Matthew Arnold Stern is an award-winning public speaker and author of four novels, including Amiga and The Remainders. He earned awards for his writing and public speaking, including Distinguished Toastmaster and an Award of Excellence from the International Online Communications Competition. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from California State University, Northridge. His hometown of Reseda, California plays a prominent role in many of his works. He lives in Lake Forest, California with his wife of nearly 30 years. He has two children, a granddaughter, and lots of cats.

Nina Schuyler’ s novel, Afterword, was published in 2023. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel, The Painting, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her nonfiction book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, is a bestseller. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and the University of San Francisco. She lives in California.

Shane Svorec is a lifelong writer who loves tenderly stringing words together to capture real emotions and create genuine connections. Her expressive writing touches hearts of all ages, provoking wonder, igniting empathy, and fostering understanding. Shane aims to rekindle the joys of appreciating the simple things in life and believes everyone can make a difference in this world and the life of another. She frequently delivers inspirational talks and keynote speeches and enjoys working with children and animal advocacy groups. Shane lives in Northern New Jersey but spends much of her time in the Adirondacks with her husband, three children, rescue dog, and chicken. Svorec's works include the award-winning Broken Little Believer and The Busy Bridge That Got Its Break.

C.J. Spataro is an award-winning short fiction writer, and her work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies including Taboos & Transgressions, Iron Horse Literary Review, december, Sequestrum, and Exacting Clam. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in Publishing programs at Rosemont College in suburban Philadelphia and was a founding partner of Philadelphia Stories. Her debut novel, More Strange Than True, is forthcoming from Sagging Meniscus Press in June of 2024.

P.D. Blackwell is an accomplished author in the field of Science Fiction. With years of experience crafting compelling stories that challenge the imagination, P.D. Blackwell is a name that is synonymous with excellence. P.D. Blackwell's fiction writing is characterized by a deep understanding of human nature and an ability to weave complex themes into captivating plots. Readers are sure to be engrossed in P.D. Blackwell's works and will come away with a new appreciation for the power of storytelling.

Catherine Bybee is a #1 Wall Street Journal, Amazon, and Indie Reader bestselling author. In addition, her books have also graced The New York Times and USA Today bestsellers lists. In total, she has written thirty-nine beloved books that have collectively sold more than 11 million copies and have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Before moving to the rural West at age forty-two, Lynne Spriggs curated exhibitions of folk and self-taught art at the High Museum in Atlanta. She spent ten summers on northern Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation while pursuing fieldwork for her PhD in Native American Art History at Columbia University. She also worked in the film industry as Production Coordinator for Spalding Gray and Jonathan Demme on the iconic Swimming to Cambodia. After landing in Montana, she curated Bison: American Icon, a major permanent exhibit for the C. M. Russell Museum on bison in the Northern Plains. For the past fifteen years, she and her husband have lived on a cattle ranch in an isolated Montana mountain valley east of the Rockies, where her life centers on writing, animals, and family. Elk Love is her first memoir.

Susan Weissbach Friedman is a psychotherapist with a specialty in women’s issues, family therapy, and trauma-focused therapy. A graduate of Hamilton College, Boston University’s MSW/MPH program, and the Ackerman Institute for Couples and Families, she has also completed EMDR and Somatic Experiencing (SE) training in trauma therapy techniques and has been a practicing clinician for more than twenty-five years. Originally from Long Island, she now lives in Westchester County, New York, where she enjoys practicing yoga and mindfulness, going for walks in nature, listening to music, and spending time near the ocean. Susan has been married to her husband for thirty years and has two daughters in their twenties. Klara’s Truth is her first novel.

C.A. Parker has spent a lifetime working at the intersection of spirituality and social justice, both as the Executive Director of several non-profit organizations and as a pastor. His doctoral work is in early Anglican spirituality, and he has spent many years exploring the commonalities between Christian and Buddhist contemplative traditions.

Bay Area native Elizabeth Stix writes, edits, and oversleeps in Berkeley, California. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Boulevard, The Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, and elsewhere. She has contributed to numerous anthologies, including Best Microfiction 2019, Drivel, and 642 Things About You (That I Love). Her work was performed live at the New Short Fiction Series in LA, and her story “Alice” was optioned by Sneaky Little Sister Films. In the early 2000s, she founded the vanguard lit zine The Big Ugly Review. Her stories have won the Katherine Manoogian Scholarship Prize, the Bay Guardian Fiction Prize, the Southampton Review Short-short Fiction Prize, and have been finalists or semi-finalists for the Disquiet Prize, Glimmer Train Fiction Open, Boulevard Emerging Writers Contest, Sherwood Anderson Prize, and others. Elizabeth has a BA from Brown University and an MA and MFA from San Francisco State. When she’s not writing, she can be found staying up way too late doing the NYT Spelling Bee.

Gina Carroll began writing, blogging and speaking after leaving a large corporate law practice to raise her five children. Her first book, 24 Things You Can Do with Social Media to Help Get into College, helped students show their best selves and tell their own stories online. Dedicated to the belief that everyone has a story worth the writing and the telling, she wrote A Story That Matters: A Gratifying Way to Write About Your Life, to help aspiring writers get their life stories written, polished and shared. She founded Story House, LLC (formerly InspiredWordsmith), a writing, editing, and authorship services company based on the belief that the storytelling universe needs more authentic and diverse voices. She is most proud of the debut Story House publishing effort, Stories Are Medicine: Writing to Heal, An Anthology, a beautiful offering from a committed and brave group of Black women writers from Houston and beyond.

Pamela Statz is the author of Thorn City. Pamela grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, the twelfth of thirteen children. She attended UW Madison earning degrees in Journalism and History. With four duffel bags and her goldfish Lucrezia swimming in a mason jar, Pamela flew to the West Coast at the cusp of the dot-com boom and never left. She’s worked in media and advertising in San Francisco and Portland for Lucasfilm, WIRED, Nike, and Wieden+Kennedy. She currently splits her time between Portland and Manzanita, Oregon with her husband Justin Graham and their giant dog Hooper. 

Lee Upton is a multi-genre author. Her most recent book is the comic novel, Tabitha, Get Up (due out May 22, 2024) about a woman desperately down on her luck who attempts to write simultaneously two biographies about two celebrities: an actor so handsome his face is on the side of buses, and an author of erotic literature with a fanatical cult following. She is also the author of seven books of poetry including The Day Every Day Is, two story collections, a novella, four books of literary criticism, and a collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing and Ambition, Boredom, Purity and Secrecy. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Noa Silver was born in Jerusalem and raised between Scotland and Maine. After receiving her BA in English and American literature and language from Harvard University, Noa lived and taught English as a Second Language on Namdrik—part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the smallest inhabited atoll in the world. She later completed her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and then worked as an editor on various oral history projects, ranging from an archive documenting the Partition of India and Pakistan to a cancer researcher telling the stories of trauma experienced by cancer survivors. Noa lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Jack, and their two daughters, Alma and Leila.

USA Today bestselling author L. R. W. Lee has authored 20 books and counting!

She loves writing fantasy because her characters are everything she’s not in real life. For example, she can’t handle scary movies, Stephen King novels, or cockroaches. And she knows she wouldn’t last long in one of her books. But give her a drink and a Hawaiian sunset and she’ll be just fine.

At age four, Claudia Marseille was diagnosed with a severe hearing loss. With determination and the help of powerful hearing aids, she learned to speak and lipread. She was mainstreamed in public schools in Berkeley, CA. After earning master’s degrees in archaeology and in public policy, and finally an MFA, she developed a career in photography and painting, a profession compatible with a hearing loss. Claudia ran a fine art portrait photography studio for fifteen years before becoming a full-time painter. Her paintings are represented by the Seager Gray gallery in Mill Valley, CA. Her memoir-- But You Look So Normal: Lost and Found in a Hearing World, received a starred review in Library Journal. 

Maggie Hill’s essays and non-fiction pieces have been published in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and Scholastic professional magazines. Current publications include Lakeshore Literary Review, Cleaver Lit Mag, Embark Literary, and Persimmon Tree. She has been the recipient of several artist fellowships and residences, including Yaddo, Ragdale, and Prospect Street. Sunday Money is her first novel. Maggie resides in Rockaway Beach, New York.

Dena Rueb Romero grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, the daughter of a Lutheran mother and a Jewish father, both refugees from Nazi Germany. She graduated from Brandeis University and received an MA in English from the University of Virginia and an MSW from Boston College Graduate School of Social Work. Her previous publications include Gretel’s Albums, a collaborative bilingual internet project with researcher Bernhild Voegel, and an essay about German citizenship in A Place They Called Home: Reclaiming Citizenship, Stories of a New Jewish Return to Germany. Dena still lives in Hanover, where she sings in a women’s chorus and volunteers at a daycare center and with an organization supporting refugees and asylum seekers.

Patti Eddington is a newspaper and magazine journalist whose favorite job ever was interviewing the famous authors who came through town on book tours. She never dreamed of writing about her life because she was too busy helping build her husband’s veterinary practice, caring for her animal obsessed daughter whose favorite childhood toy was an inflatable tick and learning to tap dance. Then fate, and a DNA test, led her to a story she felt compelled to tell. Today, the mid-century modern design enthusiast and former dance teacher enjoys being dragged on walks by her ridiculous three-legged dog, David, and watching the egrets and bald eagles from her deck on a beautiful bayou in Spring Lake, Michigan.  

Lally Pia was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Ghana, and made it halfway through medical school before political turmoil closed down her university and she learned that her American Green Card had been bungled. She went on to work as a church organist, teacher, and ice cream decorator, as well as a scientist in a molecular biology lab. Her next stint was as the director of UC Davis’s Body Donation Program, where she embalmed cadavers and maintained a freezer full of human specimens (a thankless job that she was glad to leave after three years). Lally is a mother, grandmother, and child psychiatrist who lives in Davis, California, with her husband, Tim.