Today, we hear from writers and married couple Lori Ostlund and Anne Raeff and their work with the LGBTQI+ refugee organization, Rainbow Railroad, which also inspires their fiction and their writing process.
Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.
To find Ostlund and Raeff’s latest books as well as many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page.
Want to join our January write-a-thon. Go here for more information: 7amnovelist.substack.com/p/join-our-january-group-write
Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page.
Anne Raeff's second novel, Winter Kept Us Warm, published in 2018, won the silver medal for the California Book Award for Fiction. Her short story collection, The Jungle Around Us won the 2015 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection was also a finalist for the California Book Award and was on The San Francisco Chronicle's 100 Best Books of 2017 list. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Simpson Literary Award. Clara Mondschein's Melancholia, also a novel, was published in 2002. Her last novel, Only the River, was published on May 2020. After many years of being a proud high school teacher, she is now retired and lives in San Francisco.
Lori Ostlund’s novel After the Parade (Scribner 2015) was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Ferro-Grumley Award. Her story collection, The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda Finalist and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her third book, entitled Are You Happy?, will be published by Astra House in May 2025. The final story in the collection, “Just Another Family,” will appear in the the 2024 Best American Short Stories. She has been a teacher for over twenty-five years in New Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, and North Carolina and is currently on the Mile-High MFA faculty at Regis University in Denver. She is the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a board member of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, which supports feminist women in the arts. She lives in San Francisco with her wife, the writer Anne Raeff, and their cat Oscar.
Photo by Sharon Pittaway on Unsplash
Share this post