Overview

Yes, that Hester--the fallen woman who bore the Scarlet Letter while raising her daughter on her own. She is looking back, across that clearing, and 150 years, at her fateful lover. Less a retelling or transposition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic than a repurposing of the materials to tell a different version, Hester in Sunlight, revolving around the relationships between the (unnamed) narrator; her husband Sonny and gender fluid child Luna; her sister Dani and her two kids; and their parents, is a heady and stimulating riff on contemporary motherhood and parenting.

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Hannah Calder is a UK-born novelist who lives on unceded Syilx Okanagan territory in Vernon, BC. She earned her MA in English literature in 2004 from Simon Fraser University and has published poetry and fiction in West Coast Line, The Capilano Review, and dANDelion. Currently, she teaches English and creative writing at Okanagan College. In 2022 Hannah codirected the documentary Why We Write: Poets of Vernon, while her second novel, Piranesi's Figures, has been adapted into a screenplay that's quietly looking for its just-right producer. Hester in Sunlight is her third novel with New Star. Mary Jane Wells trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, working in theater in the UK and Europe for twelve years prior to her love affair with the US. Mary Jane's first few years of work in LA were as an actress and a story coach, creating the documentary Holy Hell with its director, Will Allen. Holy Hell was chosen as a Sundance Select documentary in 2016, nominated for Grand Jury prize and the Critics' Choice Documentary Award, picked up for a special with CNN and sold to Netflix and other platforms. As an actress she worked as a guest star on various new shows and some existing ones-e.g. HBO's The Newsroom, and regularly as a voice match for various profiled actresses. In 2014, she voice-matched Cate Blanchett for a year with Dreamworks on HTTYD2: her resulting duet with Gerard Butler was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. She subsequently went full-time into voice-over, narrating the British doc series My Childhood, which won a Scottish BAFTA, and her work across commercial, animation, and gaming won her SOVAS nominations for Best Romance Narrator and Outstanding Body of Voice Work. Mary Jane's national voice-over campaigns have included Puma, Eharmony, Sunny Finance, LinkedIn Talent Pipeline, and Jet 2. She has worked for NASA, the Obama Campaign, Microgenius, Bank of America, Dreamworks, HBO, Warner Brothers, NBC Universal, Starz, Fox, Claritas for Futurebrand, who branded the 2012 Olympics, Tech-crunch, Jaguar, the BBC, and the UN, and was the digital news anchor for The Chicago Tribune for a year. She currently plays Catriona Stripe on Monsters Inc. and plays in several large-scale video games yet to be released. Mary Jane turned more comprehensively to audiobooks in 2017 and has to date narrated over 150 audiobooks on Audible and beyond, winning eight Earphones Awards, three Audie Awards (two for historical romance), and an Audible Swoon Award as ""audience favorite."" She narrated the audiobooks known as the official inspiration for Downton Abbey, Below Stairs and Climbing the Stairs, and is known for her male and female voice acting, mainly in historical romance but also narrates in the YA, classics, mystery thriller, and fiction genres. Mary Jane wrote and performed her solo show, Heroine, in 2017 at Capital Theatres, Edinburgh. This true story about a living survivor of military sexual trauma became an unlikely hit, and its heavily anonymized protagonist, ""Danna Davis,"" was often secretly in the audience. On first outing, Heroine won the Olwen Wymark Award from the Writer's Guild with Nicky McCartney. After also winning a Made in Scotland Award for the best work nationally, Heroine was booked for a month at Assembly at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2018, and was shortlisted for the Situp Award and the Amnesty Award, won the Scottish Arts Trust Award, and sold the stage rights to five territories. Resultingly, Mary Jane was invited to debut Heroine in the US at The Kennedy Center in 2020 to standing ovations every night, after a sold-out Scottish tour to the Traverse Theatre and Perth Repertory Theatre. Congresswoman Jackie Speier spoke on Heroine's aftershow panel and went on to champion overdue but groundbreaking legal change for MST survivors twelve months later in the Senate. Mary Jane launched the audiobook, winning another Earphones Award in 2021 and an Audie Award for Best Original Work in 2022. Mary Jane is currently working with a first look deal producer for FOX 21 for its TV series, which is in active development. Mary Jane was assistant for the academic research on the breakthrough vocal technique of Dr. George with the artistic directors of The National Theatre Scotland led by Ros Steen, former Head of Voice at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, which was later published in association with the Centre for Voice in Performance, UK. Her next new solo show, The Good Girl, is a recent recipient of sponsorship in 2023. She partners with Author's Republic, Capital Theatres and The Kennedy Center from the very beginning-for what she hopes will be an irreverently hilarious new show and attending audio series for those who live with and care about dementia. It is her wildest dream to serve with storytelling.

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