In Conversation: On Our Last Blue Moon: A Memoir

William Miller is the president of the board of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. For about 26 years, he directed the creative writing program at George Mason University.

Elizabeth Word Gutting is the assistant director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where Cheuse – known as the “voice of books” on NPR’s All Things Considered – taught fiction in the university’s MFA program for almost 30 years. Prior to joining the Cheuse Center, she was a lecturer and the program coordinator for the creative writing program at Boise State University. She also served as the program director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation from 2014-2017. Gutting’s writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Baltimore Review, and Humanities.

Robert Pinsky is a poet, essayist, translator, teacher, speaker, and a three-term United States poet laureate. His anthology The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Other poetry collections include At the Foundling Hospital: Poems, Selected Poems, Gulf Music: Poems, and Jersey Rain: Poems. His landmark and bestselling The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. Pinsky is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz.

Kris O’Shee spent four decades as a modern dancer and choreographer in England and the United States. In the last 20 years, she earned a certificate in massage therapy and a graduate degree in psychology, and established her current private practice in psychotherapy. Our Last Blue Moon: A Memoir (Watershed Lit Books) is her first book. In it, she writes about the loss of her husband, Alan Cheuse – the novelist, teacher, and literary commentator known as the “voice of books” on NPR’s All Things Considered – after he sustained injuries in a car crash in the summer of 2015. O’Shee chronicles the days in the Northern California hospital, the bedside vigil after Cheuse lapsed into a coma, and ultimately, his death, and reflects on 25 happily shared years with the love of her life. Rattled by grief, she eventually wrote her way to a new stage of life.

Born in Los Angeles to exiled Cuban parents, journalist and writer Ana Menéndez – whose work has appeared the Miami Herald, Vogue, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Tin House, and in several notable anthologies – is the author of Adios, Happy Homeland!; The Last War: A Novel, Loving Che, and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. She is also a contributor to Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press). The collection showcases what editor Anjanette Delgado calls “literatura del desarraigo,” a Spanish literary tradition. Home in Florida features fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Menéndez, Richard Blanco, Ariel Francisco, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Isvett Verde, and many others. These writers – first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants to Florida from places such as Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Perú, Argentina, and Chile – reflect the diversity of Latinx experiences across the state. Together, they explore what exactly makes Florida home for those struggling between memory and presence.