fellow in the Novel. She is also a nationally and internationally produced playwright. For her body of work for the stage, Corthron has garnered the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, the Horton Foote Prize, the United States Artists Jane Addams Fellowship, the Flora Roberts Award, and others. She was born and raised in Cumberland, Maryland, and lives in Harlem, New York City. Moon and the Mars is her second novel.

Photo credit: Sophie Kandaouroff

Michael Patrick MacDonald is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie. 

MacDonald grew up in the Old Colony housing project in South Boston, a neighborhood that held the highest concentration of white poverty in the United States. After losing four of his eleven siblings and seeing his generation decimated by poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration, he learned to transform personal and community trauma, becoming a leading Boston activist, organizer, and writer. He co-founded Boston’s first ever gun buyback programs as well as local support groups for survivors of poverty, violence, suicide, and the drugs trade. His efforts have built anti-racist & class-solidarity coalitions to reduce violence and promote grassroots leadership from among the families and communities most impacted. 

At Northeastern University’s honors department, MacDonald teaches “Non-Fiction Writing & Social Justice Issues.” He leads an annual Northeastern University "Dialogue of Civilizations" classroom to Derry and Belfast, where students get an up-close perspective on post-Troubles social and transformative justice efforts happening at the intersection of justice and healing. At Harvard University, MacDonald teaches the role of storytelling in restorative and transformative justice movements. 

At the grassroots level, Macdonald has developed a community-based writing and healing curriculum. The Rest of the Story: Transforming Trauma to Voice and Agency has been implemented at the Louis D Brown Peace Institute with survivors of homicide victims, at the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, with cross-border men’s sheds in Fermanagh and Leitrim, Ireland, as well at Loughan House prison in Cavan, Ireland. 

In 2019 he received a Fulbright Scholar fellowship to Belfast, where he taught Transformative Storytelling at Queen’s University and brought his community-based storytelling curriculum to mental health advocates of Participation and Practice of Rights’ #123GP campaign. This year, The Rest of the Story continues to build a transatlantic “Black & Green” solidarity coalition between survivors in Boston and Belfast. 

He is currently working on his third book of narrative nonfiction.