Author and CCCA Spring 2014 Artist-in-Residence Bo Caldwell discusses her book, City of Tranquil Light, and her journey as she developed her characters and their relationships. She explains her underlying creative process and the ideas that she aimed to share through the book. Caldwell closes with a reading from her book.
Bo Caldwell’s first novel,The Distant Land of My Father, was a national bestseller, one of the Los Angeles Times' Best Books of 2001, and a Booksense 76 pick. Her second novel, City of Tranquil Light, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, an October 2010 Indie Next Notable, and one of O Magazine's Ten Must Reads for October 2010. Her essays have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and America Magazine, and her short stories have been included in Story, Ploughshares, Epoch, and other literary journals. She lives in Northern California with her husband, novelist Ron Hansen.
Natasha Duquette received her MA from the University of Toronto and her PhD from Queen’s University. She is now an associate professor and Chair of the English Department at Biola University where she teaches courses on eighteenth-century literature, Jane Austen, critical theory, and African literature. Her articles have appeared in Notes and Queries, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Christianity and Literature, and Persuasions-Online. She has also edited the collection Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), as well as contributing to Jane Austen Sings the Blues (U of Alberta P, 2009) and Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory (Wilfred Laurier U P, 2010). For the Chawton House Library series, she created a new critical edition of Helen Maria Williams’s eighteenth-century novel Julia (Pickering & Chatto, 2009). She is currently co-editing an essay collection titled Jane Austen and the Arts with Elisabeth Lenckos (University of Chicago). Her monograph Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Biblical Hermeneutics and Social Action is forthcoming with Wipf & Stock.