Writing in Cambridge: Authors Donna Gordon and Rishi Reddi

What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me explores the story of Lee, a vibrant thirteen-year-old boy who is facing premature death from Progeria (a premature aging disease); his caretaker Tomás, a survivor of Argentina's Dirty War, who is searching for his missing wife, who was pregnant when they were both "disappeared;" and Lee's single mother, Cass, overwhelmed by love for her son and the demands of her work as a Broadway makeup artist. 

Passage West takes the reader on a sweeping journey that follows a family of Punjabi sharecroppers, their Mexican in-laws, and Japanese neighbors at the onset of WWI, revealing a little known aspect of California's--and America's--past. 

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Donna Gordon is a fiction writer, painter, and printmaker. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Boston Globe Magazine, Story Quarterly, The Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Solstice, and Post Road. She lives in Cambridge.

Rishi Reddi's novel Passage West, a Los Angeles Times "Best California Book of 2020" and Karma and Other Stories, which received the 2008 L.L. Winship /PEN New England Award for Fiction. A National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow for 2021-2022, her reviews, essays and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Alta Journal, Salamander, Partisan Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She lives in Cambridge.