Beth Kephart

Beth Kephart was a 1998 National Book Award Finalist in Nonfiction for A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage.

It's the discovered book that is remembered, changes a life. The book you stumble across on a rainy day beneath the lonely lamps of a bookstore. It's the books no one has yet mentioned: Reading in the Dark, Ava, The Richard Trilogy, The Survivor. It's the books you know you should have read and finally, given this happy coincidence, you do: Beloved, As I Lay Dying, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, So Long, See You Tomorrow. But mostly it's the book that splits language apart into so many glistening bits of heart, the book that urges the act of writing upon your reader-self. Everything Michael Ondaatje ever wrote has done that for me, done that to me. Over and over and over again.