Publishing after sixty? Not only is it possible, it has its own benefits and triumphs. We hear from Donna Gordon who debuted at age 65 and E.B. Moore who published her first book with a two-book deal at age 72.
Find Liz and Donna’s most recent books and more of my favorites on the 7am Novelist Bookshop page.
Donna Gordon graduated from Brown, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and won a PEN discovery award, and a Ploughshares discovery award. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, was published in 2022 by Regal House when she was 65 years old. It received a starred Kirkus review and was described as, “A soulful journey that offers surprises and unforeseen victories.” She received the Whirling Prose Prize for the novel, and it was named by the Independent Book Review as one of the top 45 books that they were excited about for 2022. Nina McLaughlin wrote in a Boston Globe review: “Gordon’s prose is lively; it rushes along with verve, humor, and heart…[She has] achieved the rare thing, a stirring, poignant story of death and love and a page-turning adventure.” Gordon is also a visual artist, with a focus on painting and printmaking. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
E. B. Moore is a metal sculptor turned poet, turned novelist. She has been a resident at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and The Vermont Studio Center. After graduating from the Novel Incubator, she has published three novels: Loose in the Bright Fantastic (forthcoming May 16, 2023 from Frayed Edge Press), Stones in the Road (NAL/Penguin/Random House 2015); and An Unseemly Wife (NAL/Penguin 2014). Kirkus named Stones in the Road One of the Best Books of 2015. She has also published a poetry chapbook, New Eden, A Legacy, (Finishing Line Press, ‘09). She is the mother of three, grandmother of five and lives with her partner in Scarborough, Maine.
Day 30: The Authors Journeys of E.B. Moore & Donna Gordon: It’s Never Too Late