Knitting Pearls: A Reading

Ann Hood is the author of, most recently, An Italian Wife. She is also the author of the best-selling novels The Obituary Writer, The Knitting Circle, and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. Hood has won two Pushcart Prizes, the Paul Bowles Prize in Short Fiction, and her work has been selected for inclusion in three volumes of the Best American Writing anthology series. She is the editor of the new anthology, in which celebrated writers explore the rhythm, ritual, and pleasure of knitting. In Knitting Pearls: Writers Writing About Knitting (W. W. Norton & Company), two dozen writers reflect on the transformative and healing powers of knitting.  Contributors include Lily King, Laura Lippman, Jodi Picoult, Bill Roorbach, Steve Almond, Ann Leary, Christina Baker Kline, Lee Woodruff, and knitting rock stars Jared Flood of Brooklyn Tweed and the Yarn Whisperer, Clara Parks.  The twisted (and often tightly knit) stories in Providence Noir (Akashic), edited by Hood, serve as a darkly hued tour of the city in all its nooks and crannies.

CYNTHIA CHINELLY is a poet and short story writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including the Montana Review, North Stone Review, Graham House Review, the Southern Poetry Review and MidAmerican Review. She teaches writing at Florida International University.

Michael Ruhlman has written more than 20 books about food and cooking, and their fundamental importance to our families, our communities, and our world. He has also authored non-food non-fiction on topics ranging from his experience renovating an old house to a dramatic narrative of the life inside an elite pediatric surgical unit. The three novellas contained in Ruhlman’s In Short Measures (Skyhorse Publishing) delve deeply into the nuanced complexity of romantic and sexual love—and the inevitable evolution of the heart over the span of years and decades. He is also a contributor to Knitting Pearls: Writers Writing About Knitting (W. W. Norton & Company), in which two dozen writers reflect on the transformative and healing powers of knitting.