Jill Sherer Murray is a TEDx speaker, author, influencer, coach, and founder of Let Go For It®, a lifestyle brand dedicated to helping individuals let go for a better life. She is also an award-winning journalist and communications leader who can trace practically every success she’s had in her career, love life, and more to letting go. Her TEDx talk, “The Unstoppable Power of Letting Go” has been viewed by millions of people, many of them reaching out to her from all over the world for advice on how to let go in their own lives. Murray also coaches and consults with business leaders on how to let go for better business results with a focus on communications. She spent a year studying improvisation comedy at the famous Second City Training Center in Chicago, and another five years writing a popular blog called Diary of a Writer in Mid-Life Crisis for Wild River Review. She also let go of just about everything to put her weight in Shape Magazine—twelve times—as part of a year-long assignment to document her weight loss journey for millions of readers.
Author: Author's Answer
Robert Steven Goldstein
Robert Steven Goldstein retired from his job as a healthcare information executive at age fifty-six and has been writing novels ever since. His first novel, The Swami Deheftner, about the problems that ensue when ancient magic and mysticism manifest in the twenty-first century, has developed a small cult following in India. Cat’s Whisker, his second novel, will be published soon; an excerpt from it, entitled “An Old Dog,” was featured in the fall 2018 edition of Leaping Clear, a literary journal. Enemy Queen is his third novel. Robert lives in San Francisco with his wife of thirty years and two rambunctious dogs.
Dorothy Rice
Dorothy Rice is the author of Gray Is the New Black: A Memoir of Self-Acceptance (Otis Books, 2019) and The Reluctant Artist (Shanti Arts, 2015), an art book/memoir about her father. After raising five children and retiring from a career managing environmental protection programs, Rice earned an MFA in Creative Writing at 60 from UC Riverside’s low-residency program. In addition to writing, she now works for 916 Ink, a youth literacy nonprofit, and co-directs Stories on Stage Sacramento, a literary performance series.
Sarah Z. Sleeper
Sarah Z. Sleeper is an ex-journalist with an MFA in creative writing. Gaijin is her first novel. Her short story, “A Few Innocuous Lines,” won an award from Writer’s Digest. Her non-fiction essay, “On Getting Vivian,” was published in The Shanghai Literary Review. Her poetry was published in A Year in Ink, San Diego Poetry Annual and Painters & Poets, and exhibited at the Bellarmine Museum. In the recent past she was an editor at New Rivers Press, and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Mason’s Road. She completed her MFA at Fairfield University in 2012. Prior to that she had a twenty-five-year career as a business writer and technology reporter and won three journalism awards and a fellowship at the National Press Foundation.
Debra Thomas
Originally from upstate New York, Debra Thomas has lived in Southern California for most of her adult life. She holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s in English from California State University, Northridge, and attended the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She has taught literature and writing at a Los Angeles public high school and English as a Second Language to adults from all over the world. Her experience as an advocate for immigrant and refugee rights led her to write Luz. She is currently at work on her second novel.
Ellen Birkett Morris
Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, The Antioch Review, The Notre Dame Review, and The South Carolina Review, among other journals. Her commentaries have been heard on public radio stations across the United States. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for Short Fiction and the recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. Morris holds an MFA from Queens University-Charlotte.
Caroline Leavitt
Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of 12 novels. Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow were both New York Times bestsellers. Pictures of You was also a Costco “Pennie’s Pick,” A San Francisco Chronicle Editor’s Choice “Lit Pick,” and was one of the top 20 books published so far in 2011, as named by BookPage. It was also on the Best Books of 2011 lists from The San Francisco Chronicle, The Providence Journal, Bookmarks Magazine and Kirkus Reviews.
Is This Tomorrow was also a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick/Editor’s Choice, a Jewish Book Council Bookclub Pick, a WNBA National Great Group Reads, a May Indie Next Pick, A Best Book of 2013 from January magazine, on the longlist for the Maine Readers’ Choice Award, and the winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award.
Daniel Lee
Dr. Daniel Lee: I am a historian of the Second World War and a specialist in the history of Jews in France and North Africa during the Holocaust. My first book, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–42 (OUP, 2014) explored the coexistence between young French Jews and the Vichy regime. My second book, The SS Officer’s Armchair (Jonathan Cape, 2020), examines the life of a low-ranking SS officer from Stuttgart whose personal documents were recently discovered sewn into the cushion of an armchair. I am concurrently working on a history of the Jews of Tunisia during the Second World War, and am also the Principal Investigator on a British Academy GCRF Sustainable Development Programme project entitled, “Traces of Jewish Memory in Contemporary Tunisia”.
Darlene Green
Highly sensitive, a natural empath, healer, teacher and scribe, Darlene Green has followed her heart’s direction in discovery of the sacred in life. After many years of spiritual practice and study, Darlene experienced an invitation by the Masters of the Council of Light to sit with them as scribe, daily, for one year and one day. The result is the extensive body of work that is In Service to Love, relayed through three books: In Service to Love Book 1: Love Remembered, In Service to Love Book 2: Love Elevated and In Service to Love Book 3: Love Now.
Ann L. Tucker
Ann L. Tucker is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Georgia. As a historian, her areas of expertise include the US South, Civil War, and nationalism and transnational history. Dr. Tucker has long been interested in issues of southern identity, and became interested in the creation of the Italian nation while studying abroad in Venice. She combines these interests to research and write on southern nationalism in the Civil War Era through a transnational approach. Her work demonstrates the influence of European nationalist movements, such as the Revolutions of 1848 and Italian Risorgimento, on the development of the Confederacy.