Celebrate this year’s 5 Over 50 with readings from the authors and a conversation about their individual paths to publication. This free virtual event will take place on Thursday, December 3, at 7 PM ET.
Introducing this year’s 5 Over 50 (clockwise from top left): Hillary Behrman, author of Lake Effect (Sarabande Books); Radha Lin Chaddah, author of And the Ancestors Sing (Rising Action); John Fadely, author of Before Leaving the Island (Trail to Table Press); Shanda McManus, author of Brother Epistles: A Sister’s Memoir (Split/Lip Press); and Judy Sandler, author of What Kind of Mother: A Reckoning (West Virginia University Press). Read essays by the debut authors as well as excerpts from their books.
From the November/December 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine: “‘Dreams don’t have an expiration date, rather they can lie dormant and find the right season in which to reemerge,’ writes Radha Lin Chaddah in her essay for our eleventh annual feature on debut authors age fifty and over. This time around the essays articulate the expansive and enduring identity of being a writer: valuing one’s creative work and becoming untethered from the expectations of others; picking up poetry again, and starting meditation, due to a sense of impending loss; making space to write in a life spent focusing on others; coming back to a childhood wish more than four decades later; and learning firsthand about the care behind craft. While all these writers took different routes that eventually led to publication, the concept of returning to, or finally acknowledging, a lifelong love of literature holds true for most. May the essays that follow stand as testament to the promise of what some call fate, the idea of a book coming into the world exactly when it’s meant to and, as Judy Sandler writes, ‘not a moment earlier.’”
Behrman: Steve Johnson; Fadely: David J. Toman; McManus: Sue Barr; Sandler: Harrah Lord