IBTISAM BARAKAT is an award-winning Palestinian-American author of the international memoirs: TASTING THE SKY, a Palestinian Childhood (FSG, 2007), and BALCONY ON THE MOON, Coming of Age in Palestine (FSG/Macmillan 2016). She is also a poet, essayist, translator, public speaker, artist and the author of books in Arabic.

Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, editor, and visual artist. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently: Dwelling (Sheep Meadow, 2016), Bright Body (White Pine, 2011), and Dear God Dear, Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2009).

Julie Barton is the New York Times bestselling author of DOG MEDICINE, HOW MY DOG SAVED ME FROM MYSELF (Penguin, 2016). Julie has been published in Brain Child Magazine, The South Carolina Review, Louisiana Literature, Two Hawks Quarterly, Westview, The Huffington Post, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Ishmael Beah, born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and Radiance of Tomorrow, A Novel both published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. His memoir has been published in over 40 languages and was nominated for a Quill Award in the Best Debut Author category for 2007.

Melanie Benjamin is the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling historical novels THE SWANS OF FIFTH AVENUE, about Truman Capote and his society swans, and THE AVIATOR’S WIFE, a novel about Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Her previous books include the national bestseller ALICE I HAVE BEEN, about Alice Liddell, the real life Alice in Wonderland, and the acclaimed THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MRS. TOM THUMB, the story of 32-inch tall Lavinia Warren Stratton, a star of the Gilded Age.

Zac Brewer is the NYT bestselling author of The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod series, as well as The Slayer Chronicles series, Soulbound, The Cemetery Boys, The Blood Between Us, and more short stories than he can recall.

Molly McCully Brown is the author of The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Image, TriQuarterly Online, Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, Meridian and elsewhere.

Nationally renowned for storytelling performances by literary giants like John Steinbeck and Ray Bradbury, Carol Birch is “refreshingly eloquent; dramatic but never overtly theatrical.” In her sure voice, literature’s appeal becomes appropriately conversational and intimate. A university instructor, an award-winning author, recording artist, director and storyteller, Birch received the Circle of Excellence Award from peers for being a master artist.

Dan and Connie Burkhardt -- advocates for, and true friends of, the Missouri River valley – have written a book for young readers, Growing Up with the River: Nine Generations on the Missouri. Illustrated with original paintings by one of Missouri’s leading artists, Bryan Haynes, the book takes a brief look at each of the nine generations that have grown up in different communities since Lewis and Clark plied the river for their epic Voyage of Discovery.

Willy Conley is a professor of Theatre and Dance at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. Conley is an award-winning playwright whose work has appeared in American Theatre, Theatre for Young Audiences Today, Stages of Transformation and numerous anthologies. He has one novel, The Deaf Heart, and two books of plays, Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays and Broken Spokes.

Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, MFA, LMSW, DMin, co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, an educational non-profit dedicated to transforming the suffering of old age, sickness and dying through study, direct care and meditation. He is a Senior Soto Zen Buddhist Monk, Soto Zen Teacher, poet, ACPE chaplaincy supervisor, and Jungian psychotherapist.

Julia Dahl is a journalist specializing in crime and justice. Her first novel, INVISIBLE CITY, was a finalist for the Edgar Award and was named one of the Boston Globe's Best Books of 2014. She is also the author of RUN YOU DOWN and most recently, CONVICTION, all novels in her Rebekah Roberts series.

Lyndsay Faye is the internationally bestselling author of five novels, the most recent of which is JANE STEELE, a re-imagining of JANE EYRE as a heroic vigilante murderess. Her Timothy Wilde trilogy has been translated into 14 languages and the first installment, THE GODS OF GOTHAM, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel.

Colonel Gregory Fontenot was a member of the editorial board of Military Review from 2006-2013. Publications include articles in Army, Army History, The Infantry Journal and Military Review. Colonel Fontenot has written book reviews for Army, Armor, The Journal of Military History, Military Review, and Parameters.

Alex George is the author of the national and international bestseller A GOOD AMERICAN and most recently of THE PARIS HOURS.

Peter Geye is the author of SAFE FROM THE SEA, which is soon to be a major motion picture, THE LIGHTHOUSE ROAD, which was a World Book Night 2014 selection, and WINTERING.

Jan Spivey Gilchrist is the award-winning illustrator-author of seventy-four children's books. Dr. Gilchrist illustrated the highly acclaimed picture book The Great Migration: Journey to the North, winner of the Coretta Scott King Honor Award, a Junior Library Guild Best Book, an NAACP Image Award nominee, a CCBC Best Book, and a Georgia State Children's Book Award nominee. She was inducted into the Society of Illustrators in 2001 and into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent in 1999.

Rachel Hall is the author Heirlooms, (BkMk Press) which was selected by Marge Piercy for the G.S. Sharat Chandra book prize. Hall’s recent work appears in Natural Bridge, Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Midwestern Gothic, and Lilith, which awarded her the 2015 fiction prize.

Nancy Horan is the author of two New York Times bestselling novels. Loving Frank (2007), which chronicles a little-known chapter in the life of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, won the 2009 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction. Under the Wide and Starry Sky (2014) was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post.

Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.

Brian Katcher is the author of the Stone Wall Award-winning book ALMOST PERFECT, as well as PLAYING WITH MATCHES, THE IMPROBABLE THEORY OF ANA AND ZAK, EVERYONE DIES IN THE END, and DEACON LOCKE WENT TO PROM.

Meg Kearney is author of two books of poems for adults, An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the 2010 PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; as well as three novels in verse for teens: The Secret of Me, The Girl in the Mirror, and When You Never Said Goodbye. Meg’s award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis (Scholastic, 2013).

Lisa Knopp is the author of six collections of essays, each of which explores the concepts of place, home, nature, and spirituality. Her most recent collection, What the River Carries: Encounters with Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte (University of Missouri Press, 2012) was the winner of the 2013 Nebraska Book Award in the Nonfiction/Essay category and received honorable mention in the 2013 ASLE (Association for Study of Literature and Environment) book awards for environmental creative writing.

Caroline Leavitt is the award-winning author of eleven novels, including the New York Times Bestsellers Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow.. Her essays and stories have been included in New York magazine, Psychology Today, More, Parenting, Redbook, and Salon. She’s a book critic for People, The Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle, and she teaches writing online at Stanford and UCLA, as well as working with private clients.

Cleopatra Mathis has published seven collections of poetry. Most recent, from Sarabande Books, are White Sea, awarded the May Sarton Book Prize, and Book of Dog, which won the Sheila Motten Book Prize. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals, including the New Yorker, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and Three Penny Review, as well as numerous anthologies and textbooks.

Laura McHugh is the award-winning author of The Weight of Blood and Arrowood. The Weight of Blood won the International Thriller Writers Award and Silver Falchion Award for Best First Novel, and the 2016 Missouri Author Award for Fiction. It was also nominated for an Alex Award, Barry Award, and GoodReads Choice Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by BookPage, the Kansas City Star, and the Sunday Times UK. McHugh’s second novel, Arrowood, was published in 2016. She lives in Missouri with her husband and children.

http://www.weightofblood.com/

Candice Millard is a former writer and editor for National Geographic magazine. Her most recent book, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill, was released this fall and immediately became a New York Times bestseller, entering the list at number five.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two poetry collections, The End of Pink, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American poets, and Rag & Bone, which won the Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press. A collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past won the Non/Fiction Prize from The Journal and is forthcoming from OSU Press in Fall 2017.

Jill Orr writes a parenting column for COMO Living magazine and her work has appeared in National Horseman, Waterways, and the Columbia Business Times. Jill was a speaker at the 2013 Listen to Your Mother Show in St. Louis, and she posts humor essays on her blog, An Exercise in Narcissism. The Good Byline is her first novel.

Susannah Nevison is the author of Teratology (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. New work can be found in, or is forthcoming from, Crazyhorse, The National Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, and elsewhere.

Sara Paretsky is the New York Times bestselling author of nineteen previous novels, including the renowned V. I. Warshawski series. She is one of only four living writers—along with Sue Grafton, John Le Carré, and Lawrence Block—to receive both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association in Great Britain.

Prahlad has published two books of poems, Hear My Story and Other Poems, and As Good As Mango. He has also published critical articles and books on Black folklore, including Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music, and African American Proverbs in Context, and he has edited the three volume set, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore, and the one volume African American Folklore: An Encyclopedia for Students.

Barney Saltzberg is the author of more than 50 books for children, including Beautiful Oops!, A Little Bit of Oomph!, Arlo Needs Glasses, Good Egg, and the bestselling Touch and Feel Kisses series, with over 800,000 copies in print. In addition to writing and illustrating children’s books, he has recorded two albums for children.

Will Schwalbe has worked in publishing (currently with Macmillan); in new media (as founder of cookstr.com), and as a journalist. His previous book was The End Of Your Life Book Club, was named an Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year, was one of Amazons top four best books of the year, won an Indie Choice Honor Award, and was awarded the Books for A Better Life Award for Best Inspirational Memoir.

Whitney Terrell is the author of The Huntsman, a New York Times notable book, The King of Kings County, and most recently, the nationally-acclaimed The Good Lieutenant. He is the recipient of a James A. Michener-Copernicus Society Award and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. He was an embedded reporter in Iraq during 2006 and 2010 and covered the war for the Washington Post Magazine, Slate, and NPR.

Steve Yates is the winner of the Juniper Prize in Fiction, and he has been granted three Literary Arts fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission — two for his fiction and one for creative nonfiction.His third novel, The Legend of the Albino Farm, is a horror story told inside out from the perspective of the beleaguered family that owned the property Springfield known as the Albino Farm.

DAVID VON DREHLE is an Editor-at-large for Time magazine, where he has written more than 50 cover stories over the past nine years on topics ranging from presidential politics to the Supreme Court to international terrorism. Von Drehle is the author of several books, including the award-winning bestseller “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year.”