Author, Film Producer, Podcaster
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.
Lally Pia was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Ghana, and made it halfway through medical school before political turmoil closed down her university and she learned that her American Green Card had been bungled. She went on to work as a church organist, teacher, and ice cream decorator, as well as a scientist in a molecular biology lab. Her next stint was as the director of UC Davis’s Body Donation Program, where she embalmed cadavers and maintained a freezer full of human specimens (a thankless job that she was glad to leave after three years). Lally is a mother, grandmother, and child psychiatrist who lives in Davis, California, with her husband, Tim.
Bryan Cole is a long time fan of the fantasy and science fiction genres, having grown up reading and watching everything he could find in those domains. He has had a long career in the enterprise software space, delivering countless presentations and technical sessions to customers all over the world.His love for stories about heroes, villains, magic, and dragons has never dimmed, and in 2022 published his first book is Beginning of Arrogance which is a story about what it means to be a paladin in a world where the gods are manifestly real.It was a strange journey that led him to writing, but decades of building business presentations gave him a surprising amount of practice in crafting words and conveying emotion (an often overlooked aspect of selling), and he finally made the time in 2022 to take the hundreds of pages of random notes, stories, and adventure ideas he had and committed them to the page.
Jeff Fulmer graduated from Pepperdine University in California. After careers in financial services and real estate (with a brief stint in video production), he now enjoys hiking, fishing, yoga, and traveling. Along with his wife, he is involved with their church and local charities. A lifelong writer, Jeff has published a handful of books under pseudonyms, as well as his own name, including Hometown Prophet and his new release, American Prophet (April 2024). He lives in Tennessee.
Enemy Combatant, David Winner’s third novel (March 2021) received a Kirkus-starred review and was a Publisher’s Weekly/Booklife Editor’s Pick. He is the co-editor of Writing the Virus, a New York Times-noted Anthology. His Kirkus-recommended second novel, Tyler’s Last, was nominated for a Pushcart while his first, The Cannibal of Guadalajara, won the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Millions, The Kenyon Review, The Forward, and (in German) Manuskripte. He is a senior editor at StatOrec magazine, the fiction editor of The American, a magazine based in Rome, a frequent contributor to The Brooklyn Rail, and a columnist for 3 Quarks Daily. His most recent book, Master Lovers, is Kirkus-recommended and a Publisher’s Weekly/Booklife Editor’s Pick.
Maryann Lesert writes about people and place in equal measure. Her first novel, Base Ten (Feminist Press, 2009), featured an astrophysicist’s quest for self among Lake Michigan’s forested dunes and the stars. Before novels, Maryann wrote plays, including three full-lengths, five one-acts, and collaborations with a memoirist and a local symphony. Maryann lives in west Michigan, where she teaches writing, enjoys time in the natural world (shared with family and friends), and writes by the big lake.
