Peter Wallace

Peter Wallace is the author of two novels and numerous short stories. He was Chair of the Theater Program at Eugene Lang College of New School University in New York for many years. He directed theater in New York and all around the country. He has also taught and directed at a number of other universities and theater schools, such as Princeton, Yale, and Trinity Rep. Through the Institute of Writing and Thinking at Bard College, he has taught writing practices in Myanmar, Turkey, and Russia, and has also been on the Language and Thinking faculty at Bard. He has received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, and The Millay Colony for the Arts. He has written and sold screenplays, written and produced plays. He received his MFA in Directing at Yale School of Drama. He has been a fisherman, a motorcycle bum, an interfaith minister, a sculptor and a bodywork therapist. He now lives in the Pacific Northwest, writing and teaching.

Speaker

After 14-year-old Hamish Taylor loses his father to cancer, his mother forces him to move with her from rural Pennsylvania to Brooklyn. In this unfamiliar and bewildering place, he discovers he has the ability to communicate with all animals, and they with him. Hamish learns he is a Speaker, one in a centuries-long tradition of rare individuals who emerge when the world is confronted by extraordinary crises. As Hamish tries to figure out what crisis he has been called to address, he also attempts to rescue a young woman from human traffickers in his neighborhood.

Speaker is a coming-of-age story about overcoming grief and letting go. It is the story of how a boy begins to become a man. And it is an epic adventure, filled with foul-mouthed birds, dim-witted dogs, and a mysterious panther who lurks in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

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