Gretchen Anthony

GRETCHEN ANTHONY is the author of Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners, which was a Midwestern Connections Pick and a best books pick by Amazon, BookBub, PopSugar, and the New York Post. Her forthcoming book, The Kids Are Gonna Ask, will be released on July 28, 2020. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Medium, and The Write Life, among others. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.

Steven Rowley

Steven Rowley is the bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus, a Washington Post Notable Book of 2016 and The Editor, named by NPR and Esquire Magazine as one of the Best Books of 2019. His fiction has been published in nineteen languages. Lily and the Octopus is being developed as a feature film by Amazon Studios. The Editor was optioned by Twentieth Century for director Greg Berlanti. Steven has worked as a freelance writer, newspaper columnist and screenwriter. Originally from Portland, Maine, he is a graduate of Emerson College. He currently resides in Palm Springs.

Dallas Woodburn

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

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

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.

Steve Friesen

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

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

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

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

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.