.png)
2017 Authors
Ellen Airgood grew up on a small farm, and for the past nineteen years she and her husband have run a diner together in a small town in Michigan. Her adult novel, South of Superior, was published to much acclaim.Prairie Evers is her first children s book. She lives in Grand Marais, Michigan.
Morgane Chang works on Content Strategy and Marketing at BARK, spearheading creative initiatives for new product lines. She is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Dogs and Their People, and delights in painting dog portraits in her free time. She is also the reigning champion of handstand competitions in the office.
Dave Coverly is an internationally syndicated cartoonist whose Speed Bump cartoons appear in more than four-hundred newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Detroit Free Press, and Parade. He is the illustrator of Sue MacDonald Had a Book and The Very Inappropriate Word. The winner of the prestigious Reuben Award for Best Cartoonist, Dave lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
David Bell is a bestselling and award-winning author whose work has been translated into six languages. He's currently an associate professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He received an MA in creative writing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a PhD in American literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. His novels include Bring Her Home, Since She Went Away,Somebody I Used to Know, The Forgotten Girl, Never Come Back, The Hiding Place, and Cemetery Girl.
Erica M. Chapman writes dark, emotional YA novels with a burst of humor, and lighter contemporaries with smart-ass protagonists. Her first novel, TEACH ME TO FORGET will be published by Simon Pulse. She’s a member of SCBWI & Sweet16s, and a lifetime Lions and Michigan football fan who loves alternative music.
James R. Benn is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries. The debut, Billy Boyle, was named one of five top mysteries of 2006 by Book Sense and was a Dilys Award nominee. A Blind Goddess was long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The Rest Is Silence was a Barry Award nominee. Benn, a former librarian, splits his time between the Gulf Coast of Florida and Connecticut with his wife Deborah Mandel.
Desiree Cooper, a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, and Detroit community activist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010, and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets, and she is a Kimbilio fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers.
Peter Ho Davies is on the faculty of the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Michigan. His debut collection, The Ugliest House in the World, won the John Llewellyn Rhys and PEN/Macmillan awards in Britain. His second collection, Equal Love, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review for its -stories as deep and clear as myth.- It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a New York Times Notable Book. In 2003 Davies was named among the -Best of Young British Novelists- by Granta. The Welsh Girl was his first novel, his second, The Fortunes, was published in September 2016. The son of a Welsh father and Chinese mother, Davies was raised in England and spent his summers in Wales.
Karen Dionne is the author of The Marsh King's Daughter, a dark psychological suspense set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula which the New York Times calls "subtle, brilliant and mature . . . as good as a thriller can be." Translation rights have sold in 23 countries, and the novel has also been optioned for film. Karen is co-founder of the online writers community Backspace, the organizer of the Salt Cay Writers Retreat, and a member of the International Thriller Writers, where she served on the board of directors. She has been honored by the Michigan Humanities Council as a Humanities Scholar, and lives with her husband in Detroit's northern suburbs.
Loren D. Estleman is author of more than seventy novels, including twenty-two featuring Amos Walker. Winner of four Shamus Awards, five Spur Awards and three Western Heritage Awards, he lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.
Robert Fanning is the author of five poetry collections, including three full-length collections: Our Sudden Museum (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), American Prophet (Marick Press), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press), as well as two chapbooks: Sheet Music (Three Bee Press), and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry Award). A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. He is also the founder and facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series in Mt. Pleasant, MI., where he lives with his wife, sculptor Denise Whitebread Fanning, and their two children.
Patrick Flores-Scott was, until recently, a long-time public school teacher in Seattle, Washington. He’s now a stay-at-home dad and early morning writer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Patrick’s first novel, Jumped In, has been named to the 2014 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults list, a Walden Award finalist, a Washington Book Award winner, an NCSS/CBC Notable Book for the Social Studies, and a Bank Street College Best Books of 2014. He is currently working on his second book, American Road Trip.
Stacie Grissom is the head of content at BARK, the company building a next-generation brand for dogs and dog people. Stacie leads the team behind the BARK’s interactive, humor-driven content strategy and is a co-author of the New York Times bestseller, Dogs and Their People. She lives in NYC with her rescue mutt, Pimm.
Elizabeth Heiter, critically acclaimed and award-winning author likes her suspense to feature strong heroines, chilling villains, psychological twists and a little bit of romance. Her research has taken her into the minds of serial killers, through murder investigations, and onto the FBI Academy's shooting range. Her novels have been published in more than a dozen countries and translated into eight languages. Visit her at www.elizabethheiter.com
An Anishinabe poet and novelist, Gordon Henry, Jr. is an enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota.
His poetry has been published in anthologies and his novel, The Light People (1994), was awarded The American Book Award in 1995. He has also co-authored the textbook, The Ojibway (2004), to which he contributed a number of essays on Native American culture.
Currently, Henry teaches courses in American literature, creative writing, and American Indian literature.
Nancy Herriman, the author of No Comfort for the Lost, the first Mystery of Old San Francisco, received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Cincinnati, where she also took courses in history and archeology. She's a past winner of the RWA's Daphne du Maurier Award, and when she isn't writing, she enjoys performing with various choral groups. She lives in central Ohio with her husband and their two teenaged sons.
Anna Lee Huber is the Daphne award-winning author of the national bestselling Lady Darby Mysteries, as well as the forthcoming Verity Kent Mysteries and the anthology The Jacobite's Watch. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she majored in music and minored in psychology. She currently resides in Indiana with her family and is hard at work on her next novel. Visit her online at www.annaleehuber.com.
Laurel Davis Huber grew up in Rhode Island and Oklahoma. She is a graduate of Smith College. She has worked as a corporate newsletter editor, communications director for a botanical garden, high school English teacher, and senior development officer for both New Canaan Country School and Amherst College. She has studied with the novelist and short-story writer Leslie Pietrzyk (the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner for This Angel on My Chest) and has participated in several writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center. She and her husband split their time between New Jersey and Maine.
D.E. (Dan) Johnson's literary debut, a historical mystery entitled The Detroit Electric Scheme, was published by St. Martin 's Minotaur in September 2010. The sequel, Motor City Shakedown, was published by Minotaur in September 2011. These were followed by Detroit Breakdown and Detroit Shuffle. Dan is a history buff who has been writing fiction since childhood, but had to hit his midlife crisis to realize he should get serious about it. After spending his childhood in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Dan graduated from Central Michigan University and owned a business in Grand Rapids, Michigan for many years. He is married, has three daughters, and once again lives near Kalamazoo. He’s currently working on a new series.
Stephen Mack Jones is a published poet, an award-winning playwright, and a recipient of the prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellowship. He was born in Lansing, Michigan, and currently lives in Farmington Hills, outside of Detroit. He worked in advertising and marketing communications for a number of years before turning to fiction. August Snow is his first novel.
Zilka Joseph teaches creative writing and is an independent editor and manuscript coach. Her chapbooks, Lands I Live In and What Dread, were nominated for a PEN America and a Pushcart award, respectively. She was awarded a Zell Fellowship, a Hopwood Prize, and the Elsie Choi Lee Scholarship (Center for the Education of Women) from the University of Michigan.
Theresa Kaminski is the author of Angels of the Underground: The American Women Who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II, which was a January 2016 Midwest Connections Pick of the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. She earned a PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She regularly teaches courses on American women's history, including a class on women and war.
Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. His books include Quarantine!, When Germs Travel, and An Anatomy of Addiction. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Journal of the American Medical Association, and The New England Journal of Medicine, and he is a monthly contributor to PBS NewsHour. Markel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Kristin Bartley Lenz is a writer and social worker from metro-Detroit who fell in love with the mountains when she moved to Georgia and California. Now she’s back in Detroit where she plots wilderness escapes and manages the Michigan Chapter blog for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). Her debut young adult novel, The Art of Holding On and Letting Go, was published in September 2016 and was a Junior Library Guild Fall Selection.
Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist whose work has appeared in publications such as The North American Review, The Missouri Review, and The Messenger. Her plays have been performed at American University, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.
M. L. Liebler is an award-winning poet, literary arts activist, and professor. He is the author of several books of poetry, including I Want to Be Once (Wayne State University Press, 2016), and an editor of the anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams (Coffee House Press, 2010). He is also co-editor of Bob Seger's House: An Anthology of Michigan Fiction (Wayne State University Press, 2016). He has taught at Wayne State University since 1980.
Molly McCaffrey is the author of You Belong to Us (memoir) and How to Survive Graduate School & Other Disasters (stories) as well as the co-editor of Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There and the founder of I Will Not Diet, a blog devoted to healthy living and body acceptance.
Heather Smith Meloche has had the honor of winning the Katherine Paterson Prize and the Writer s Digest national competition for her children s and young adult writing. She studied video production and poetry at Michigan State University, and then earned her master s in teaching English as a second language at Bowling Green State University. She spends her days with her family in her home in Michigan, sampling a wide variety of chocolate, letting her dogs in and out constantly, and writing and reading as much as she can. Ripple is her debut novel.
Barbara Mhangami –Ruwende is a scholar practitioner in public health with a focus on minority women’s sexual and reproductive health and founder/ director of the Africa Research Foundation for the Safety of Women. She is originally from Zimbabwe. She holds degrees from University of Glasgow, Scotland, Walden University and attended the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her poetry has been published in the anthology Muse for Women, 2013 and African Drum by Diaspora Publishers, 2013. She was a 2014 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence and Caine Prize for African Writing workshop attendee. She is a mentor with the Writivism program at the center for African excellence (CACE) Foundation and a member of Rotary International.
Cindy Hunter Morgan teaches creative writing and book arts at Michigan State University. She is also the author of two chapbooks: The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker, which won The Ledge Press 2011 Poetry Chapbook Competition, and Apple Season, which won the Midwest Writing Center's 2012 Chapbook Contest, judged by Shane McCrae.
Drew Philp's work has been published both nationally and internationally and has appeared in publications, including BuzzFeed, The Detroit Free Press, Metrotimes, Corp! Magazine, the Bakersfield Californian, and the Michigan Daily. He lives in Detroit with his dog, Gratiot.
Deanna Raybourn is the author of the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Lady Julia Grey series, which has been optioned for television, and several standalone novels. She lives in Virginia with her husband and daughter.
Ted Sanders is the author of the short-story collection No Animals We Could Name, winner of the 2011 Bakeless Prize for fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in publications such as the Georgia Review, the Gettysburg Review, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. A recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, he lives with his family in Urbana, Illinois, and teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Box and the Dragonfly was his first book for younger readers. You can visit him online at www.tedsanders.net.
Tom Stanton is the author of several nonfiction books, among them the critically acclaimed memoir The Final Season and the Quill Award finalist Ty and The Babe. A longtime journalist, he teaches at the University of Detroit Mercy. Stanton co-founded and edited the suburban Detroit Voice newspapers, winning state and national press awards, including a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. He and wife Beth Bagley-Stanton live in New Baltimore, Michigan.
Keith Taylor teaches at the University of Michigan. He has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
Pamela D. Toler is a writer with a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and a fascination with historical figures who step outside the constraints of their time. She is the author of Mankind: The Story of All of Us and The Everything Guide to Socialism. She lives in Chicago.
Z.G. Tomaszewski, born in 1989, lives in Grand Rapids where he aspires to fish the river every morning and play bossa nova in a lounge by night. For now, Tomaszewski works maintenance at an old Masonic Temple and is a founding member and events coordinator of Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters and co-director of Lamp Light Music Festival. His debut book All Things Dusk was the winner of the International Poetry Prize of 2014.
Douglas Trevor is the author of the novel Girls I Know and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, winner of the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award for First Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, New England Review. He lives in Ann Arbor, where he is the director of the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writer's Program.
Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
Stephen Ward is a historian who also teaches at the University of Michigan's Residential College and is associate professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University. Stephen also serves as the academic advisor and coordinator of the RC’s Urban and Community Studies minor (UCS), which aims to facilitate students’ active engagement with local communities while fostering the integration of their practical experience with classroom instruction.
Darcy Woods has held an eclectic mix of professions--from refueling helicopters for the US Army to recharging bodies and spirits at a spa--but her most beloved career is being an author. She is a happily-ever-after addict and finds all things metaphysical endlessly fascinating. She lives in Michigan with her husband and cat. The Golden Heart(R) award-winning Summer of Supernovas is her first novel. You can follow Darcy on Twitter at @woodswrite.
Michael Zadoorian was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He is the author of two novels, The Leisure Seeker and Second Hand. His story collection, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit features new work as well as short fiction. He lives with his wife in Ferndale, MI and drives a moderately-priced crossover vehicle.