Free Author Reading with Award-Winning Writer Emily Gray Tedrowe followed by Community Open Mic

Emily Gray Tedrowe is the author of three novels, The Talented Miss Farwell (HarperCollins 2020), Blue Stars (St. Martin’s Press 2015), and Commuters (Harper  Perennial, 2010). Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in  Story Quarterly, swamp pink, The Rumpus, Crab Orchard Review, and other  magazines. One story won an Illinois Arts Council award and another was  named a finalist in the 2024 Zoetrope fiction contest. Tedrowe has been  awarded fellowships at Ragdale, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the  Virginia Center for the Arts. She has taught literature and writing at  several universities in Chicago and New York. Tedrowe is also a  bookseller at Chicago’s first and currently only unionized independent  bookstore, Seminary Co-op Books.

About Tedrowe's novel,The Talented Miss Farwell: 

Catch Me If You Can meets Patricia Highsmith in this “stylish” (New York Times Book Review) page-turner of greed and obsession, survival and self-invention that is a piercing character study of one unforgettable female con artist.

At the end of the 1990s, with the art market finally recovered from its disastrous collapse, Miss Rebecca Farwell has made a killing at  Christie’s in New York City, selling a portion of her extraordinary art  collection for a rumored 900 percent profit. Dressed in couture YSL,  drinking the finest champagne at trendy Balthazar, Reba, as she’s known, is the picture of a wealthy art collector. To some, the elusive Miss  Farwell is a shark with outstanding business acumen. To others, she’s a heartless capitalist whose only interest in art is how much she can make.

But a thousand miles from the Big Apple, in the small town of Pierson, Illinois, Miss Farwell is someone else entirely—a quiet single woman  known as Becky who still lives in her family’s farmhouse, wears sensible  shoes, and works tirelessly as the town’s treasurer and controller.

No one understands the ins and outs of Pierson’s accounts better than Becky; she’s the last one in the office every night, crunching the  numbers. Somehow, her neighbors marvel, she always finds a way to get  the struggling town just a little more money. What Pierson doesn’t see—and can never discover—is that much of that money is shifted into a separate account that she controls, “borrowed” funds used to finance her  art habit. Though she quietly repays Pierson when she can, the business  of art is cutthroat and unpredictable.

But as Reba Farwell’s deals get bigger and bigger, Becky Farwell’s debt to Pierson spirals out of control. How long can the talented Miss Farwell  continue to pull off her double life?

If you would like to read at the open mic, please send an email to driftlesswritingcenter@gmail.com with the subject line: IN-PERSON OPEN MIC, and include your name and contact information. Please prepare to read no more than 5 minutes of material.