At the center of the Circle: The National Book Critics Circle, that is. Tonight, the Circle chooses among the finalists for one of the nation’s most prestigious literary awards. Will they tap Annette Gordon-Reed, whom WVFC interviewed last fall even before she won the National Book Award? And in the Autobiography category, watch to see if Honor Moore (seen above) snags the title for her deeply moving memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter.

(Update: Results here; to our dismay, neither author took the nod. The Book Critics had their reasons, though we’re disappointed. Without reading either, we think we sense why the Autobiography nod went to Ariel Sabar’s book about his search for his Jewish roots in Kurdish Iraq. But we wonder if any biography of V.S. Naipul — even one that the New Yorker’s George Packer calls “a magnificent tribute to the painful and unlikely struggle by which
the grandson of indentured Indian workers, born in the small island colony of Trinidad, made himself into the greatest English novelist of the past half century” — can hold a candle to Gordon-Reed’s towering, yet sneaky saga of the hugely influential Hemingses of Monticello.)

Power Women Update #27: Some new names for midlife women to brag about: Margaret Hamburg, Tina Tchen, Valerie Jarrett (again). Jarrett, who WVFC has known was rising since she arrived in Washington with the president, will co-chair the new White House Councll on Women and Girls. As Salon points out, this is both unsurprising and heartening:

In December, 50 women’s groups lobbied the president to create a bureau that was itself Cabinet-level, which this is not, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s complaining…. As Susan Scanlan of the National Council of Women’s Organizations told Politico’s Josh Gerstein: “It’s certainly more than we have had in the last eight years. We’re pretty happy with this administration.” And so are we. If you are watching the news, or if you’re a sentient being who can digest solid food, then you know there’s not exactly an excess of reasons to celebrate. So let’s enjoy this one, shall we?

Tina Tchen, Jarrett’s co-chair, has an equally deep record of service, ever since as a 1980s law student, when she was state vice president of the National Organization for Women and was one of the leaders in writing and ensuring passage of the Illinois Criminal Sexual Assault Act.

Tchen, who has been with her law firm since 1985, has broad litigation experience in state and federal courts. She has worked on cases involving shareholders, intellectual property,
constitutional matters, insurance, real estates and breach of contract. Some of the companies she has represented, according to her law firm bio, include Sprint Corporation, Abbott Laboratories, McDonald’s, Aon Corporation and Motorola.