I’ve been enjoying getting to know the DC writers’ scene better lately, even without leaving my house, and today’s guest is one of the great local crime writers our area seems to be particularly rich in. E.A. Aymar recommended her debut suspense novel One Night Gone earlier in the #read99women series, calling it “a taut, character-driven read, the kind of book that begs to be read slowly.”

And just a few days ago, One Night Gone brought home an Agatha Award! Great news! As you’ll see in her bio below, Tara’s been racking up awards and prizes and honors galore.

Tara Laskowski is the author of the suspense novel One Night Gone, which won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel and was a finalist for the Lefty Award and the Simon and Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award. She has also written two short story collections, Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and Bystanders. She has had stories published in numerous magazines and anthologies such as Mid-American Review, Barcelona Review, and the Norton anthologies Flash Fiction International and New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, among others. Her Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine story, “The Case of the Vanishing Professor,” won the 2019 Agatha Award and her Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine story, “The Long-Term Tenant,” is a finalist for the 2020 Thriller Award. Tara was the winner of the 2010 Santa Fe Writers Project’s Literary Awards Prize, was the longtime editor of the popular online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly, and is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. She and her husband, writer Art Taylor, write the column Long Story Short at the Washington Independent Review of Books. She earned a BA in English with a minor in writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. She grew up in Pennsylvania and lives in Virginia. Follow her on Twitter, @TaraLWrites.

Tara’s recommendation: “I don't read a lot of poetry books, but when I find one I love I want to read it over and over again. This is how I feel about Catherine Pierce's The Tornado Is the World. Catherine's poetry is so vivid and relatable. I particularly love the themes in Tornado--motherhood, fear, nostalgia, hope. The ever-presence of the unyielding, uncaring force of the tornado is particularly poignant and unsettling. And it's relevant now, too, in these times, as we are reminded how brutal nature can be.”