Month: April 2024

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.

Bryan Cole is a long time fan of the fantasy and science fiction genres, having grown up reading and watching everything he could find in those domains. He has had a long career in the enterprise software space, delivering countless presentations and technical sessions to customers all over the world.His love for stories about heroes, villains, magic, and dragons has never dimmed, and in 2022 published his first book is Beginning of Arrogance which is a story about what it means to be a paladin in a world where the gods are manifestly real.It was a strange journey that led him to writing, but decades of building business presentations gave him a surprising amount of practice in crafting words and conveying emotion (an often overlooked aspect of selling), and he finally made the time in 2022 to take the hundreds of pages of random notes, stories, and adventure ideas he had and committed them to the page.

Jeff Fulmer graduated from Pepperdine University in California. After careers in financial services and real estate (with a brief stint in video production), he now enjoys hiking, fishing, yoga, and traveling. Along with his wife, he is involved with their church and local charities.  A lifelong writer, Jeff has published a handful of books under pseudonyms, as well as his own name, including Hometown Prophet and his new release, American Prophet (April 2024). He lives in Tennessee. 

Enemy Combatant, David Winner’s third novel (March 2021) received a Kirkus-starred review and was a Publisher’s Weekly/Booklife Editor’s Pick. He is the co-editor of Writing the Virus, a New York Times-noted Anthology. His Kirkus-recommended second novel, Tyler’s Last, was nominated for a Pushcart while his first, The Cannibal of Guadalajara, won the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Millions, The Kenyon Review, The Forward, and (in German) Manuskripte. He is a senior editor at StatOrec magazine, the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome, a frequent contributor to The Brooklyn Rail, and a columnist for 3 Quarks Daily. His most recent book, Master Lovers, is Kirkus-recommended and a Publisher’s Weekly/Booklife Editor’s Pick.

Maryann Lesert writes about people and place in equal measure. Her first novel, Base Ten (Feminist Press, 2009), featured an astrophysicist’s quest for self among Lake Michigan’s forested dunes and the stars. Before novels, Maryann wrote plays, including three full-lengths, five one-acts, and collaborations with a memoirist and a local symphony. Maryann lives in west Michigan, where she teaches writing, enjoys time in the natural world (shared with family and friends), and writes by the big lake.

Janet A. Wilson writes: South African-born author and adventurer passionate about Africa’s wilderness, wildlife, and diverse cultures. I graduated with a nursing and sociology degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. I immigrated to Canada in 1979 with my husband and sons. I obtained my master’s in health administration at Central Michigan University. Before retirement, I worked in healthcare, primarily in palliative and mental health.

Van Hoang’s first name is pronounced like the van in minivan. Her last name is pronounced “hah-wawng.” She is the author of Girl Giant and the Monkey King, Girl Giant and the Jade War, and the forthcoming Hidden Tails for middle grade readers. Her adult debut novel The Monstrous Misses Mai will publish in spring 2024. Van was born in Vietnam, grew in up Orange County, California, and now resides in Los Angeles with her husband, kid, and dog. When she is not writing, she spends her days force-feeding books to small children (and adults!) at the Huntington Beach library in Southern California.

Allison Landa is a Berkeley, CA-based writer of fiction and memoir whose debut novel BEARDED LADY was published by Woodhall Press. Her work has been featured in venues including Business Insider, Parents Magazine, The Guardian US, The Washington Post, and HuffPost Personal. A MacDowell Fellow, she has held artist residencies at Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow, Playa Summer Lake, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Julia and David White Artists Colony. She is represented by Marisa Zeppieri of Strachan Literary Agency.

Merrill Joan Gerber has written thirty-one books including The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine, and King of the World, winner of the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Sewanee Review, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, and Redbook, and her essays in The American Scholar, Salmagundi, and Commentary.  She has won an O. Henry Award, a Best American Essays award, and a Wallace Stegner fiction fellowship to Stanford University. She retired in 2020 after teaching writing at the California Institute of Technology for thirty-two years. Her literary archive is now at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library.

Paige writes about superheroes and sentient cities, were-spiders and gun-loving fairies, werewolves and fighter pilots. By day, Paige writes articles and technical books for O’Reilly Publishers about analytics software and data architecture. In her spare time, Paige loves to shoot arrows and throw axes and spears. She lives in the middle of Texas, and will show you far too many pictures of her garden if you let her. She once invented a way to grow food on Mars that NASA liked, and has a cute trophy to show for it. Her dogs and horses are unimpressed.