WILLIAM ALEXANDER: William Alexander is a National Book Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of fantasy and science fiction for young audiences.
His novels include Goblin Secrets, Ghoulish Song, Ambassador, Nomad, A Properly Unhaunted Place, and the forthcoming A Festival of Ghosts. Additional honors include the Eleanor Cameron Award, the Earphones Award, two Junior Library Guild Selections, an International Latino Book Award finalist, a Mythopoetic Award finalist, two Minnesota Book Award finalists, and two CBC Best Children’s Book of the Year awards.
Will is Cuban-American. He studied theater and folklore at Oberlin College, English at the University of Vermont, and creative writing at Clarion. He teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.
JANE BROX: Jane Brox’s fifth book, Silence, will be published in January 2019. Her most recent book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010 by Time magazine. She is also the author of Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She has received the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in many anthologies including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Maine Arts Commission.She lives in Brunswick, Maine.
JEANNE CAVELOS – Jeanne Cavelos (jeannecavelos.com) began her professional life as a NASA astrophysicist. After earning her MFA, she moved into publishing, becoming a senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, where she edited award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and horror and won the World Fantasy Award. Jeanne left New York to pursue her own writing career and find an in-depth way of working with writers. She is the author of seven books, including the bestselling The Passing of the Techno-Mages trilogy and the nonfiction The Science of Star Wars. Her writing has twice been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. Jeanne serves as director of the Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to helping writers of fantasy, SF, and horror improve their work (odysseyworkshop.org). Odyssey offers a summer workshop in NH, online classes, and numerous free resources. Jeanne has been nominated for a World Fantasy Award for her work at Odyssey.
DEBORAH JOY COREY – Deborah Joy Corey is the sixth of seven children raised in rural Canada by a mother and father who instilled in their children a great love of storytelling. She is the author of two critically acclaimed novels Losing Eddie and The Skating Pond, and her many prize-winning short stories are printed in numerous anthologies and writing textbooks in both the U.S. and Canada.
SANDERIA FAYE – Sanderia Faye serves on the faculty at Southern Methodist University. Her novel, Mourner’s Bench, is the winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in debut fiction, The Philosophical Society of Texas Award of Merit for fiction, and The 2017 Arkansas Library Association, Arkansiana Award. She is co-founder and a fellow at Kimbilio Center for Fiction, and was awarded the 2017 Sewanee Writers’ ConferenceTennessee Williams Scholarship.
She holds an MFA from Arizona State University, a MA from the University of Texas at Dallas, a BS in Accounting from the University of Arkansas. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of North Texas where she was nominated for the University of North Texas Wingspan Presidential Award For Excellence.
INDIRA GANESAN: Indira Ganesan is the author of three novels, The Journey, Inheritance, and As Sweet as Honey. She was born in 1960 in Srirangam, India, and grew up in St. Louis, MO, and Rockland County, NY. She held fellowships from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, The McDowell Colony, The Paden Institute for Writers of Color, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the W. K. Rose Fellowship of Vassar College. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Antaeus, Black Renaissance, and Half and Half: Writers on Biracialism & Biculturalism. She teaches at Emerson College, is working on a new novel, and reviews books for Phi Beta Kappa’s thekeyreporter.org. She hosts a global music program on Cape Cod community radio, WOMR/WFMR, and her website is indiraganesan.com.
DAMARIS B HILL – Dr. DaMaris B. Hill is a writer. Her books include The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the Heartland and \ Vi-zə-bəl \ \ Teks-chərs \ (Visible Textures), a short collection of poems. Her poetry manuscript, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing. Hill is also writing a novel about girls that are incarcerated during the 1930’s. She is represented by Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.
Her work is modeled after the work of Toni Morrison and an expression of her theories regarding ‘rememory’. In addition to working or taking workshops with writers such as Lucille Clifton, Thomas Glave, Sterling Watson, Nikky Finney, Marita Golden, Natasha Trethewey, David Rivard and Monifa Love-Asante, Hill sought to strengthen her writing with a PhD in English. Her development as a writer has also been enhanced by the institutional support of the The MacDowell Colony, Key West Literary Seminar/Writers Workshops, Callaloo Literary Writers Workshop, The Watering Hole Poetry, Eckerd College Writers’ Conference: Writers in Paradise, Project on the History of Black Writing, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Sicily, The Furious Flower Poetry Center, The Urban Bush Women and others.
Similar to her creative process, Dr. Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary and examines the intersections between artistic criticisms, cultural studies, and digital humanities. Dr. Hill serves as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. For more information: https://english.as.uky.edu/users/dbhi222.
HESTER KAPLAN – Hester Kaplan is the author of the novels The Tell and Kinship Theory, and the short story collections Unravished and The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her fiction and non-fiction has been widely published and anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories series. She is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, the McGinnnis-Ritchie Award for Non-Fiction The Salamander Fiction Award, and several RI State Council on the Arts Awards, among other awards and honors.
She has taught creative writing at Rhode Island School of Design, the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, and is on the faculty of Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, where she was also Acting Director.
She is co-founder and co-director of Goat Hill Writers which produces literary events, gives workshops and seminars, provides editorial services, and co-sponsors a statewide high school writing competition.
MICHAEL LOWENTHAL: Michael Lowenthal is the author of four novels: The Same Embrace, Avoidance, Charity Girl (a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and Washington Post “Top Fiction of 2007” pick), and The Paternity Test (an IndieNext List selection and a Lambda Literary Award finalist).The recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Wesleyan writers’ conferences, the MacDowell Colony, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Lowenthal is a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. Before publishing his own work, Lowenthal was an editor at University Press of New England, where he founded the Hardscrabble Books imprint. He can be reached at http://www.michaellowenthal.com/.
JAMES A. MOORE – James A. Moore is the best selling and award winning author of over forty novels, thrillers, dark fantasy and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and his most recent novels, Alien: Sea of Sorrows and The Seven Forges series (Seven Forges, The Blasted lands, City of Wonders, and The Silent Army). In addition to writing multiple short stories, he has also edited, with Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, the British Invasion anthology for Cemetery Dance Publications.
Moore’s first short story collection, Slices, sold out before ever seeing print. His most recent novels include The Last Sacrifice (Book one in the Tides of War series) and the forthcoming Fallen Gods, Along with Golden and Jonathan Maberry, he is co-host of the Three Guys With beards podcast. More information about the author can be found at his website: jamesamoorebooks.com.
BENJAMIN NUGENT – Benjamin Nugent is the author of the story collection Fraternity, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the novel Good Kids (Scribner, 2013) and the cultural history American Nerd (Scribner, 2008). His short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories 2014 and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he directs and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.
PAMELA PETRO: Pamela Petro is an author, artist, and educator. She has written three books of place-based, creative nonfiction for HarperCollins, UK, and her words and images have appeared in The Harvard Review, The NYT, Granta, The Paris Review, and others. She teaches at Smith College and Lesley University and is the Director of the Dylan Thomas Summer School in Creative Writing at the University of Wales. Her BA is from Brown, and her MA from the University of Wales. She has received visual arts and literary residencies from Grand Canyon National Park, The MacDowell Colony, The Black Rock Arts Foundation, and The Spring Creek Project.
ANA E ROSS – New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author, Ana E Ross, was born and raised in the Caribbean where she began indulging in romance novels at a very early age.
Ana holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of New Hampshire and a Master’s of Education from Lesley University, Massachusetts. A former Writing and English Literature teacher, Ana now pens steamy contemporary romances featuring sexy, alpha heroes and strong, beautiful heroines who fight and love with equal passion.
Her published works include three short stories, five books in her bestselling series, Billionaire Brides of Granite Falls, and three books in the spinoff series, Beyond Granite Falls. She is presently working on her Billionaire Island Brides series, featuring—once again—sexy alpha males and strong beautiful women.
Ana lives in the northeast, and loves traveling, tennis, yoga, meditation, everything Italian, and spending valuable time with her daughter.
ELIZABETH RUSH: Elizabeth Rush is the author of Rising: The Unsettling of the American Shore (Milkweed Editions, 2018) and Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar (Global Directions, 2014.) Her work explores how humans adapt to changes enacted upon them by forces seemingly beyond their control, from ecological transformation to political revolution. Her essays have appeared in Harpers, Granta, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Le Monde Diplomatique and others. Rush is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project, the Society for Environmental Journalism, the National Society of Science Writers and the Metcalf Institute. In 2016, she was awarded the Howard Foundation Fellowship by Brown University where she currently teaches courses on writing and reading literary nonfiction.
JANET SYLVESTER: Janet Sylvester’s first books of poetry were That Mulberry Wine (Wesleyan) and The Mark of Flesh (Norton). Her most recent book, After-Hours at the Museum of Tolerance, has been a finalist at Paris Press and for the Wheeler Prize at Ohio State’s The Journal. She is working on a new book tentatively called Color Wheel. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Pushcart Prize XXVIII; Best American Poetry; Triquarterly; Boulevard, Harvard Review; Virginia Quarterly Review; Georgia Review; Poetry Daily; and many others. She is the Associate Director of the Undergraduate Program at Goddard College (VT) and teaches online writing classes at Harvard Extension.
SINAN ÜNEL: Sinan Ünel’s plays have been produced at: The Huntington Theatre Company, The Long Wharf Theater, The Arcola Theatre (London), Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, The Lark Theatre Company (New York), The Gate Theatre (London), Provincetown Theatre Company, Provincetown Theatreworks, Landes-theater and Theater Helbronn (Germany), Theater Kosmos (Austria), Theatre at Boston Court (Pasadena, CA). Sinan has been awarded The John Gassner Memorial Award, The Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, and was a fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company from 2003 to 2005. His script Race Point was the winner of the 2001 New Century Writer Award for best screenplay. Sinan teaches at Lesley University and divides his time between Eastham, MA and NYC.
