Month: August 2023

Populating ROBERT MCKEAN’S novels and stories are some five hundred characters, steelworkers and bankers, doctors and jewelers, teachers and librarians, lawyers and yardage clerks, salesmen and ballet instructors—all residents of Ganaego, a small mill town in Western Pennsylvania. Mending What is Broken, his latest novel, is just out from Livingtson Press. McKean’s short story collection I’ll Be Here for You: Diary of a Town was awarded first-prize in the Tartts First Fiction competition (Livingston Press). His novel The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts was awarded first-prize in the Methodist University Longleaf Press Novel Contest. The novel was also named a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Recipient of a Massachusetts Artist’s Grant for his fiction, McKean has had six stories nominated for Pushcart Prizes and one story for Best of the Net. He has published extensively in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Chicago Review, and Armchair/Shotgun.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Jennifer Hamm graduated with a BA in English at UCLA and began her writing career developing screenplays for movies and television. As a travel writer, she has covered the globe on assignment for various magazines and brands. She also writes It’s Only for A Year, a long-running blog chronicling her adventures raising her four boys in two countries. Hamm currently splits her time between London and Los Angeles. One Friday in Napa is her first novel.

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Akemi is the author of a handful of unpublished novels and a smattering of unrecorded song lyrics.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.