This week, tune into the panel discussion Making Up True Stories: Novels and Books About Real People. Our featured writers are Amanda Flower, Sarah James, Brianna Labuskes, and Brianna Madia. Moderated by Dipika Mukherjee. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the 2024 American Writers Festival.

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About the writers:

AMANDA FLOWER is the USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award–winning mystery author of over twenty-five novels, including the nationally bestselling Amish Candy Shop Mystery Series, the Amish Matchmaker Mysteries, the Emily Dickinson Mysteries, the Katharine Wright Mysteries, and several series written under the name Isabella Alan. An organic farmer and former librarian, Amanda lives in Northeast Ohio and can be found online at AmandaFlower.com.

SARAH JAMES is the international bestselling author of The Woman with Two Shadows and Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen. Her work has appeared in Baseball Prospectus, Pittsburgh City Paper, Reductress, and more. Sarah is a graduate of the MFA Writing for Screen and Television program at USC and currently lives in Los Angeles.

BRIANNA LABUSKES is the Washington Post bestselling author of The Lost Book of Bonn, The Librarian of Burned Books as well as eight thrillers. For the first decade of her career, Brianna worked as a journalist for national news organizations covering politics and policy.

BRIANNA MADIA has lived a life of relentless intention, traveling the deserts of the American West in an old Ford van. She made a name for herself on social media with her inspiring captions-cum-essays about bravery, identity, nature, and subverting expectations. She lives in Utah with her four dogs. Her first book, Nowhere for Very Long, was a New York Times bestseller. Never Leave the Dogs Behind is her second book.

DIPIKA MUKHERJEE’S collection of travel essays, Writer’s Postcards (Penguin), was published in October 2023. Her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion and more, and she has been translated into French, Portuguese, Bengali and Mandarin Chinese. She is the author of the novels Shambala Junction (Aurora Metro, winner of the Virginia Prize f