Castle Hill Author Talks
Join us for a series of provocative and entertaining discussions with some of today’s most talented and creative authors. In a series of live, one-hour events, host Karen Dukess, author of The Last Book Party, will interview acclaimed, debut, and award-winning authors of fiction and non-fiction about their new books and their paths to publication. Available individually or as a series, the interviews will include time for questions from the audience. Events are FREE although donations greatly appreciated!
This is and online event is hosted on Zoom, you must sign up to receive the link!
Wednesday, January 22, 6pm
Join Karen Dukess in conversation with Deborah Jackson Taffa
on ZOOM
Deborah Jackson Taffa is the author of the memoir Whiskey Tender, which was a 2024 National Book Award finalist, was named to Time Magazine's top 100 books of 2024, and was long listed for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction. Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. A citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo, Deborah earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. She is the director of the MFA CW at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
About the host
Karen Dukess, who has hosted the Castle Hill Author Talks since 2021, is the author of the IndieNext and Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick THE LAST BOOK PARTY and the upcoming (June 2025) WELCOME TO MURDER WEEK. She has been a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia, and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master's in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family near New York City and spends as much time as possible in Truro on Cape Cod.