Library to Host Vermont Author Elayne Clift for Reading and Signing

Tompkins County Public Library will host author Elayne Clift for a reading and signing of her award-winning book, “Children of the Chalet: New and Selected Stories,” Wednesday, August 26 at 6 p.m. in the BorgWarner Community Room. 

 Grand Prize Winner for Fiction in the Greyden Press 2014 Book Competition, the two-part “Children of The Chalet,” offers a series of connected stories, based on the year Clift spent as a residential counselor in a halfway house for troubled teens during the 1960s, and several previously-unpublished short stories. 

 “I had ruminated for years about the girls I worked with and what brought them to residential living and care,” Clift said. “Their stories, which I’ve fictionalized, were compelling, and I often wondered what had become of them as adults. 

Those two questions: why were they in the “chalet” and what became of them, inspired the work.”

 Clift, a Vermont Humanities Council Scholar, is an award-winning writer and journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications internationally. In addition to “Children of the Chalet,” she has published two short story collections, two poetry collections, a memoir, and the 2014 novel “Hester’s Daughters,” based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” 

This program is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Carrie Wheeler-Carmenatty at (607) 272-4557 extension 248 or cwheeler@tcpl.org.