Jennifer Vanderbes is a novelist and nonfiction writer whose work has been translated into 16 languages. A former Guggenheim fellow, Vanderbes’ first novel, Easter Island, was named a "Best Book of 2003" by The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.  Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Granta and The Atlantic, and her forthcoming nonfiction book, The Gatekeeper, about the thalidomide scandal of the 1960s, has been awarded a grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and will be published by Random House and HarperCollins UK.