Amber Dermont

Festival Appearance:

• The Starboard Sea: A Novel, Saturday, 5:30 at Decatur Library

Amber Dermont is the author of The New York Times best-selling novel, The Starboard Sea. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she received her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. The Starboard Sea was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review and as a Best Summer Reading Selection from O, The Oprah Magazine. Her short stories have recently appeared in American Short Fiction, The Georgia Review, Open City, Tin House, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope: All-Story and in the anthologies Best New American Voices and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She currently serves as the Charles Loridans Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College. Her short story collection, Damage Control, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press

The Starboard Sea, 2012

Jason Prosper grew up in the elite world of Manhattan penthouses, Maine summer estates, old-boy prep schools, and exclusive sailing clubs. A smart, athletic teenager, Jason maintains a healthy, humorous disdain for the trappings of affluence, preferring to spend afternoons sailing with Cal, his best friend and boarding-school roommate. When Cal commits suicide during their junior year at Kensington Prep, Jason is devastated by the loss and transfers to Bellingham Academy. There, he meets Aidan, a fellow student with her own troubled past. They embark on a tender, awkward, deeply emotional relationship. When a major hurricane hits the New England coast, the destruction it causes brings with it another upheaval in Jason’s life, forcing him to make sense of a terrible secret that has been buried by the boys he considers his friends. Set against the backdrop of the 1987 stock market collapse, The Starboard Sea is an examination of the abuses of class privilege, the mutability of sexual desire, the thrill and risk of competitive sailing, and the adult cost of teenage recklessness. It is a powerful and provocative novel about a young man finding his moral center, trying to forgive himself, and accepting the gift of love.