Junior League of Morristown

The Junior League of Morristown, Inc. (JLM) celebrated their 10th Annual Lunch with the Authors fundraising event on Friday, May 13, from 11am to 3pm at Fiddler's Elbow Country club in Bedminster, NJ. The annual event raises money for the JLM's Voluntarism Scholarship Fund and for its community projects. Since its inception in 1986, the event has funded 112 scholarships awarded totaling over $155,500 to area high school seniors and women returning to college.

Lunch with the Authors chairwomen Amanda Boyadjis and Megan Schubiger, along with a very capable committee, organized this year's event which was attended by 225 women. The annual event began at 11:00 am with a Basket Raffle and a Meet and Greet with the authors where patrons were able to speak with each author one-on-one and have their books signed. The luncheon began at noon along with presentations celebrating the event's tenth year and continued into the afternoon with the three celebrated authors reading from their novels and discussing the origins and inspiration for their books.

Mark your calendars now for Lunch with the Authors 2012 to be held May 11, 2012.

This year's authors were Jennifer Egan - 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction, Daphne Kalotay, and Julie Orringer.

Jennifer Egan
Her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2010. Egan’s novel is an innovatively structured work about an aging rocker, his record executive and his passionate, troubled young assistant. Each chapter in this novel about the music business is told from a different character’s perspective, weaving connections through time, family, friends, music, and emotions. Egan has published numerous short stories in The New Yorker, Granta and Harpers. Her three previous novels, The Keep (2006), Look at Me (2001), and The Invisible Circus (1995) are national bestsellers. Also a journalist, Egan writes cover stories for the New York Times Magazine on a wide range of topics including homeless children, which received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award in 2002 and a story on bipolar children, which won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness in 2008.

For more information on Ms. Egan, please visit www.jenniferegan.com.

Daphne Kalotay
Her first novel, Russian Winter, a saga about the Cold War and ballet, tells the magnificent tale of love, loss, betrayal and redemption while shifting between Cold War Moscow and present day Boston. The novel was a finalist in the James Jones First Novel competition. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed collection Calamity and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Story Prize. A New Jersey native, Kalotay graduated from Vassar College and received her M.A. from Boston University’s Creative Writing Program, where her stories won the Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize and a Transatlantic Review Award from the Henfield Foundation, before earning her Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Kalotay has received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, and she has taught creative writing at Middlebury College, Boston University, and Skidmore College. She lives in the Boston area.

For more information on Ms. Kalotay, please visit www.daphnekalotay.com

Julie Orringer
Her debut novel, The Invisible Bridge, was listed in The New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2010. This epic love story set in World War II Europe, follows Andras Levi, a young Hungarian-Jewish student, who moves to Paris to study architecture in 1937. He meets Klara, an older Hungarian ballet teacher and falls in love, despite concerns and mystery surrounding her background and the march of Nazism across Europe. Profound love, familial bonds and binding friendships play out against the cruelty inflicted on Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Orringer’s short stories have been published in The Yale Review, Paris Review and Washington Post Magazine. Her collection of short stories, How to Breathe Underwater, was recognized by the Los Angeles Times as Best Book of the Year and by the New York Times as a Notable Book. It was translated into nine languages, and in 2006, was made required reading for all freshmen at Stanford University. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and has been a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan and Columbia University.

For more information on Ms. Orringer, please visit www.julieorringer.com.