Jean Duffy is a nonfiction writer with published essays in the Boston Globe, Concord Monitor, Lexington Observer, and WBUR Cognoscenti. Soccer Grannies: The South African Women Who Inspire the World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) is her first book. Jean can be found on the soccer field in Lexington, Massachusetts where her team, the Lexpressas, have been playing for some twenty years. When she’s not pounding her fingers on the keyboard or flubbing a shot on goal, she might be consulting with nonprofits, helping people downsize, or doing crossword puzzles with her husband at their home in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Akemi is the author of a handful of unpublished novels and a smattering of unrecorded song lyrics. Her work is character-driven and genre-fluid because this gives her thoughts more space to wander.

Sarah Sapora is a writer, inspirational speaker, and the organizer of body inclusive personal growth events and self-love retreats around the world. Sarah uses her voice to make personal growth relatable to the nearly 70% of American women considered plus size. Online, her tight-knit community includes hundreds of thousands of “80’s and 90’s kids” searching for self-love and wellness free of diet culture. Sarah’s guiding principles of radical vulnerability, self-accountability and tolerance have solidified her reputation as someone who “talks about the hard stuff” with humor and heart. She lives in Las Vegas, NV with her 110lb “lap dog” Eliza, and loves cowboy boots, meditation, cooking, and crochet.

Melanie Smith has worked in the field of heartbreak, grief, trauma, transition, loss, change, reinvention, and all things Unfinished Business for over two decades and has helped thousands of people change their lives profoundly. She started her career as a platinum-selling international songwriter and award-winning actress, starring and co- starring in shows such as: As the World Turns, Melrose Place, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Deep Space Nine, and The Division, to name a few. As an entrepreneur, her award-winning lifestyle, wellness, and yoga center was considered to be one of the most well-respected in the country by sources such as Vogue, Yoga Journal, Philadelphia Magazine, and others. Now a powerful motivational speaker, writer, and leader, Melanie has been a contributing writer for many national health and wellness magazines and holds the distinction of being an PCC-level ICF certified coach and an ICI-master-level coach. She is the proud mother of one grown son, Gideon. Born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, she presently splits her time between New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Naples, Florida.

Kathryn Brown Ramsperger is a lifelong writer, who’s published articles in National Geographic and Kiplinger, short stories in The MacGuffin, The Penman Review, and scores of others, most recently, The Nelligan Review  Her first short story was published in a local college literary journal when she was 16. She was a humanitarian journalist throughout Europe, S.E. Africa, and the Middle East, covering war, family, disaster, and displacement. She writes about her time there in her books and whenever possible. Kathryn loves to review books, coach authors in mindset, and share her stories through speaking. All her work focuses on the connections we all share, and how our stories  we tell ourselves and others can divide or heal us. It's our choice: Do we choose love and peace? Or judgment and war? 

Joanne Intrator’s life has been shaped by being the daughter of German Jewish refugees. Since childhood, she pondered why people perpetrate atrocities on their fellow human beings. After studying European history at Connecticut College, she received an MD from Columbia University and became a psychiatrist. She did a fellowship in Psychiatry and Law at Albert Einstein. Mentored by Dr. Robert Hare, she spearheaded the first brain imaging research on well-defined psychopaths, published in The Journal of Biological Psychiatry. Following her father’s death in 1993, she took it upon herself to fight for the restitution of a building in Berlin. Her journey has been the subject of news articles, television interviews, and museum exhibits. Joanne practices psychiatry in New York City. She has written for The Journal for The Study of Antisemitism, Ästhetik & Kommunikation (Berlin), Women Writers. Women(‘s) Books, and she writes a blog on psychopathy for Psychology Today.

Sherry Sidoti is an author and the founder and lead teacher of FLY Yoga School, a yoga teacher training program, and FLY Outreach, a not-for-profit that offers yoga and meditation for trauma recovery on Martha's Vineyard, MA. A certified yoga teacher, labor doula, addiction recovery coach, and somatic therapist, she leads spiritual courses, teacher training, and retreats globally. Her musings, infused by twenty-plus years of practicing and teaching yoga, healing arts, and mysticism have been published in Heart & Soul Magazine, The Martha's Vineyard Times, and Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly. Her essay "Mosaic" is featured in the 2022 She Writes Anthology: Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis: Women Writers Respond to the Call. A Smoke and a Song: A Daughter's Memoir of Living in the Layers is Sherry's first book. She currently resides on Martha's Vineyard, MA.

Barbara Wolf Terao, author of Reconfigured, is from Northfield, Minnesota, and Evanston, Illinois, and now lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Along with way too many janitor jobs, Barbara has been teacher, psychologist, land ethic leader, television host, newspaper columnist, and book reviewer. Her most joyful roles are as mother and grandmother! Barbara's articles and essays have appeared in Orion magazine, The Seattle Times, ihadcancer website, Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis anthology, and other publications, as well as on her website ofthebluepla.net. Her memoir's message? When your life calls, listen.

Cathy Ulrich is the founding editor of Milk Candy Review, a journal of flash fiction. Her work has been published in various journals, including Black Warrior Review, Jellyfish Review, Passages North, Split Lip Magazine, and Wigleaf and can be found in Best Microfiction 2021 and 2022, Best of the Net 2022, Best Small Fictions 2019, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2019 and 2022. Her first collection of short stories, GHOSTS OF YOU, was released by Okay Donkey Press in 2019. She lives in Montana with her daughter and various small animals. 

Kristin Nilsen has been a children’s librarian, a bookseller, a perfume seller, a horse poop shoveler, a typist (on an actual typewriter), a storyteller, a seventh grader, and a mom to both humans and dogs. Today she is a self-proclaimed Pro Crushologist who talks about Gen X pop culture on The Pop Culture Preservation Society podcast. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one of the only big cities in the world where you can look out your window and see a lake. Which she likes. A lot.

Jan Stinchcomb is the author of Verushka (JournalStone), The Kelping (Unnerving), The Blood Trail (Red Bird Chapbooks) and Find the Girl (Main Street Rag). Her stories have appeared in Bourbon Penn, The Horror Is Us (Mason Jar Press) and Menacing Hedge, among other places. A Pushcart nominee, she is featured in Best Microfiction 2020 and The Best Small Fictions 2018 & 2021. She lives in Southern California with her family and is an associate fiction editor for Atticus Review.

Aliza Knox built and led APAC businesses for three of the world's top technology firms—Google, Twitter and Cloudflare. Named 2020 APAC IT Woman of The Year, she spent decades as a global finance and consulting executive and is now a non-executive board director, a senior advisor for BCG, and a regular columnist for Forbes, where she shares her wisdom (and humour) to help professionals who dream of "doing it all."

Aliza now shares her passion and lessons learned with the next generation of business leaders guiding companies across new frontiers while building and maintaining strong connections between teams around the world.

Terah Shelton Harris is a collection development librarian based in Alabama and a freelance writer. She has been published in Women’s Health, Natural Solutions, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Backpacker, Draft, and Women’s Adventure.

Kara H.L. Chen grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, where she once had to shovel snow off her car with a plastic trashcan. She now lives on the West Coast with her husband and daughters, and is learning how to use an Instapot. She has undergraduate degrees in English and economics, a J.D., and an MFA in fiction. She has used her economics degree exactly once, when she tried to make a joke about marginal costs and marginal returns. It did not go well.

Gin Hammond is an award-winning Harvard University/Moscow Art Theatre grad, as well as an actor, playwright, director, and author.  She has performed onstage both nationally and internationally and received grants from Allied Arts, Artist Trust, 4 Culture, the NEA and others.  She also works as a voice teacher, dialect coach, and voice-over artist, and is known for her work in video games such as DotA II, BattleTech, Undead Labs, and is doing motion capture for an upcoming, under-wraps game for Sony/Sucker Punch.  Gin is the author of the historical fiction novel, Returning the Bones, co-founder of Meditations for Actors (MFA), a meditation app specifically for actors, and she lives with her husband, son, cat, and chickens in Washington State.

Debbie Russell is a lawyer turned writer. She spent twenty-five years as an Assistant County Attorney in Minneapolis, prosecuting numerous high-profile cases and fighting off several nervous breakdowns. At age fifty-five, Debbie took early retirement, giving up a full pension for the freedom of time. She now spends that precious time writing, restoring her property to native prairie and wetlands, and training her rambunctious retrievers. Crossing Fifty-One: Not Quite a Memoir is her debut memoir.

Gabrielle O’Flaherty was born and educated in Waterford, Ireland, later continuing her studies in England and the USA. She now lives with her family in San Diego, California. She is passionate about writing, travel, and nature, and is an accomplished artist and sculptor. “The Night of the Red Tide” is her first published book, an illustrated adventure story written over a two-and-a-half-year period during the COVID pandemic. The idea for her story came to her on a magical night while watching an astonishing red tide, when the breaking waves were shining bright bioluminescent blue.

Tracey Buchanan crashed into the literary world when she was six and won her first writing award. Fast forward through years as a journalist, mom, volunteer, freelance writer, editor, artist, small business owner, and circus performer (not really, but wouldn’t that be something?) and you find her happily planted in the world of fiction with her debut novel, Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace.

Alenka Vrecek was born at the foot of the Alps in Slovenia, a part of former communist Yugoslavia. Born with a spirit for adventure, she came to America at twenty years old with a backpack, a pair of skis, and a pocket full of dreams. She was a ski coach and a director of Pedagogy for Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows Ski Teams for thirty years. Alenka owns Tahoe Tea Company and lives in Lake Tahoe, California, with her second husband, Jim, their four children, three grandchildren, and a Golden Retriever named Monty. She continues to ride and write. 

Emma Deards grew up in New York City and earned her undergraduate degree at Barnard College at Columbia University , where she studied Japanese literature and biology. She was then accepted to The University of Edinburgh, where she completed her veterinary degree. She remained in the UK afterward, and since then has split her time between her day job as a vet and her truest passion: writing. Emma has authored a number of humor articles for In Practice, a veterinary magazine, and was the recipient in college of two writing awards: Oscar Lee Award and the Harumatsuri Award. Wild with All Regret is her first book.