Enjoy a talk by the beloved author of the novels The Red Tent, Good Harbor, The Last Days of Dogtown, Day After Night, and The Boston Girl.  Also an award-winning journalist whose work appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine and Parenting, she is the author of six nonfiction guides to contemporary Jewish life.

More about Anita Diamant:

Diamant was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1951, and grew up in Newark, New Jersey until she was twelve years old and her family moved to Denver, Colorado. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in comparative literature and earned a Master’s in American literature from Binghamton University in upstate New York.  In 1975, she moved to Boston and began a career in journalism.

Diamant wrote for magazines and newspapers including the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, New England Monthly, Yankee, Self, Parenting, Parents, McCall’s, and Ms. Her feature stories and columns covered a wide variety of topics, from politics to popular culture to pet ownership to food.  Diamant also wrote about contemporary Jewish practice for Reform Judaism Magazine, Hadassah Magazine, and jewishfamily.com. Her first book, published in 1985, was The New Jewish Wedding, a handbook that combined a contemporary sensibility, respect for tradition and a welcoming prose style. Five other guidebooks to Jewish life and lifecycle events followed.

In 1997, Diamant published her first work of fiction. Inspired by a few lines from Genesis, The Red Tent became a bestseller, and in 2001, was honored as the “Booksense Best Fiction” of the year. The Red Tent has been published in more than 25 countries worldwide, and was adapted as a miniseries by Lifetime TV. Diamant has since written 4 more novels, exploring historical stories as well as contemporary women’s lives, largely set in Massachusetts.

Anita Diamant is the founding president Mayyim Hayyim, Living Waters Community Mikveh and Education Center in Newton Massachusetts — a reinvention of the ancient Jewish tradition of mikveh, ritual immersion in water. Visit mayyimhayyim.org for more information.

Biographical information excerpted from anitadiamant.com

This event is sponsored by the Billerica Public Library Foundation