Today we have another of our roundtables and we’re focusing on one of the hardest things for an author to get right: world building. Because this issue is complex, I’m going to hold two world building roundtables, one for writers trying to establish place in either a speculative work or a work that takes place in a non-U.S. location, and this one today about world building for historical fiction. What is world building? How do you it without boring the reader to death or brazenly showing all of your research? And how do you work it into your story line? We’ve got four incredible writers joining us for the discussion: Allison Amend, Rachel Barenbaum, Janet Rich Edwards, and Hesse Phillips.

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Allison Amend is a professor of creative writing at Lehman College, CUNY in New York City and is the author of a short story collection and three novels.

Rachel Barenbaum is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Atomic Anna and A Bend in the Stars and the creator and host of the literary show Check This Out that airs on NHPR and focuses on emerging and diverse authors.

Janet Rich Edwards is a graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program. She is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Hesse Phillips‘s debut novel Lightborne was a finalist in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and a London Times’ Top Historical Fiction Book of 2024.

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