Writer Christine Baker Kline/Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
BY LINDA HULL
Vice President
Rotary Club of Los Alamos
Mark your calendars, please! The public is cordially invited to attend a Zoom presentation with best-selling author Christina Baker Kline on Tuesday, Nov. 2, at 12:15 p.m. during the weekly meeting of the Rotary Club of Los Alamos. Following Club business, Baker Kline will join us from New England and will describe how a Rotary scholarship influenced her writing and career path and will discuss her books in a 30-minute program. For the Zoom link, please email Linda Hull, Club vice-president, at northmesa@comcast.net.
According to her website, Baker Kline is a #1 New York Times best-selling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World and is published in 40 countries.
Her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among other prizes, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, universities and schools as “One Book, One Read” selections. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the NYT Book Review, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, and Slate.
Christina Baker Kline was born in England and raised in the American South and Maine. She is a graduate of Yale (B.A.), Cambridge (M.A.), and the University of Virginia (M.F.A.), where she was a Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. A resident of New York City and Southwest Harbor, Maine, she is married to David Kline and has three sons: Hayden, Will, and Eli. She serves on the advisory boards of the Center for Fiction (NYC), the Jesup Library (Bar Harbor, ME), the Montclair Literary Festival (NJ), the Kauai Writers Conference (HI), and Roots & Wings (NJ); and on the gala committees of Poets & Writers, The Authors Guild, and Friends of Acadia. She is an Artist-Mentor for StudioDuke at Duke University and the BookEnds program at Stony Brook University and an Author-Advocate for the literacy organization Room to Read.
Kline’s latest novel, The Exiles (2020), an instant NYT and Indie Next bestseller, captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women’s lives—two English convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl — in nineteenth-century Australia. A Piece of the World (2017), also an instant bestseller, explores the real-life relationship between the artist Andrew Wyeth and the subject of his best-known painting, Christina’s World. Orphan Train (2013), about a little-known but significant piece of American history, spent more than two years on the NYT bestseller list, including five weeks at #1. Orphan Train and A Piece of the World have been optioned for film; The Exiles has been optioned for television, and Kline is executive producing.
Kline has written five other novels — The Way Life Should Be, Bird in Hand, Desire Lines, Sweet Water, and Orphan Train Girl— and written or edited five nonfiction books: The Conversation Begins (with Christina L. Baker), Child of Mine, Room to Grow, About Face (with Anne Burt), and Always too Soon (with Allison Gilbert). She recently contributed to the anthologies Stories from Suffragette City (2020) and Lolita in the Afterlife (2021).
The Rotary Club of Los Alamos is very pleased that Ms. Baker Kline is able to join us on November 2nd and hopes the community and its readers will be among the 100 attendees on our Zoom format.
For more information about this presentation, Rotary International’s humanitarian service, and the work of the Los Alamos club, please contact Linda Hull, 505-662-7950.