Alice McDermott is the author of eight novels, including “Charming Billy,” which was the winner of the National Book Award and the American Book Award; “That Night,” a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize; and “The Ninth Hour,” named one of the top 10 novels of 2017 by The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. Her latest book, “What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), muses on the joys and struggles of literary craft. Throughout her career, McDermott has received numerous honors, such as a Carington Award for Literary Excellence, a Whiting Award and an F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature. For more than two decades, she was the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.