Mary Margaret lives in Olds, Alberta with three cats, two kids, and one dog. Her debut novel Time After Time: Backward, and its follow up Time After Time: Forward, were published in 2020. The third book in the series, Time After Time: Frozen, will be released August, 2021.

Born a missionary kid in Kobe, Japan, and homeschooled on the American Great Plains as part of an evangelical community, Jaye Viner straddles many worlds and too many personal interests. As an “EXvangical,” she now worships her cats and spends a great deal of time at the salon maintaining her blue hair. She holds an MFA and MA from the University of Nebraska. Her debut thriller, JANE OF BATTERY PARK, explores what it means to come from one place and want to learn how to be from somewhere else. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

Gail Reitano grew up in the southern New Jersey Pine Barrens. She graduated from Rutgers University and lived in London for twelve years before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Her fiction, memoir and personal essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Ovunque Siamo among others, and have been featured on public radio in the Bay Area. Italian Love Cake is her first novel. 

Samantha Specks is a licensed independent clinical social worker. Dovetails in Tall Grass is Samantha’s debut novel. Currently, she is writing Dovetails of a River, which is set at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. She and her husband live in Houston with their baby (Pippa) and fur baby (Charlie). When not in Texas, they enjoy spending time on the lakes of Minnesota and in the mountains of the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado.

Susan Frances Morris is the author of THE SENSITIVE ONE: A Memoir (She Writes Press). She was raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, the second-oldest of seven siblings with two sets of twins. She was a practicing nurse from 1989 to 2011, including at Yale New Haven Hospital working in nursing management alongside international experts in the field of women’s health. She met her current husband, Bruce, in 1989. Her passions are walking and bike riding in nature, yoga, traveling, photography, and jewelry design. She has three grown children and four grandchildren. Susan lives with her husband and two dogs in Clifton Park, New York.

Leora Krygier is a former Los Angeles Superior Court, Juvenile Division judge. She’s the author of When She Sleeps (Toby Press), which was lauded for its “luminous prose” (Newsweek) and praised by Booklist, Library Journal, and Kirkus. It was also a New York Public Library Selection for “Best Books for the Teen Age.” She’s also the author of Juvenile Court: A Judges Guide for Young Adults and their Parents (Rowan & Littlefield) and Keep Her (She Writes Press), a young adult novel reviewed as a “vibrantly dazzling literary cocktail on the restorative powers of love.” She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, David.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Jackie received her MBA from UC Berkeley and worked as a management consultant in the Bay Area alongside her husband, who worked in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world before starting and running his own tech company. Their careers, both exciting and exhausting, fuel Jackie’s novels and essays, as does her travel and exposure to foreign cultures. A native of Southern California married to a native of Italy who carries around a big hole in his heart for home, her themes revolve around displacement, crossing borders, belonging (or not belonging), loss, and love. You can find her living in New York City with her husband, sometimes. Riding High in April is her fourth novel.

Jeanne Baker Guy of Jeanne Guy Gatherings is an author, speaker, and journal-writing coach. Born and raised in Indiana, she received her bachelor’s degree in English literature and drama from Indiana University. After a twenty-five-year career in office management and business development, she found her calling in facilitating personal growth circles. Years of blogs, filled with her irreverent humor, serve as the basis for her classes and her 2015 book Seeing Me: A Guide for Reframing the Way You See Yourself Through Reflective Writing, co-authored with photographer David Rackley. Jeanne lives in Cedar Park, Texas, with her retired architect–husband Robert and their two spoiled feral cats.

Jane Elizabeth Hughes is a professor of international finance at Simmons College School of Business in Boston. Using the creative right side of her brain, Jane published her first novel, Nannyland, with Simon & Schuster Pocket Star Books in 2016 and is now publishing The Long-Lost Jules with She Writes Press.

Peri Chickering is a coach, consultant, herbalist, and leadership educator. Working for years in field of wilderness-based leadership, she went on to run her own leadership school in Colorado and then start new schools in South Africa and Bulgaria. Taking her leadership experience from the outdoors inside, Peri has worked with clients in private, governmental, and nonprofit sectors, including Disney Theatrical, USDA Forest Service, World Bank, Stanford Woods Institute, University of Chicago, and Renaissance Reinsurance. She holds a master’s degree in human development and a Ph.D. in human and organizational systems. Now situated in the small town of Hancock, New Hampshire, she, her husband, their cat, and two horses steward 55 acres of beautiful woodlands passed down from her grandmother.

Steve Prentice is a social worker, artist, photographer, and the author of Seventh Generation.

While working with youth and adults, he has seen firsthand the desire to hide from that which is painful. Seventh Generation addresses these concerns through the eyes of a young teenager in a way that is relatable for readers of all ages.

Alexandria Rizik is an award-winning filmmaker and the author of two books, the poetry collection Words Written in the Dark and the children’s book Chocolate Milk. She was born and raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she was brought up by a large Armenian family. She received her bachelor of arts in English literature from Arizona State University. Alexandria’s love for writing began when she was a young child: her aunt bought her a journal and told her to write her a story, and the rest is history. Her favorite part about writing is being able to write the happily ever after that doesn’t always happen in real life. Besides writing, Alexandria loves yoga, wine, and family time. She lives in Scottsdale, AZ.

Jennifer Katz was born and raised in South Florida along with a twin brother, a younger sister, and a toy poodle named Muffin. At age twenty-five, she earned her degree in clinical psychology and met Tristram Smith at a job interview. After she was hired, they became friends, and then more. Jenny and Tris married and moved to upstate New York with a son. Widowed at age forty-five, Jenny now lives with her teen daughter. She loves reading, yoga, musical theater, and broccoli. An award-winning professor, she teaches about gender, sexuality, and helping relationships. This is her first book, and she still lives in the New York area.

For most of her life, Pacific Northwest naturalist, photographer, and award-winning author Cheryl Grey Bostrom, MA, has lived in the rural and wild lands that infuse her writing. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including the American Scientific Affiliation’s God and Nature Magazine, for which she’s a regular photo essayist. A member of the Redbud Writers Guild, she has also authored two non-fiction books. This is her first novel. She currently resides near Lynden, WA.

Barbara Gregorich writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She’s on First and the award-winning Women at Play: The Story of Women in baseball are her best-known books. The F Words is her first YA novel.

Frank Haberle’s debut story collection, Shufflers, about minimum wage transients during the Reagan era, is forthcoming in August from Flexible Press. His short stories have won awards from Pen Parentis (2011), Beautiful Loser Magazine (2017) and the Sustainable Arts Foundation (2013). They have appeared in magazines including Stockholm Literary Review, Necessary Fiction, the Adirondack Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, and the Baltimore Review. Frank lives in Brooklyn and works at New Settlement in The Bronx.

Denise Larson is a native Californian: she went to elementary school in the Los Angeles suburb town of Torrance and high school in the San Joaquin Valley city of Manteca, and finally, after college, she put down roots in San Francisco. With a BA in theater from San Francisco State University, she pinned her dreams on becoming an experimental theater artist in the ’70s counterculture milieu of the Bay Area. Along that path she founded Les Nickelettes. For thirteen years, she helmed the feminist theater company and assumed the role of actress, playwright, producer, stage director, and administrative/artistic director. Then she gave it all up to become a mother and teacher. After a twenty-year career in early childhood education, she retired and took up writing. Denise still lives in San Francisco with her husband and their cat. She has also returned to her first love: theater. She is taking an improv class, and collaborating with other performers to form a new theatre group: Cosmic Elders. The author resides in San Francisco, CA.

Kim Fairley was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. She attended the University of Southern California and holds an MFA in Mixed Media from the University of Michigan. Her first book, Boreal Ties: Photographs and Two Diaries of the 1901 Peary Relief Expedition chronicled the Arctic expedition of her great grandfather, Clarence Wyckoff. Kim lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Janet Luongo writes stories, creates art, and gives speeches and workshops. Raised Unitarian Universalist in New York City, she holds an MSEd from Queens College at CUNY and taught art from kindergarten to college. While teaching at the International School of Geneva over several years, she exhibited paintings in Geneva and Paris. In Connecticut, she taught communication at Sacred Heart University. As an art education curator in Bridgeport museums, her innovative programs garnered grants, awards and media attention for connecting urban and suburban children and developing leadership in underserved teens. Her book, 365 Daily Affirmation for Creativity, with a foreword by Jack Canfield and published in five countries, led to presentations in the US and as far as Xian, China. To make diverse feminist artists visible, she founded a non-profit, which mounted forty exhibits. She coproduced the movie Women Make Art, which was screened at the UNIFEM film festival. Currently, photography is her art. She resides with her husband, Jim, in Norwalk, Connecticut, and they enjoy hiking with their son and family in Colorado.

Susan Schoenberger is the award-winning author of A Watershed Year and The Virtues of Oxygen. With a linotypist as a grandfather, she has ink in her blood and worked as a journalist and copyeditor for many years, including The Baltimore Sun and 12 years with The Hartford Courant. She currently serves as Director of Communications at Hartford Seminary, a graduate school with a focus on interfaith dialogue. She lives in West Hartford, Connecticut, with her husband Kevin. They have three grown children and a small dog named Leo.