Month: May 2020

Kerry Kletter holds a degree in literature and is the critically-acclaimed author of the young adult novel The First Time She Drowned. She has an extensive background in theater, having appeared in film, television, and onstage. She lives in Los Angeles and adores her friends, her partner David, dogs, neuroscience, funny people, Montauk, surfing, and French fries. East Coast Girls is her first adult novel.

Bianca Marais is the author of two novels, Hum If You Don’t Know the Words and If You Want to Make God Laugh. She holds a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Torontos School of Continuing Studies where she now teaches creative writing. Before becoming an author, she started a corporate training company and volunteered with Cotlands, where she assisted care workers in Soweto with providing aid for HIV/AIDS orphans and their caregivers. She champions the Own Voices movement in her country of birth, South Africa, where she runs various programs through the Eunice Ngogodo Own Voices Initiative to encourage and empower women of colour to tell their own stories. She resides in Toronto with her husband (Stephen), her golden retriever (Muggle) and her cat (Wombat).

Michael J. Spivey, Ph.D., is the author of Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness and The Continuity of Mind. After 12 years as a psychology professor at Cornell University, Spivey moved to the University of California, Merced to help build their Cognitive Science Program. His research uses eye-tracking, computer-mouse tracking, neural network models and dynamical systems theory to explore how a mind emerges from the interaction of brain, body, and environment. In 2010, Spivey received the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society.

Aimee Liu is the author of Glorious Boy (May 2020), as well as the bestselling novels Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face, and the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. She is the editor of Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing, and Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives: Guidance and Reflections on Recovery from Eating Disorders. Her articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Ms., Cosmopolitan, Self, Glamour, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications. Her novels include a Literary Guild Super Release and have been published in more than twelve languages and serialized in Good Housekeeping. She’s received a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award and special mention by the Pushcart Prize and teaches in Goddard College’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Port Townsend, WA.

Theresa Kaminski holds a PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of a trilogy of nonfiction history books on American women in the Philippine Islands during World War II, the most recent of which is Angels of the Underground. Theresa’s biography, Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War, is forthcoming from Lyons Press, and she is currently completing the first full-length biography of America’s favorite cowgirl, Dale Evans.

Christina Clancy is the author of the forthcoming novel The Second Home, out June 2020, St. Martin’s Press. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Sun Magazine, Glimmer Train Stories, Hobart, Pleiades, and on Wisconsin Public Radio.