Author: Author's Answer

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.

Patricia D’Arcy Laughlin was born in Trinidad of British and French ancestry. She was educated there, the UK, and the USA. She is a world traveler and an award-winning artist, famous for developing her “Unique Stainings On Wood.” Although she has composed poetry, Sacrifices For Kingdoms is her first novel, the start of a series (book two of the trilogy will be published in June 2024.) She lives in Florida with her husband, and she has three children, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

I wrote a two-act play, a book for a musical and a novel before finishing high school. They are memories now; thankfully, none of their pages exist.

When I started at McGill University in Montreal, I was thinking of journalism. My father’s advice was precise, and cruel. “You should train for a job that will always exist, no matter what happens. Besides, maybe your writing isn’t that good.”

So I became a doctor and have had a satisfying career as a neonatologist.  I am also a husband and father, the happiest roles of all.

Eventually, I decided to ignore my father and learn the discipline and craft of writing. On these pages are links to some of the available essays and stories by which, as their quality indicate, I have practiced and learned.

Tyler C. Gore is the author of My Life of Crime: Essays and Other Entertainments, which the Washington Independent Review of Books called “immensely readable…full of the people and peculiarities of New York and told with an almost wide-eyed wonder of someone in love with the place — even the worst of it.”

Boston native Eugenio Volpe was awarded the PEN Discovery Award for Fiction and nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. Volpe’s essay “Jesus Kicks His Oedipus Complex” was listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. His stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, New York Tyrant, VICE, Post Road, The Nervous Breakdown, BULL, and other journals. Out now, I, Caravaggio (CLASH Books) his daring debut novel about the temperamental Baroque master, dramatizes an artistic superstar’s psychological unraveling under the sexual and political pressures of the Catholic Reformation. Volpe resides in Los Angeles with his wife and son, where he is a professor of rhetoric at Loyola Marymount University.

Brooke Bentley is a former television anchor and award-winning sports reporter. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Davidson College, she received a master’s in journalism from the University of Southern California. Brooke then spent two years working for the Houston Texans as a media personality and over a decade working in sports journalism. Brooke now devotes her time to championing local nonprofits, including Homemade Hope, where she served as the development director. She and her husband live in Houston and are raising two young boys.