Donna Baier Stein is the author of The Silver Baron's Wife (PEN/New England Discovery Award, Bronze Winner Foreword reviews 2017 Book of the Year in General Fiction and Finalist Historical Fiction, and Finalist in Paterson Prize for Fiction), Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist and 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in Short Fiction), and Sometimes You Sense the Difference (poetry chapbook). She was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and founded and publishes Tiferet Journal. She has received a Scholarship from Bread Loaf, a Fellowship from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, four Pushcart nominations, runnerup status from the 2017 Saturday Evening Post fiction contest, and prizes from the Allen Ginsberg Awards and elsewhere. Her writing has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, Gargoyle, and many other journals and anthologies. Donna was also an award-winning copywriter for Smithsonian, Time, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and many other clients in the direct marketing industry. www.donnabaierstein.com

Gayle Brandeis is the author most recently of Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss (Overcup Press.) Earlier books include Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne) and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement (judged by Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and contest founder Barbara Kingsolver), Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state wide read in Wisconsin. Her most recent books include the poetry collection, The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press) the memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother's Suicide (Beacon Press) and the novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus (A Testimony) (Black Lawrence Press). Her essays, poems and short fiction have been widely published in venues such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Longreads, O, The Oprah Magazine, and more, and have received numerous honors, including a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, the Columbia Journal Nonfiction Prize, and Notable mentions in The Best American Essays 2016, 2019, and 2020. She teaches in the low residency MFA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles and University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. Gayle served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012-2014 and was deemed a Writer Who Makes a Difference by The Writer Magazine. She lives in Highland Park, IL.

I was born in North Dakota but spent most of my life in Denver, Colorado until my husband Matt and I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2002. We live on top of a lively, verdant hill in the city of Seattle with our three-legged cat, Baz.

I've been a full-time writer since 1995, and a working musician for even longer. My band, The Rejections, is made up of authors and their spouses, and we play for literary events around the Seattle area. In 2009, my friend Garth Stein and I cofounded a nonprofit collective of authors, called Seattle7Writers, that brought together the reading and writing communities and raised money and awareness for literacy and literary organizations. We retired Seattle7Writers in 2019, after giving it all we had for 10 years.

After writing five novels, I embarked on writing a memoir about trauma, mental illness, and family. As you can imagine, it's a difficult project, but I remain steadfastly working on it each day in my small home office, Baz sitting in the window, rain often pattering outside. I hope to have it ready for readers before too long.

Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist living in Berkeley, California. Her newest book of nonfiction, THIRD EAR: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening, will be published in September 2024. Her previous book of nonfiction, SURVIVOR CAFÉ: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, was chosen as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice. Interviews with Ms. Rosner have been featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" and in The New York Times. Her most recent novel, ELECTRIC CITY, was named one of the best books of 2014 by National Public Radio. Her highly praised autobiographical poetry collection, GRAVITY, was published by Atelier26 Books in Fall 2014. THE SPEED OF LIGHT, her debut novel of 2001, was translated into nine languages, and won several literary prizes in both the US and Europe, including the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, the Prix France Bleu Gironde, and the Great Lakes Colleges Award in Fiction. It was short-listed for the prestigious Prix Femina in 2002, and picked as the "One City One Book" choice of Peoria, IL that same year. BLUE NUDE, her second novel, was named among the best books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Rosner's essays have appeared in the NY Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah Magazine, the Huffington Post, and numerous anthologies. She frequently writes book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle. Having taught writing for over 30 years, she travels widely to lead intensive writing workshops, to lecture on contemporary literature, and to visit with book groups.

Michelle Wildgen is the author of the novels WINE PEOPLE, BREAD AND BUTTER, BUT NOT FOR LONG, and YOU'RE NOT YOU, as well as the editor of the anthology FOOD and BOOZE: A TIN HOUSE LITERARY FEAST. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, Salon, Real Simple online, Best Food Writing, Best New American Voices, and several literary journals and anthologies, including Tin House, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Death by Pad Thai, Naming the World, and Dirty Words.

She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, the setting of her first two novels and the city to which she returned in 2007 after seven years in the greater New York area. Now she's one of those overjoyed shoppers who linger at the farmers markets, engaging passersby in conversations about shallots. She writes about memorable food and nervous people, finally relinquished the dream of making her own mozzarella, and saw her quality of life sky-rocket after discovering the concept of "weekday cake."

Dawn Raffel's most recent book is The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, which was named by NPR as one of the great reads of 2018 and won a 2019 Christopher Award for books that "affirm the highest values of the human spirit." Her previous book, The Secret Life of Objects, was selected for Oprah's Summer Reading List, and reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "a lean, brilliant, playful memoir." She is also the author of two collections--Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division--and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Brooklyn Rail, The Quarterly, NOON, and many other periodicals and anthologies.

Dawn is a freelance book editor in New York.

W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi, which will be released on March 16, 2021 by Timber Press. A Place Like Mississippi takes readers on a complete tour of the real and imagined landscapes that have inspired generations of authors. This is a book that honors and explores the landscape of Mississippi—and the Magnolia State’s history—and reveals the many ways this landscape has informed the work of some of America’s most treasured authors.

Eubanks is the author of two other books: Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi's Dark Past (Basic Books) and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South (HarperCollins). Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley named Ever is a Long Time as one of the best nonfiction books of 2003. Richard Ford wrote that The House at the End of the Road “finds its truth in between conventional wisdom and sociological presumption, in between lies and faulty history. It is a story of race, of family, of place itself, and it tells us that compassion and the stirring force of individual human endeavor finally mean more than anything.”

Eubanks has contributed articles to the Washington Post Outlook and Style sections, WIRED, The Hedgehog Review,The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and National Public Radio. A graduate of the University of Mississippi (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (M.A., English Language and Literature), he is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation. Ralph lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and three children. From 1995 to 2013 he was director of publishing for the Library of Congress and is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia. Currently he is a visiting professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.

​Sally Koslow is the author of THE REAL MRS.TOBIAS, a sharply funny and big-hearted multi-generational story about the deeply complicated relationships between mothers- and daughters-in-law, told through three women who marry into the same family. This novel will be published by Harper Perennial in September 2022.

Sally's previous novels include ANOTHER SIDE OF PARADISE, also published in France and Bulgaria. Called "stylish, vibrant and colorful" by Kirkus Reviews and "intoxicating" by Publisher's Weekly, this book explores the turbulent love affair of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist during Hollywood's golden era. Koslow has been a featured speaker at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society's annual conference held in Toulouse, France,

Sally's second novel, THE LATE, LAMENTED MOLLY MARX, became an international bestseller as well as a Book Pick by Target, who selected her third novel, WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE, as an Emerging Writer Book. THE WIDOW WALTZ, her fourth novel, was praised by Library Journal, calling it "page-turning" and "well-written."Her debut novel, LITTLE PINK SLIPS, was inspired by her long career as the editor-in-chief of iconic McCall's Magazine. Her books have been published in fifteen countries. All are available on Kindle as well as audiobooks. She is also the author of one non-fiction book, SLOUCHING TOWARD ADULTHOOD.

Sally has contributed essays and articles to numerous anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and websites, including The New York Times, O the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, More, The Boston Globe, Good Housekeeping, The Forward, AARP Magazine, The Ethel, Woman's Day, Redbook, Mademoiselle, Reader's Digest and many more. She works independently with aspiring writers to help them polish their manuscripts and book proposals.

To arrange a book club visit or speaking engagment, inquire about independent writing coaching, or just to say hello, please contact Sally via her website: www.sallykoslow.com, on Twitter: @sallykoslow, through her Facebook Author Page, that she hopes you'll "like," and as spkoslow on Instagram.

Sally lives in Manhattan but humbly brags that she is from Fargo, North Dakota. She is an honors graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she met her husband. They are the proud parents of two sons.

I grew up in Toronto where I met my husband Arron in 1986. We married in 1990 and then lived around the world - Brussels, London, Boston - before settling in Montclair, NJ where we were happily raising our two kids, Olivia, 6 and Carter, 2 until one sunny September day, when Arron went off to work, later calling me to tell me a bomb had gone off in The World Trade Center where he was attending a trade show. I never spoke with him again.

Thus at the ripe old age of 38, two years after that very fateful day, I began writing down everything I could remember about the two years I had just lived through. In 2005, I moved myself and our two kids to Seattle, WA in order to begin anew. I took a writing course and wrote some more and then by sheer happenstance wound up with my book, The Alchemy of Loss being published.

Like widow(er)s everywhere this is my unintentional life. Perhaps we all lead unintentional lives. I'm beginning to believe so.

My kids are now 18 and 14, happy, secure, funny. But every now and then, that roller coaster still mounts those steep inclines and plunges us into sheer drops.

Jean Kwok is the international bestselling author of Girl in Translation, Mambo in Chinatown, and Searching for Sylvie Lee, which was a Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club pick and an instant New York Times bestseller. Her work has been published in twenty countries and is taught in schools across the world. She has been selected for numerous honors, including the American Library Association Alex Award, the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award and the Sunday Times Short Story Award international shortlist. She immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. She received her bachelor's degree from Harvard University and earned an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in the Netherlands.

Learn more about Jean here:

https://jeankwok.com/

Susan Henderson is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award, and the author of two novels, Up from the Blue and The Flicker of Old Dreams, both published by HarperCollins. Her latest is a Montana Book Award Honor Book and winner of the High Plains Book Award for Fiction, the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction, and the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Western Contemporary Novel. Susan is a lifetime member of the National Book Critics Circle and the NAACP.  She lives in New York and blogs at the writer support group, LitPark.com.

On a more personal level, Susan is a dog lover, a beginner-Spanish speaker, a hiker, and a voracious reader. Her favorite authors include Toni Morrison, Shirley Jackson, James Baldwin, William Gass, Kent Haruf, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ellen Gilchrist, John Steinbeck, Nikki Giovanni, Max Porter, Nicole Krauss, Ocean Vuong, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tim O’Brien, Zora Neale Hurston, Edward Hirsch, William Maxwell, Claudia Rankine, and the Brothers Grimm.

Shana Mahaffey lives with two tuxedo cats and her husband. She is a co-founder of the Castro Writers' Cooperative. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Sunset Magazine, SoMa Literary Review, Spectrum Literary Journal, Reflections Literary Journal, and assorted literary blogs.

https://www.shanamahaffey.com/

Molly Ringle was one of the quiet, weird kids in school, and is now one of the quiet, weird writers of the world. She likes thinking up innovative romantic obstacles and mixing them with topics like Greek mythology, ghost stories, fairy tales, or regular-world scandalous gossip. She's into mild rainy climates, gardens, '80s new wave music, chocolate, tea, and perfume (or really anything that smells good). She has lived in the Pacific Northwest most of her life, aside from grad school in California and one work-abroad season in Edinburgh in the 1990s. (She's also really into the U.K., though has a love/stress relationship with travel.) She currently lives in Seattle with her husband, kids, guinea pigs, corgi, and a lot of moss.

Robin Black's story collection, If I loved you, I would tell you this, was a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Story Prize, and named a Best Book of 2010 by numerous publications, including the Irish Times. Her novel, Life Drawing, was longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the Impac Dublin Literature Prize, and the Folio Prize. Her fiction has been translated into Italian, French, German, and Dutch.

Robin's most recent book is Crash Course: Essays From Where Writing And Life Collide. Robin's work can be found in such publications as One Story, The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, Southern Review, The Rumpus, O. Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler UK, and numerous anthologies, including The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. I (Norton) and The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review. Robin lives with her husband in Philadelphia and teaches in the Rutgers-Camden MFA Program.

Jennifer Rosner is the author of THE YELLOW BIRD SINGS, called "exquisite, heart-rending... an absolutely beautiful and necessary novel" by The New York Times Book Review and a Finalist for the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. Her previously published books include the memoir, IF A TREE FALLS: A Family's Quest to Hear and Be Heard, and the picture book, THE MITTEN STRING, a Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable. In addition to writing, Jennifer teaches philosophy. She received her BA from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Stanford University, and lives in western MA with her family. Her newest novel is ONCE WE WERE HOME, forthcoming from Flatiron Books.

Gina Frangello is the author of the short story collection Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010) and the novel My Sister's Continent (Chiasmus 2006), and her second novel, London Calling, will be released in 2011. Gina is a long-time editor and advocate in the independent publishing community. For ten years she served as the Editor of the award-winning literary magazine, Other Voices, and in 2005 she co-founded its book imprint, Other Voices Books, where she is now the Executive Editor. Other Voices Books (www.ovbooks.com) specializes in short story collections, themed anthologies and novels set outside the United States. Gina also edits the Fiction Section of the popular online literary collective, The Nervous Breakdown (www.thenervousbreakdown.com) and has guest-edited several outside projects, including the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters (Hourglass 2004) and the inaugural issue of TriQuarterly Online. Her journalism and book reviews have appeared widely in newspapers and blogs such as the Chicago Tribune and The Huffington Post. She can be found online at www.ginafrangello.com and currently resides in Chicago with her husband, twin daughters and son.

Author's note: "I love to do book clubs and blog tours, and have based my writing and editing career around forging personal connections between writers and readers. I'm on Facebook and Twitter, and if you'd like to read more of my nonfiction work, I can be found on The Nervous Breakdown blogging, and respond to all comments left on my stories there!"

Jessica Keener's latest novel, Strangers in Budapest, was an Indie Next pick, chosen as a "best new novel" by Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, Chicago Magazine, and landed on the Southern Independent bestseller list as well as the #2 spot in Jewish Historical Fiction (Amazon).

Her debut novel, Night Swim, was a national bestseller and rose to #9 on Amazon's bestseller list.

Her collection of stories, Women In Bed, was chosen as one of ten winter reads by Shape Magazine; and one of 12 best fall reads by Bettyconfidential.com editors. National Book Circle Critics award winner, Edith Pearlman called Keener "a master of immediacy." Her fiction has been recognized in The Pushcart Prize under "Outstanding Writers," and won Redbook magazine's second prize. Keener is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist's Grant, a Wesleyan creative writing scholarship, and a fellowship in fiction by the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She was a finalist in Breadloaf's Bakeless novel competition. Her feature articles (more than 100) have appeared in The Boston Globe; O, The Oprah Magazine, WBUR's Cognoscenti, Coastal Living, Design New England, Writer's Digest, and the award-winning anthology, Alone Together, Love, Grief, and Comfort in the time of Covid-19. https://www.amazon.com/author/jessicakeener

Scott James is a veteran journalist and author of Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for Truth, winner of the ★2021 top prize for contemporary nonfiction from the New England Society Book Awards.

Trial by Fire tells the true story of the Station nightclub fire, one of the deadliest criminal cases in United States history. A starred review in Publishers Weekly called Trial by Fire “gripping” and “essential reading for true crime fans.”

Scott has received three Emmy awards for his work in television news, and since 2009 has been a contributor to The New York Times. Writing under the pen name Kemble Scott, he’s also the author of two bestselling novels, The Sower and SoMa, finalist for the national Lambda Literary prize for debut fiction.

Scott lives in San Francisco. He’s on the board of directors of Litquake, the city’s literary festival, and co-founder of the Castro Writers’ Cooperative, a co-working community for writers.

CHRISTINE HEMP has been called a “poetry adventurer.” She has aired her essays and poems on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition; she has sent a poem of hers into space on a NASA mission to monitor the birth of stars; and her program Connecting Chord, has united cops and youth offenders—in Britain and the U.S.— through poetry. Her memoir Wild Ride Home will be released in February, 2020. She has been appointed to the Speakers Bureau for Humanities Washington for her talk “From Homer to #hashtags: Our Changing Language.” She's received, among other honors, a Harvard University Extension Conway Award for Teaching Writing, a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship for Literature, and an Iowa Review award for literary nonfiction. She currently teaches at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival and lives on Washington's Olympic Peninsula with two horses, two cats, and one husband. www.christinehemp.com

Sonora Jha is the author of the novels The Laughter (2023) and Foreign (2013) and the memoir How To Raise A Feminist Son: A Memoir and Manifesto (2021). The Laughter has earned rave reviews from The New York Times, The New Yorker, India Today, and The Seattle Times and received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Bookpage and others. Author Celeste Ng has described it as "a deliciously sharp, mercilessly perceptive exploration of power." Foreign was a finalist for The Hindu Prize for Fiction and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award. After a career as a journalist covering crime, politics, and culture in India and Singapore, Sonora moved to the United States to earn a Ph.D. in media and public affairs. Sonora’s OpEds, essays, and public appearances have featured in The New York Times, on BBC, and elsewhere. Her work is rooted in liberatory, intersectional, subversive interrogations of power, race, and gender. Sonora is a professor of journalism at Seattle University. She also teaches fiction and essay writing for Hugo House, Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, Creative Nonfiction, and Seattle Public Library.

Julie Gardner, an Amherst Writers & Artists Affiliate and Life Legacies Facilitator, leads writing groups and retreats in Seattle and Bainbridge Island, WA and around the world. Most of her published writing has been in the field of early childhood, family and counselor education. She is working on a memoir. She often writes about love, loss and spirituality in essay and poetry.

Kevin Sampsell is the author of a novel, This Is Between Us (2013, Tin House), the memoir, A Common Pornography (2010, Harper Perennial), and a collection of collage art and poetry, I Made an Accident (Clash Books, 2022). He also edited the anthologies, Portland Noir (Akashic), and The Insomniac Reader (Manic D Press). Sampsell is the publisher of the influential micropress, Future Tense Books, which has been based in Portland, Oregon since 1992. He has worked at Powell’s Books since 1997 as an events coordinator and the head of the small press section. His writing has appeared in Southwest Review, Joyland, Salon, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Portland Review, Diagram, Hobart, Longreads, Wigleaf, and many other publications and anthologies. His collage art practice began in 2016 and his collages have been featured in Kolaj Magazine, Black Candies, The Rumpus, Maggot Brain Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2020, he and Cheryl Chudyk launched sharphandsgallery.com, where they showcase international collage artists.

I've always been a curious person, finding kernels of fascination in the stories of kids who might bully me, awkward first dates, college roommates and co-workers who I seemingly had nothing in common with. I discovered and honed a talent for asking the right questions and making genuine connections. What started out as an introvert's survival tactic has served me well as a freelance journalist for 25-plus years, an author of three novels (two in-progress) for 14 years, and a writing teacher. It's also been a useful skill as a traveler and mom!

My essays and articles have been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, The Rumpus, Psychology Today, Travel & Leisure, The Seattle Times, Spirituality & Health, The Sun, and many other publications. I also write about creating a blueprint for your book and the how to have a satisfying writing life for Writers Digest, the Hugo House blog and other outlets.

My favorite pass-times are traveling solo and finding new stories of people and cultures, fine-tuning Spotify playlists, walking in the woods with my double-doodle, and playing board games with my husband of 25-plus years and two grown sons.

Paulette Perhach’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Elle, Slate, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire. She’s worked for Health and Coastal Living magazines, as well as various

newspapers. Hugo House awarded her the Made at Hugo House fellowship in 2013. She was nominated for the 2016 BlogHer Voices of the Year award for her essay “A Story of a F*ck Off Fund,” which was included in the anthology Freshman Year of Life from Flatiron Books and The Future Is Feminist: Radical, Funny, and Inspiring Writing by Women from Chronicle Books, out in 2019.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Kristen Millares Young is the author of the novel Subduction, named a staff pick by The Paris Review. Called “whip-smart” by The Washington Post and a “brilliant debut” by The Seattle Times, Subduction is a lyric retelling of the troubled history of encounter in the Americas. Shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Subduction won Nautilus and IPPY awards and was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards and Foreword Indies Book of the Year.

Her essays, reviews, stories and investigations appear most recently in the Washington Post, Literary Hub, the Guardian, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, Vol. I Brooklyn, Los Angeles Review, Joyland Magazine, Moss, and Fiction International, as well as the anthologies Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of Covid-19, which won a 2021 Washington State Book Award in general nonfiction, Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity, and Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. She is the editor of Seismic: Seattle, City of Literature, a 2021 Washington State Book Award finalist in creative nonfiction.

Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. Her stories have been recognized by the Society for Features Journalism, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Kristen has been a fellow at UC Berkeley’s Knight Digital Media Center, the Jack Straw Writing Program, and the University of Washington Graduate School, where she was a Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Scholar. She teaches creative writing for the Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, the University of Washington Continuum College, and the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Kristen graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with an A.B. in History and Literature, later earning her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington. From 2016 to 2019, Kristen served as board chair of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit news studio she co-founded in 2009. InvestigateWest’s reporting led to the passage of a dozen new laws to improve the environment and the lives of foster families, people of color caught in the criminal justice system, health care workers and advocates for government transparency. Find her on Instagram and Twitter: @kristenmillares

Catherine Matthews is a PNW author. Through her novels, she tells the stories of strong women finding the courage to face the storm and live their dreams—usually in the company of a faithful hound. Her essay, “Deeper Than Social Connections,” is featured in the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Jennifer Haupt, Ed.), winner of the 2021 Washington State Book Award for general nonfiction. Her blog, Life Through My Lens, examines life through the stories of her youth, and her adventures in parenting, teaching, and leading schools.

Elizabeth Dimarco is a marketing executive and ghost writer who works with companies, non-profit organizations and individuals whose ideas are on the cutting edge of science, finance, technology and publishing. As co-founder of Cymbalic Moments™ (www.cymbalicmoments.com), she helps people mine life’s moments of awe and wonder to discover deeper meaning. She is a voracious reader, occasional poet and PNW enthusiast. In a former life she was the lead singer in a rock band in France.

Elizabeth is working on her second novel.

Logan McRae Blanton is a writer, poet, mindset and health coach, traveler, and mental health advocate based in Seattle, Washington. He is currently prepping the release of his debut novel that explores the human condition and has other writings and musings that can be found on his website, loganblanton.com, previous essay publications, or on his social media platforms.

Martha Anne Toll has a new novel coming out in 2025: DUET FOR ONE.

Martha Anne Toll writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and reads anything that’s not nailed down. Her debut novel, THREE MUSES, was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize and won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Toll brings a long career in social justice to her work covering writers of color and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, Pointe Magazine, The Millions, and elsewhere. She also publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets. Toll has recently joined the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Please visit her at her website, which is the same as her name.