Dallas Woodburn is the author of the short story collection Woman, Running Late, in a Dress and the novel The Best Week That Never Happened. A former John Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing and a current SF Writers Grotto Fellow, her work has been honored with the Cypress & Pine Short Fiction Award, the international Glass Woman Prize, second place in the American Fiction Prize, and four Pushcart Prize nominations. She is also the host of the popular book-lovers podcast "Overflowing Bookshelves" and founder of the organization Write On! Books that empowers youth through reading and writing endeavors. Dallas lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her amazing husband and adorable daughter.

Matthew Langdon Cost has wanted to be a writer since age eight. I Am Cuba is his first traditionally published novel. He has also self-published another work of historical fiction, Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War: At Every Hazard. Encircle Publications will be publishing his Mainely Mystery trilogy over the course of the next year: Mainely Power is due out in September, Mainely Fear in December, and Mainely Blackmail in May of 2021. Over the years, Cost has owned a video store, a mystery bookstore, and a gym. He has also taught history and coached just about every sport imaginable. He now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A Chocolate Lab and a Bassett Hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.

Alison Moncrieff writes poetry, paints, sews, collects rocks, digs in the dirt, and tends to chickens & children in Oakland, California. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Pluck (dancing girl press, 2020), don draper checks the window (dancing girl press, 2017) and Cherrystem (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her writing has appeared in The East Bay Review, Entropy, Rivet Journal, The Manifest Station, and Bay Area Generations.

I worked from 1976 to 2017 in the museum field, serving the last 22 years as director of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave. I wrote my first freelance article in 1969 and have been writing everything from articles and book chapters to exhibit labels and grant proposals ever since. My first book A Modest Mennonite Home was published in 1990. Since then I have authored Buffalo Bill: Scout, Showman, Visionary, published in 2010 and Lakota Performers in Europe, published in 2017. I am taking advantage of "sheltering at home" to work more intensively on my next book.

Meredith May, a former journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, is the author of the best-selling memoir, THE HONEY BUS, about her beekeeping childhood with her grandfather in Big Sur. It has been published in eighteen countries and translated into eleven languages. She is a fifth-generation beekeeper and lives in Carmel Valley, CA, where she is working on her next book, LOVING EDIE, about life with her extremely anxious golden retriever puppy.

Hadley Moore's collection Not Dead Yet and Other Stories won Autumn House Press’s 2018 fiction contest and was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her short stories, novel excerpts, and nonfiction have appeared in Newsweek, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Witness, Amazon’s Day One, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Indiana Review, and many other publications. She is at work on a novel and another collection, and is an alum of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

J. Ryan Stradal is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest, which won the 2016 American Booksellers Association Indie's Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, the 2016 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for debut fiction, and the 2016 Southern California Independent Booksellers Association award for 2016's top novel. His second novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, was an instant national bestseller. A native of Minnesota, he lives with his family in California, where he enjoys books, wine, craft beer, and peas.

Grant Ginder is the author of The People We Hate at the Wedding and Honestly, We Meant Well. He received his MFA from NYU, where he teaches writing. He lives in Brooklyn.

Emmy award-winning writer Amy Bass was born and raised in New England, the daughter of two noted local journalists, in a house filled with books and a yard filled with an enormous vegetable garden, berry patches, a small orchard, and about thirty acres of woods going straight up a mountain. Now a New Yorker, she makes sure that the Red Sox, the Berkshire Hills, and Cape Cod’s beaches and bike paths remain big pieces in her heart. Bass is a graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where her fourth book, One Goal, is set. She received a doctorate degree with distinction from Stony Brook University and has had a fruitful career as a professor and scholar of sport, culture, and politics, established by her first book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle. She worked across eight Olympic Games for NBC Sports, winning an Emmy for Live Event Turnaround in 2012. One Goal was named a best book of 2018 by the Boston Globe and Library Journal, and was featured on the Today Show, NPR’s The Takeaway, Midday, and Only A Game. It is being adapted to film by Netflix. In its starred review of the book, Kirkus Reviews called One Goal “an edifying and adrenaline-charged tale,” while the Wall Street Journal declared it “the perfect parable for our time,” and the Globe and Mail dubbed it “magnificent and significant.” Bass is a frequent contributor for CNN, both in print and on-screen, and is professor of sport studies at Manhattanville College.

Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist living in Berkeley, California. Her newest book of non-fiction, SURVIVOR CAFÉ: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and in The New York Times; it was also a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Her three acclaimed novels have been translated into nine languages and have received prizes in the US and in Europe. A graduate of Stanford University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Queensland in Australia, she lectures and teaches writing workshops internationally.

Nancy B. Kennedy is a journalist and the author most recently of Women Win the Vote! 19 for the 19th Amendment, a middle grade nonfiction book released by Norton Young Readers (an imprint of W.W. Norton) in February 2020. Prior to her career in books, she worked in magazines and newspapers, including a stint as an editor for Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of eight books of fiction, including The Evolution of Love, Lava Falls, and A Thin Bright Line, which the New York Times said, “triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances.” Her fiction has won a California Arts Council Fellowship in Literature, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, a Pushcart nomination, a Yaddo Fellowship, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. Her stories have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, and Chinese. Bledsoe lives in the Bay Area.

Felice Cohen, author, speaker, Holocaust educator, is known nationally and internationally as the woman who lived in the world’s smallest apartment. Her award-winning book 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet (...or more) is a “want to” guide motivating people to do more of what they love by letting go of extra stuff. The book was inspired by the YouTube video of her 90-square-foot NYC studio that went viral with over 22 million views, gaining media attention across the globe. As the grandchild of two Holocaust survivors, Felice is also the author of What Papa Told Me, a memoir about her grandfather’s life before, during and after the war. The book has been endorsed by Elie Wiesel, is taught in schools and has been translated into Polish. Felice has a memoir coming out soon called No Whining.

Karen Odden received her PhD in English from NYU, where she wrote her dissertation on Victorian literature and history. After teaching at UW-Milwaukee and writing for academia, she turned to writing mysteries set in foggy 1870s London. Her first, A LADY IN THE SMOKE, was a USA Today bestseller; A DANGEROUS DUET won best historical novel at the NM-AZ book awards. Her most recent, A TRACE OF DECEIT (William Morrow, 2019), was inspired by her time at Christie’s auction house during the scandalous ‘90s. She lives in Arizona with her family and her rescue beagle, Rosy.

Robert Aquinas McNally is the author or coauthor of ten nonfiction books, most recently The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age, general-nonfiction finalist in the Northern California Book Awards and winner of a Commonwealth Club gold medal. His short nonfiction has appeared in periodicals ranging from Sierra and Wild West to Indian Country Today Media Network and California Wild. McNally is also the author of the full-length poetry collection Simply to Know Its Name, which won the Grayson Books Poetry Prize in 2014, as well as four chapbooks. His poems have appeared in a long list of journals and anthologies and been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize.

Maria Sipilä is CEO of Sipila Consulting. She is a leading thinker on growth and advises companies of all sizes and public organizations on growth strategies and brands. Brand Mash-Up (available on Amazon) is her is her third book and she has written several articles for business papers. Her book Heart of Growth (Kasvun sydan in Finnish) covers high growth companies and modern marketing techniques. Her love for marketing and collaborations was seen at Ericsson, where she introduced to the Finnish market a new method called Joint Marketing. She later held leadership positions with Nokia's marketing from 1997-2005, when Nokia's brand value was at its highest. Maria is also known for her work with start-ups and in venture capital. Maria holds a master's degree in marketing from Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration.

Leslie Schrock is an investor and entrepreneur with a decade of experience working at the intersection of health and technology. She helped grow Rock Health, a startup accelerator and venture fund, from an idea to a globally-known firm with over 100 portfolio companies and more than one billion dollars in funding. When she’s not writing (BUMPIN’: THE MODERN GUIDE TO PREGNANCY is her first book), Leslie spends her time with startups improving the way we live. Leslie was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, and her work has been featured in publications including NPR, Time, GQ, Entrepreneur, Wired, and The New York Times. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and son.

Deborah Kalb is the author of George Washington and the Magic Hat and John Adams and the Magic Bobblehead, middle grade novels for kids. The third in the series, Thomas Jefferson and the Return of the Magic Hat, will be published this fall. She also is the co-author with her father, Marvin Kalb, of Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama, and she runs the author Q&A website Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb. She worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., for two decades, and she lives in the D.C. area.

Lara Tupper is the author of Off Island, a novel, A Thousand and One Nights, a novel, and Amphibians, a linked short story collection forthcoming in 2021 (winner, Leapfrog Fiction Award). Lara taught creative writing at Rutgers University for many years and now teaches, writes, and sings in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. A jazz/pop performer who has traveled around the world, her latest album is ThisDance.

Hunter Howe Cates is the author of Oklahoma's Atticus, the true story of how his grandfather defended a Cherokee man falsely accused of murder in Tulsa, 1953. Cates is an advertising copywriter, and is the principal and writer for Cates Creates, LLC. a copy and content marketing firm. He has written ad copy for national and international brands during his career. He is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.