Month: May 2024

Pamela Statz is the author of Thorn City. Pamela grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, the twelfth of thirteen children. She attended UW Madison earning degrees in Journalism and History. With four duffel bags and her goldfish Lucrezia swimming in a mason jar, Pamela flew to the West Coast at the cusp of the dot-com boom and never left. She’s worked in media and advertising in San Francisco and Portland for Lucasfilm, WIRED, Nike, and Wieden+Kennedy. She currently splits her time between Portland and Manzanita, Oregon with her husband Justin Graham and their giant dog Hooper. 

Lee Upton is a multi-genre author. Her most recent book is the comic novel, Tabitha, Get Up (due out May 22, 2024) about a woman desperately down on her luck who attempts to write simultaneously two biographies about two celebrities: an actor so handsome his face is on the side of buses, and an author of erotic literature with a fanatical cult following. She is also the author of seven books of poetry including The Day Every Day Is, two story collections, a novella, four books of literary criticism, and a collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing and Ambition, Boredom, Purity and Secrecy. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Noa Silver was born in Jerusalem and raised between Scotland and Maine. After receiving her BA in English and American literature and language from Harvard University, Noa lived and taught English as a Second Language on Namdrik—part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the smallest inhabited atoll in the world. She later completed her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and then worked as an editor on various oral history projects, ranging from an archive documenting the Partition of India and Pakistan to a cancer researcher telling the stories of trauma experienced by cancer survivors. Noa lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Jack, and their two daughters, Alma and Leila.

USA Today bestselling author L. R. W. Lee has authored 20 books and counting!

She loves writing fantasy because her characters are everything she’s not in real life. For example, she can’t handle scary movies, Stephen King novels, or cockroaches. And she knows she wouldn’t last long in one of her books. But give her a drink and a Hawaiian sunset and she’ll be just fine.

At age four, Claudia Marseille was diagnosed with a severe hearing loss. With determination and the help of powerful hearing aids, she learned to speak and lipread. She was mainstreamed in public schools in Berkeley, CA. After earning master’s degrees in archaeology and in public policy, and finally an MFA, she developed a career in photography and painting, a profession compatible with a hearing loss. Claudia ran a fine art portrait photography studio for fifteen years before becoming a full-time painter. Her paintings are represented by the Seager Gray gallery in Mill Valley, CA. Her memoir– But You Look So Normal: Lost and Found in a Hearing World, received a starred review in Library Journal. 

Maggie Hill’s essays and non-fiction pieces have been published in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and Scholastic professional magazines. Current publications include Lakeshore Literary Review, Cleaver Lit Mag, Embark Literary, and Persimmon Tree. She has been the recipient of several artist fellowships and residences, including Yaddo, Ragdale, and Prospect Street. Sunday Money is her first novel. Maggie resides in Rockaway Beach, New York.

Dena Rueb Romero grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, the daughter of a Lutheran mother and a Jewish father, both refugees from Nazi Germany. She graduated from Brandeis University and received an MA in English from the University of Virginia and an MSW from Boston College Graduate School of Social Work. Her previous publications include Gretel’s Albums, a collaborative bilingual internet project with researcher Bernhild Voegel, and an essay about German citizenship in A Place They Called Home: Reclaiming Citizenship, Stories of a New Jewish Return to Germany. Dena still lives in Hanover, where she sings in a women’s chorus and volunteers at a daycare center and with an organization supporting refugees and asylum seekers.

Patti Eddington is a newspaper and magazine journalist whose favorite job ever was interviewing the famous authors who came through town on book tours. She never dreamed of writing about her life because she was too busy helping build her husband’s veterinary practice, caring for her animal obsessed daughter whose favorite childhood toy was an inflatable tick and learning to tap dance. Then fate, and a DNA test, led her to a story she felt compelled to tell. Today, the mid-century modern design enthusiast and former dance teacher enjoys being dragged on walks by her ridiculous three-legged dog, David, and watching the egrets and bald eagles from her deck on a beautiful bayou in Spring Lake, Michigan.