Valerie Bolling

Let’s Dance! (Boyds Mills & Kane) is Valerie Bolling’s debut picture book. In addition to being an author, Valerie has been an educator for over 25 years. When she taught elementary students, it was difficult to find diverse literature for them. Thus, she is passionate about creating stories in which all children can see themselves and feel valued and heard.

A graduate of Tufts University and Columbia University, Teachers College, Valerie currently works as an Instructional Coach with middle and high school teachers.

Valerie and her husband live in Connecticut and enjoy traveling, hiking, reading, going to the theater, and dancing.

Paige Bowers

Paige Bowers is the author of THE GENERAL’S NIECE: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France. For the past couple of years, she has been working closely with Hidden Figure Raye Montague’s son, David, on the story of how his mother engineered her way out of the Jim Crow South to become the first person to draft a Naval ship design by computer. That book, OVERNIGHT CODE: The Life of Raye Montague, the Woman Who Revolutionized Naval Engineering, will be published on January 12, 2021.

Paige is a nationally published news and features writer whose work has appeared in TIME, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, People, Allure, Thomson Reuters, Glamour, Pregnancy, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Magazine and Palm Beach Illustrated.

A lifelong Francophile, Paige earned a master’s degree in Modern European history from Louisiana State University in 2012, and has taught French history classes for LSU Continuing Education. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, 15-year-old daughter and a Yellow Lab who thinks he is a lap dog.

Luke Geddes

Luke Geddes is the author of the novel Heart of Junk, which has been optioned for television by a Disney subsidiary and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist and praise from authors such as Elizabeth McKenzie, Kevin Wilson, Chris Bachelder, and Alissa Nutting, and the short story collection I am a Magical Teenage Princess, which was cited as Roxane Gay’s “favorite book that no one has heard of” in the New York Times. Originally from Appleton, Wisconsin, he now lives Cincinnati, Ohio.

Kim Powers

Kim Powers is the author of the upcoming novel Rules for Being Dead (pub date August 4, 2020), the thriller Dig Two Graves, the novel Capote in Kansas, and the critically acclaimed memoir The History of Swimming, a Barnes & Noble “Discover” Selection and Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Memoir. Powers is currently Senior Writer for ABC’s 20/20; during his more than two decades at ABC News and Good Morning America, he’s won two Emmys, a Peabody and is part of the news group that has received a record four Edward R. Murrow Awards. He received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and lives in New York City and Asbury Park, NJ.

J.F. Riordan

J.F. Riordan has worked in opera, in the classroom, and in philanthropy, but her first love is writing.

Ms. Riordan has been called “a latter-day Jane Austen”. Her mesmerizing literary fiction makes the Great Lakes region one of the characters in this continuing series. The North of the Tension Line books (North of the Tension Line; The Audacity of Goats; Robert’s Rules; and A Small Earnest Question-due out in Summer 2020) represent a sensibility that is distinctively Midwestern, even though the small town politics and gossip will be universally familiar. Riordan celebrates the well-lived life of the ordinary man and woman with meticulously drawn characters and intriguing plots that magnify the beauty and mystery lingering near the surface of everyday life.

She is also the author of a book of essays, Reflections on a Life in Exile.

She lives in Wisconsin with her husband and three dogs.

Cathryn J. Prince

Cathryn J. Prince brings a journalist’s sensibility to her work through meticulous research and investigation. Prince’s passion lies in revealing and personalizing little known and forgotten episodes of history, while placing them in a larger political and cultural context. Prince is the author of Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman (Chicago Review Press, 2019), American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World’s First Celebrity Travel Writer (Chicago Review Press, 2016), Death in the Baltic: The WWII Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), awarded the Military Writers Society of America 2013 Founders Award and selected as a Military Book Club selection. She is also the author of A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science (Prometheus, 2010), which won the Connecticut Press Club’s 2011 Book Award for nonfiction. Additionally, she wrote Burn the Town and Sack the Banks: Confederates Attack Vermont! (Carrol & Graf, 2006) and Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland (US Naval Institute Press, 2003).

Prince is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Journalism at SUNY-Purchase in New York. She also worked as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Switzerland and in New York, where she reported on the United Nations. She holds an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University, a B.A. in international affairs from The George Washington University, and an M.A. in American studies from Fairfield University. She is a frequent contributor to the Christian Science Monitor, The Times of Israel, and The Journal of the American Revolution, as well as several regional magazines.

Bob Eckstein

Bob Eckstein is a New York Times bestseller (Footnotes From the World’s Greatest Bookstores), an award-winning writer and illustrator, New Yorker cartoonist and world’s leading snowman expert (author of The Illustrated History of the Snowman). He has written thousands of pieces worldwide from magazines ranging from Playboy to MAD magazine. He is also a Contributing Editor for Writer’s Digest magazine and teaches writing and drawing at New York University. His next book All’s Fair in Love & Fair; Cartoons by the World’s Greatest Cartoonists published by Princeton Architectural Press in Oct. 2020.

Alexandra Zapruder

Alexandra Zapruder began her career as a member of the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Smith College, she served on the curatorial team for the museum’s exhibition for young visitors, Remember The Children, Daniel’s Story. She earned her Ed.M. in Education at Harvard University in 1995. In 2002, Alexandra completed her first book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, which was published by Yale University Press and won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. It has since been published in Dutch and Italian. She wrote and co-produced I’m Still Here, a documentary film for young audiences based on her book, which aired on MTV in May 2005, a multimedia edition of Salvaged Pages and related educational materials designed for middle and high school teachers.

In November 2016, she published her second book, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which tells the story of her grandfather’s home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination. She curated a permanent exhibition titled And Still I Write: Young Diarists on War and Genocide which opened at Holocaust Museum Houston in 2019 and currently serves as the Education Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation in Washington, D.C. She also sits on the Board of Directors for the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights, a nonprofit that develops partnerships with teachers in post-conflict countries to provide training in best practices on human rights, genocide prevention, and Holocaust education. She has been published in Parade, LitHub, Smithsonian Magazine, and The New York Times.

Nancy Johnson

Nancy Johnson is the author of the debut novel, The Kindest Lie, forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins in April 2021. The book centers on race, class, and family at the time of Obama’s election as president. Nancy manages brand communications at a large nonprofit and is a former Emmy-nominated, award-winning television journalist. Her work has been supported by Hurston/Wright Foundation, Tin House, Eckerd College Writers in Paradise, and Kimbilio Fiction. An excerpt of her novel received first runner-up recognition by the 2018 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. A native of Chicago’s South Side, Nancy lives in the city’s South Loop.

Sunny Stalter-Pace

Sunny Stalter-Pace is Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Auburn University. Her first book, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance (Northwestern University Press, 2020) is her first biography.