Frances Mayes is an elegant and gracious speaker
Program Titles
- She quickly engaged the audience of more than 1000 people, who arrived eager to hear everything she had to say about Tuscany
Frances Mayes has always adored houses, and when she saw Bramasole, a neglected, 200-year old Tuscan farmhouse nestled in five overgrown acres, it was love at first sight. Out of that instant infatuation has come three marvelous, and hugely popular, books: the bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun, followed by Bella Tuscany (a memoir), and In Tuscany, a collaborative photo-textbook with her husband, the poet Edward Mayes, and photographer Bob Krist. All three highly personal books are about taking chances, living in Italy, loving and renovating an old Italian villa, the pleasures of food, and the “voluptuousness of Italian life.” Her first novel, Swan, a tale of family saga and mystery, returns Mayes to her childhood home of Georgia. Frances Mayes is the editor for the Best American Travel Writing. She and her husband continue to divide their time between the USA and Cortona, Italy. A film version of Under the Tuscan Sun, featuring Diane Lane.
A widely published poet and essayist, Frances Mayes has written numerous books of poetry, including Sunday in Another Country, After Such Pleasures, The Arts of Fire, Hours, The Book of Summer, and Ex Voto. Her work The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems is widely used in college poetry classes. Her poetry has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, and Manoa. Mayes’ essays have been published in The American Scholar, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and The Virginia Quarterly, and four have been selected as Notable Essays by Robert Atwan, editor of Best American Essays. Formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, where she directed The Poetry Center and chaired the Department of Creative Writing, Mayes now devotes herself full time to writing.
***
“Frances Mayes is an elegant and gracious speaker. She quickly engaged the audience of more than 1000 people, who arrived eager to hear everything she had to say about Tuscany, and left with their expectations met and then exceeded.” — North Suburban Library, Wheeling, IL
“Tuscany may have found its own bard in Frances Mayes.” — The New York Times
Books by Frances Mayes
- Under the Tuscan Sun
- Swan
- Bella Tuscany
- in Tuscany
- A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveller
- Sunday in Another Country
Book Frances Mayes for your Event!