Deborah Lee Luskin and Ellen B. Rockmore in Norwich

Join authors Deborah Lee Luskin and Ellen B. Rockmore for a reading from their new books Reviving Artemis and The Given-Up Girl! At sixty, longtime writer, gardener, and teacher Luskin feels a wild new calling to leave the safety of her garden and learn to hunt deer. Reviving Artemis follows her late-in-life transformation as she confronts fear, embraces the forest, and reclaims a primal connection to nature while learning to age on her own fierce terms. The Given-Up Girl: Bonnie Koller trades skirts for jeans and her innocence for independence when she attends Halstead College in 1969. An unwanted pregnancy forces her to navigate a pre-Roe America, a boyfriend consumed with fear of the draft, incompetent doctors, and corrupt hospitals put her livelihood at risk.Twenty years later, Bonnie is determined to find the daughter she bore and gave up–if the given-up girl even wants to be found. Deborah Lee Luskin moved from New York City to Vermont in 1984 to write, keep bees, and raise daughters. She has been an editorial columnist, radio commentator, pen-for-hire, and blogger. Her first novel, Into the Wilderness, won the Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Regional Fiction. Luskin has also enjoyed a long career as an educator, teaching writing and literature-based humanities classes. She holds a PhD in English Literature and expected to become an academic, not a deer hunter. She lives in Vermont with her husband, their dog, usually a cat, and a variable number of chickens. Born and raised in Manhattan, Ellen B. Rockmore was once a New York lawyer. But for the past eighteen years she has taught expository writing at Dartmouth College. She lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with her husband and three children. Fortunately, only two of them play hockey. Ellen recently began a two-year term as a state legislator in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. Her essay titled “How Texas Teaches History” was published in the New York Times.