Author: Author's Answer

Matthew Langdon Cost has wanted to be a writer since age eight. I Am Cuba is his first traditionally published novel. He has also self-published another work of historical fiction, Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War: At Every Hazard. Encircle Publications will be publishing his Mainely Mystery trilogy over the course of the next year: Mainely Power is due out in September, Mainely Fear in December, and Mainely Blackmail in May of 2021. Over the years, Cost has owned a video store, a mystery bookstore, and a gym. He has also taught history and coached just about every sport imaginable. He now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A Chocolate Lab and a Bassett Hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.

Alison Moncrieff writes poetry, paints, sews, collects rocks, digs in the dirt, and tends to chickens & children in Oakland, California. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Pluck (dancing girl press, 2020), don draper checks the window (dancing girl press, 2017) and Cherrystem (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her writing has appeared in The East Bay Review, Entropy, Rivet Journal, The Manifest Station, and Bay Area Generations.

I worked from 1976 to 2017 in the museum field, serving the last 22 years as director of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave. I wrote my first freelance article in 1969 and have been writing everything from articles and book chapters to exhibit labels and grant proposals ever since. My first book A Modest Mennonite Home was published in 1990. Since then I have authored Buffalo Bill: Scout, Showman, Visionary, published in 2010 and Lakota Performers in Europe, published in 2017. I am taking advantage of “sheltering at home” to work more intensively on my next book.

Meredith May, a former journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, is the author of the best-selling memoir, THE HONEY BUS, about her beekeeping childhood with her grandfather in Big Sur. It has been published in eighteen countries and translated into eleven languages. She is a fifth-generation beekeeper and lives in Carmel Valley, CA, where she is working on her next book, LOVING EDIE, about life with her extremely anxious golden retriever puppy.

J. Ryan Stradal is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest, which won the 2016 American Booksellers Association Indie’s Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, the 2016 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for debut fiction, and the 2016 Southern California Independent Booksellers Association award for 2016’s top novel. His second novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, was an instant national bestseller. A native of Minnesota, he lives with his family in California, where he enjoys books, wine, craft beer, and peas.

Grant Ginder is the author of The People We Hate at the Wedding and Honestly, We Meant Well. He received his MFA from NYU, where he teaches writing. He lives in Brooklyn.

Emmy award-winning writer Amy Bass was born and raised in New England, the daughter of two noted local journalists, in a house filled with books and a yard filled with an enormous vegetable garden, berry patches, a small orchard, and about thirty acres of woods going straight up a mountain. Now a New Yorker, she makes sure that the Red Sox, the Berkshire Hills, and Cape Cod’s beaches and bike paths remain big pieces in her heart. Bass is a graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where her fourth book, One Goal, is set. She received a doctorate degree with distinction from Stony Brook University and has had a fruitful career as a professor and scholar of sport, culture, and politics, established by her first book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle. She worked across eight Olympic Games for NBC Sports, winning an Emmy for Live Event Turnaround in 2012. One Goal was named a best book of 2018 by the Boston Globe and Library Journal, and was featured on the Today Show, NPR’s The Takeaway, Midday, and Only A Game. It is being adapted to film by Netflix. In its starred review of the book, Kirkus Reviews called One Goal “an edifying and adrenaline-charged tale,” while the Wall Street Journal declared it “the perfect parable for our time,” and the Globe and Mail dubbed it “magnificent and significant.” Bass is a frequent contributor for CNN, both in print and on-screen, and is professor of sport studies at Manhattanville College.

Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist living in Berkeley, California. Her newest book of non-fiction, SURVIVOR CAFÉ: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and in The New York Times; it was also a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Her three acclaimed novels have been translated into nine languages and have received prizes in the US and in Europe. A graduate of Stanford University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Queensland in Australia, she lectures and teaches writing workshops internationally.