Category: Author’s Answer

Gin Hammond is an award-winning Harvard University/Moscow Art Theatre grad, as well as an actor, playwright, director, and author.  She has performed onstage both nationally and internationally and received grants from Allied Arts, Artist Trust, 4 Culture, the NEA and others.  She also works as a voice teacher, dialect coach, and voice-over artist, and is known for her work in video games such as DotA II, BattleTech, Undead Labs, and is doing motion capture for an upcoming, under-wraps game for Sony/Sucker Punch.  Gin is the author of the historical fiction novel, Returning the Bones, co-founder of Meditations for Actors (MFA), a meditation app specifically for actors, and she lives with her husband, son, cat, and chickens in Washington State.

Debbie Russell is a lawyer turned writer. She spent twenty-five years as an Assistant County Attorney in Minneapolis, prosecuting numerous high-profile cases and fighting off several nervous breakdowns. At age fifty-five, Debbie took early retirement, giving up a full pension for the freedom of time. She now spends that precious time writing, restoring her property to native prairie and wetlands, and training her rambunctious retrievers. Crossing Fifty-One: Not Quite a Memoir is her debut memoir.

Gabrielle O’Flaherty was born and educated in Waterford, Ireland, later continuing her studies in England and the USA. She now lives with her family in San Diego, California. She is passionate about writing, travel, and nature, and is an accomplished artist and sculptor. “The Night of the Red Tide” is her first published book, an illustrated adventure story written over a two-and-a-half-year period during the COVID pandemic. The idea for her story came to her on a magical night while watching an astonishing red tide, when the breaking waves were shining bright bioluminescent blue.

Tracey Buchanan crashed into the literary world when she was six and won her first writing award. Fast forward through years as a journalist, mom, volunteer, freelance writer, editor, artist, small business owner, and circus performer (not really, but wouldn’t that be something?) and you find her happily planted in the world of fiction with her debut novel, Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace.

Alenka Vrecek was born at the foot of the Alps in Slovenia, a part of former communist Yugoslavia. Born with a spirit for adventure, she came to America at twenty years old with a backpack, a pair of skis, and a pocket full of dreams. She was a ski coach and a director of Pedagogy for Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows Ski Teams for thirty years. Alenka owns Tahoe Tea Company and lives in Lake Tahoe, California, with her second husband, Jim, their four children, three grandchildren, and a Golden Retriever named Monty. She continues to ride and write. 

Emma Deards grew up in New York City and earned her undergraduate degree at Barnard College at Columbia University , where she studied Japanese literature and biology. She was then accepted to The University of Edinburgh, where she completed her veterinary degree. She remained in the UK afterward, and since then has split her time between her day job as a vet and her truest passion: writing. Emma has authored a number of humor articles for In Practice, a veterinary magazine, and was the recipient in college of two writing awards: Oscar Lee Award and the Harumatsuri Award. Wild with All Regret is her first book.

Jessica Jopp grew up in New York state. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. An award-winning poet, Jopp has published her work in numerous journals, among them POETRY, Seneca Review, and Denver Quarterly. Her collection, The History of a Voice was awarded the Baxter Hathaway Prize in Poetry from EPOCH, and it was published in 2021 by Headmistress Press. She has been a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the Honickman Prize. Jopp teaches in the English Department at Slippery Rock University. She lives in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where she is on the board of a nonprofit working to protect a community woodland.

Kathryn Crawley was born of pioneer stock and raised in the small West Texas cotton town of Lamesa. She received undergraduate and graduate degrees in speech pathology from Baylor University. Unforeseen events and an adventurous spirit led her to Wyoming, Colorado, and to Greece, where she worked with Greek cerebral palsied children. She later established roots in Boston where she continued her career as a speech pathologist. Today, she enjoys life with her partner Tom, daughter Emilia, and two dogs. Walking on Fire is her debut novel. 

Mary Kathleen Mehuron is a career educator who made a splash with her first book, Fading Past, an autobiographical novel whose protagonist, like Mary Kathleen, grew up Irish-Catholic in New Jersey. The Opposite of Never is Mary Kathleen’s second book, and to finish it, she traveled alone to Havana in January 2015 in order to experience the city before it became Americanized. Mary Kathleen lives and teaches in a ski town in Vermont where they call her Kathy. This is where she and her husband raised three sons,  and she is an occasional columnist and writes curriculum daily for private math and science students. She takes extended time to work on her novels on Grand Turk Island and in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

Gretchen Cherington’s first view of powerful men was informed at the feet of her father, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, and his eclectic and fascinating writer friends, from Robert Frost to Allen Ginsberg to James Dickey. As an executive management consultant, she figured out what made powerful men tick by working alongside nearly three hundred of them in their corner suites during her 35 year career. Her first memoir, Poetic License, has won multiple awards; her writing has appeared in Crack the Spine, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Women Writers/Women’s Books, MS. Girl, Yankee and more; and she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her essay “Maine Roustabout” in 2012. Gretchen and her husband split their time between Portland, ME, and a saltwater cottage on Penobscot Bay.