Robin Farrar Maass is a lifelong reader and writer who fell in love with England when she was twenty-two. She enjoys tending her messy wants-to-be-English garden, painting watercolors, and traveling. She lives in Redmond, Washington, with her husband and two highly opinionated Siamese cats. The Walled Garden is her first novel, and she’s already at work on her next novel set in England.

Since 1969 Tom Miller (Washington, D.C, 1947) has lived in Arizona, where he initially wrote for the underground anti-war press, then for sea-level publications such as Smithsonian, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, LIFE, and many other outlets. His books include The Panama Hat Trail, about South America; On the Border, an account of his travels along the U.S.-Mexico frontier; Revenge of the Saguaro, about the American Southwest; and about Cuba, Trading with the Enemy. He has been a member of the Thornton Wilder Society and the Cervantes Society of America and served as a Fellow of the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History.

Maggie Anton is an award-winning author of historical fiction, as well as a Talmud scholar with expertise in Jewish women's history. She was born Margaret Antonofsky in Los Angeles, California, where she still resides. In 1992 she joined a women's Talmud class taught by Rachel Adler. There, to her surprise, she fell in love with Talmud, a passion that has continued unabated for thirty years. Intrigued that the great Jewish scholar Rashi had no sons, only daughters, she started researching the family and their community. Thus the award-winning trilogy, Rashi's Daughters, was born, to be followed by National Jewish Book Award finalist, Rav Hisda's Daughter: Apprentice and its sequel, Enchantress. Then she switched to nonfiction, winning the Gold Ben Franklin Award in the religion category for Fifty Shades of Talmud: What the First Rabbis Had to Say about You-Know What, a lighthearted in-depth tour of sexuality within the Talmud.

Catherine Drake lives with her husband in Stowe, Vermont. The Treehouse on Dog River Road is her first novel.

Prior to Gary Lee Miller beginning his writing career, he was a successful businessman and entrepreneur. His writing is rooted in life experiences and people who have crossed his path in his life’s journey. He draws on his ability to translate his observations into very relatable stories by readers. His book Finding Grace has been recognized as the winner of 5 different national book awards, including the Literary Titan Silver Award, Southern California Book Festival Award, Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, Firebird Book Award, and the Maincrest Media Book Award. Finding Grace has also been recognized internationally with the 2nd place award by the London Book Festival. Gary’s favorite hobby is occasionally acting in movies and TV and he has appeared in almost 3 dozen movie and TV shows, including “42”, Hunger Games-Catching Fire, Anchorman 2, Avengers-Endgame, MacGyver, and many others. He is listed in IMBD (Internet Movie Data Base).

Amy Lea is a Canadian bureaucrat by day and contemporary romance author by night (and weekends). She writes laugh out loud romantic comedies featuring strong heroines, witty banter, mid-2000s pop culture references, and happily ever afters.

When Amy is not writing, she can be found fan-girling over other romance books on Instagram, eating potato chips with reckless abandon, and snuggling with her husband and goldendoodle.

Sophia R. Tyler hopes to reintroduce the timeless message of the Golden Rule to young children. Currently a senior at Hope College, she will begin the Master of Social Work program at University of Denver in Fall 2023. Sophia also interns for Ready for Life, a nonprofit organization which fosters an inclusive community and provides creative and engaging opportunities for college students with disabilities. Her children’s picture book, The Friendly Mouse, launched March 21.

Leslie Johansen Nack’s debut, Fourteen, received five indie awards, including the 2016 Finalist in Memoir at the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Before she started writing, she raised two children, ran a mechanical engineering business with her husband, took care of her aging mother, and dreamed of retirement when she could write full-time. She did everything late in life, including getting her degree in English Literature from UCLA at age thirty-one, only two years after she married for the second time. She lives in sunny San Diego and enjoys sailing, hiking and reading.

SARA RAUCH is the author of WHAT SHINES FROM IT: STORIES and the autobiographical essay XO (forthcoming). Her fiction and essays have appeared in Paper Darts, Hobart, Split Lip, So to Speak, Qu, Lunch Ticket, and other literary magazines, as well as in the anthologies Dear John, I Love Jane; Best Lesbian Romance 2014; and She’s Lost Control. She has covered books for Bustle, BitchMedia, Curve Magazine, Lambda Literary, The Rumpus, and more. In 2012, she founded the literary magazine Cactus Heart, which ran through 2016. She holds an MFA from Pacific University. Sara teaches writing at Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop and Grub Street and also works as an independent editor and manuscript consultant. She lives with her family in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Jeneva Rose is the bestselling author of The Perfect Marriage, which has been published in nearly a dozen languages and optioned for film. Originally from Wisconsin, she currently lives in Chicago with her husband and stubborn English bulldog. One of Us Is Dead is her third novel.

Linda Dahl began her career as a travel journalist and college teacher before turning to writing full time. An award-winning author, she has written groundbreaking books about women in jazz and women’s needs in recovery from addiction, as well as five works of fiction. She is currently at work on a screenplay and a new novel. She has two children, a cat, and too many plants. She lives in Riverdale in New York City.

Julie Winkle Giulioni is a champion for workplace growth and development. She believes that everyone deserves the opportunity to reach their potential. And she supports organizations and leaders who want to make that happen with keynote speeches, consulting, and training.

Jody Hadlock: I’ve always loved history. When I was in junior high school in north Texas, I was a member of the Junior Historians of Texas, and history was always one of my favorite subjects. So, of course, my first novel is historical. I also always wanted to be a writer. After getting a degree in journalism at Texas A&M University, I worked as a television news reporter and anchor, and then as a public relations professional before I started writing fiction. I also write screenplays and won the 2020 Dallas International Film Festival’s screenplay contest. My co-writer and I had interest from a Hollywood producer and almost had our award-winning script optioned, but it didn’t work out. Still, it was a great learning process. No regrets. 

Madhushree Ghosh is the author of food memoir Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory and Family. She is the daughter of refugees, an immigrant, a woman of color in oncology diagnostics and an activist. Her nonfiction been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Longreads, Bomb Magazine, Catapult, Guernica, The Kitchn, Serious Eats, The Rumpus and others. Her work has been awarded a Notable Mention (Best American Essays in Food Writing), Pushcart-nominated, an Oakley Hall scholarship and a Sirenland Positano residency (2020-21). Editorial roles have been in gastronomy (Panorama Journal) and international fiction (Del Sol Review). She actively mentors women leaders in science and hosts food and discourse events at her home in San Diego. Ghosh has a PhD in biochemistry and a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University. She is also certified in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion from Cornell University as well as in Conflict Management and Global Negotiations from Thunderbird University, AZ.

Rod Tanchanco writes medically-themed nonfiction focused on historical events and their human narratives. FIRST PATIENTS: The incredible true stories of pioneer patients launched in March 2022, His articles have appeared in numerous publications. He is an internist and has worked as a primary care physician, hospitalist, research doctor, and medical director for a global clinical research organization. He is also a champion archer, avid photographer, backyard bird-watcher, husband to a saint, father to two grown children, and loyal butler to a ridiculously cute cavapoo.

Jonathan Howland lives in San Francisco. After 36 years’ teaching and working in independent schools, he now alternates between climbing trips in western states and writing, gardening, and playing with two grandchildren at home. Also: cooking, yoga-ing, and coyote-sighting in the Presidio of San Francisco, which he frequents with Courtney and their dog Ike. His favorite writers include Melville and Morrison and Marlon James, Faulkner and Woolf and Chekhov, though if limited to just one, Emily Dickinson.

In a career that’s included work as a journalist, a psychologist, and the founder of a national art consulting company, Maggie Smith now adds novelist to her resume with the publication of her debut, Truth and Other Lies in March 2022. In addition to her writing, Maggie hosts the weekly podcast Hear Us Roar, where she interviews debut authors about their novel and their path to publication and blogs monthly for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. A board member of the Chicago Writer’s Association, she’s Managing Editor of their Write City Magazine.

Nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and The Millions, Dina Greenberg’s poetry, fiction, essays, and articles have appeared widely in literary journals, anthologies, and peer-reviewed journals, both in the U.S. and the U.K.Her work facilitating creative writing workshops for combat veterans and military families led her to write her debut novel: Nermina’s Chance (Atmosphere Press), set in 1992 Bosnia. The author’s immediate goal is to use the book’s platform to inspire discussions on intergenerational trauma resulting from war and displacement—not only in the Balkans but across the globe.

Kathleen Stone knows something about female ambition. As a lawyer, she was a law clerk to a federal judge, a litigation partner in a law firm, and senior counsel at a financial institution. She also taught seminars on American law in six foreign countries, including as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Kathleen’s work has been published in Ploughshares, Arts Fuse, Los Angeles Review of Books, Timberline Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. She holds graduate degrees from Boston University School of Law and the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in Boston.

Fiction writer, poet, antipoet, gentle quasi-misanthrope, librarian, Philip Brunetti has been writing fiction and poetry since his early 20s. His innovative work has been published in various online or paper literary journals including Cobalt Weekly, Swamp Ape Review, The Boiler, and Identity Theory. His debut novel, Newer Testaments (Atmosphere Press, 2020) is described in the Independent Book Review as 'an innovative existential novel told through hallucinatory poetics.' Via his librarianship at the Brooklyn Public Library, Brunetti also runs the Gravesend Writers Group, a monthly writers discussion group.