The Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award Judges

Ann Hood

For as long as she can remember, Ann Hood has wanted to be a writer. Her favorite books as a child were Little Women and Nancy Drew. Later, she enjoyed Marjorie Morningstar, Les Misérables, and Doctor Zhivago, clearly favoring lengthy novels.

A native of Rhode Island, she was born in West Warwick and spent her high school years working as a Marsha Jordan Girl, modeling for the Jordan Marsh department store at the Warwick Mall. She majored in English at the University of Rhode Island, where she developed a love for Shakespeare, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In seventh grade, she read a book called How To Become An Airline Stewardess, which fueled her desire to see the world. Following her graduation from URI, she pursued that dream by working as a flight attendant for TWA. At the time, she believed that adventures were essential for becoming a writer. However, she later realized, as Eudora Welty said, that all one needs is to sit on their own front porch.

Her career with TWA allowed her to see much of the world, and she moved from Boston to St. Louis, eventually settling in NYC, a place she had dreamed of living since watching Doris Day movies as a little girl. She wrote her first novel, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, during international flights and on the Train to the Plane, the subway out to JFK. The novel was published in 1987. Since then, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, O, Bon Appetit, Tin House, The Atlantic Monthly, Real Simple, and other prestigious publications. She has also won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing Awards, Best American Spiritual Writing and Travel Writing Awards, and a Boston Public Library Literary Light Award.

Lawrence Douglas, J.D.

Lawrence Douglas, J.D.

Professor Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought at Amherst College. He is the author of seven books of both fiction and nonfiction, including The Catastrophist (2007), a Kirkus “Best Books of the Year;” The Vices (2011), a New York Magazine, Bookforum and New Statesman “Best Books of the Year” and finalist for the National Jewish Book Prize; The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2001); and The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (2016), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” and an inspiration for the Netflix documentary series “The Devil Next Door.” His book from early 2020, Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020, which accurately predicted Trump’s refusal to accept electoral defeat, received extensive national and international attention, including lead reviews in the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

His work has appeared many venues, including Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Economist and The Los Angeles Times; and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian (US), where he is a contributing opinion writer.

Rand Richards Cooper

Rand Richards Cooper is the author of two works of fiction, The Last to Go and Big As Life. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and in Best American Short Stories. He has been Writer-in-Residence at Amherst and Emerson colleges. A longtime contributor to Bon Appétit and the New York Times, Rand lives in Hartford, CT with his family. He is the restaurant critic for the Hartford Courant and has been a critic and essayist for Commonweal for over two decades. The Last to Go was produced for television by ABC.