CALL FOR PROPOSALS IS OPEN! 

We look forward to seeing you at Thomas College in May for our Annual Meeting and Conference! Registration for attendees and exhibitors will open in late February.

Monday Keynote Speaker:  Phuc Tran

Phuc Tran has been a frequent guest on Maine Public Radio and a regular, live storyteller in Portland and Maine. Most recently, he was a storyteller for The Moth Mainstage in Portland. He has delivered many keynote addresses for numerous academic, non-profit, and corporate organizations nationally. Those include the American Classical League, Google, The International Association of Trial Lawyers, the Classical Association of New England, and others.

Also, NPR’s TED Radio Hour featured his 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive.”

His acclaimed memoir, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and The Fight To Fit In, received the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. In addition, Sigh, Gone was named a best book of 2020 by Amazon, Audible, Kirkus Reviews, and many other publications.

Phuc Tran has been a high school Latin teacher for more than twenty years while also simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. Phuc graduated Bard College in 1995 with a BA in Classics and received the Callanan Classics Prize. He taught Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in New York at the Collegiate School. He also was an instructor at Brooklyn College’s Summer Latin Institute. Most recently, he taught Latin, Greek, and German at the Waynflete School in Portland, Maine.

Tuesday Keynote Speaker: Tess Gerritsen

Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A graduate of Stanford University, Tess went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was awarded her M.D.

While on maternity leave from her work as a physician, she began to write fiction and in 1987, her first novel, Call After Midnight, was published. It was just the first of 31 suspense novels that she’s written over a 36-year writing career. She also wrote a screenplay, "Adrift," which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.

Tess's first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Her novels have hit bestseller lists ever since. Among her titles are Gravity, The Surgeon, Vanish, The Bone Garden, and The Spy Coast. Her books have been translated into 40 languages, and more than 40 million copies have been sold around the world.

She has won both the Nero Wolfe Award (for Vanish) and the Rita Award (for The Surgeon). Critics around the world have praised her novels as “Pulse-pounding fun” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “Scary and brilliant” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “Polished, riveting prose” (Chicago Tribune). Publishers Weekly has dubbed her the “medical suspense queen” and Time Magazine named her novel The Surgeon one of the best mystery/thriller novels ever written.

Her series of novels featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the hit TNT television series "Rizzoli & Isles," starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander.

She is also a filmmaker. She and her son Josh produced a feature-length documentary, “Magnificent Beast,” about the ancient origins of the pig taboo. It aired on PBS channels around the country. Their previous film, “Island Zero”, was a feature-length horror movie that was released in 2018.

She lives in Maine.

Exhibitors & Vendors

We're grateful to our many repeat exhibitors over the years and look forward to welcoming new folks this year in Waterville, Maine at Thomas College. Please see our Exhibitor & Vendor page for more information.

General conference and exhibitors questions: atlarge2@mainelibraries.org
All programming related questions: conferenceprogramming@mainelibraries.org