Jen Percy, Melissa Pritchard, Masha Hamilton, and Paul Whitlatch

Jennifer Percy, Melissa Pritchard, and Masha Hamilton, three authors committed to examining U.S. involvement in the Middle East, past and present, discuss their work as writers and journalists with Jennifer’s editor at Scribner, Paul Whitlatch.JENNIFER PERCY is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she received a Truman Capote Fellowship in Fiction. She also received an Iowa Arts Fellowship from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Winner of the Pushcart Prize and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, her work has appeared in a number of magazines including Harper’s, The New Republic and The Oxford American. She teaches writing at NYU.PAUL WHITLATCH, editor at Scribner, joined the imprint in 2008. His authors include novelist David Goodwillie (American Subversive, a New York Times Notable Book) and Tony Wagner (Creating Innovators, a national bestseller). New publications include Iraq aid worker Kirk W. Johnson’s To Be a Friend Is Fatal, MIT scientist David Rose’s Enchanted Objects, and Company Man by former CIA lawyer John Rizzo. He has worked on books by bestselling authors Colm Toibin, Andrew Solomon, and Siddhartha Mukherjee, among others.MELISSA PRITCHARD is the author of four short story collections and four novels. Her most recent novel is Palmerino, Bellevue Literary Press (2014). Among other honors, she has received the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, two O.Henry and two Pushcart Prizes as well as an NEA Fellowship. Her books have been cited as New York Times Notable Book and Editor's Choice selections, a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and an O Magazine Top Pick and Book of the Week. Pritchard has worked as a journalist in Afghanistan, Ethiopia and India, and her nonfiction has appeared in Byliner, The Wilson Quarterly, O, The Oprah Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Longform and various other publications. Founder of the Ashton Goodman Fund, benefitting the Afghan Women's Writing Project, she currently teaches at Arizona State University.MASHA HAMILTON is the author of five acclaimed novels, most recently What Changes Everything, which the Washington Post praised for "elegantly wrought prose (that) conveys terror as well as tenderness." She also founded two international literacy non-profits, worked a decade as a journalist overseas, and recently wrapped up 16 months as the Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy at the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.