Day 15: First Person Pros & Cons with Maya Shanbhag Lang & Lauren Acampora

First person may grant you intimacy with your character and the reader as well as help you establish the voice of your book, but it can also limit the experience you put on the page. We’re looking at the pleasures and pitfalls of this popular point-of-view choice today with authors Maya Shanbhag Lang and Lauren Acampora.

Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author of What We Carry, named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Best Book of 2020 by Amazon, Parade, Times of India, Bookshop.Org, and others. She is also the author of The Sixteenth of June, long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and hailed a "Must Read Novel" by CBS and In Style. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and lives with her daughter in New York.

Lauren Acampora is the author of The Wonder Garden, winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the New England Book Award; and The Paper Wasp, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her most recent novel, The Hundred Waters, was named a Best Book of 2022 by Vogue. Lauren is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared Paris Review, Guernica, The New York Times Book Review, and LitHub, among other places. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband and daughter. 

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