Adrienne began her career on the Broadway stage, first playing Tevye’s second daughter, Hodel, in Fiddler on the Roof, and then winning a Theatre World Award and Tony nomination for her creation of Betty Rizzo in the original Broadway production of Grease. The hit series Maude provided her move to television, as Bea Arthur’s daughter, Carol. Since then, she has made more than 450 film and television appearances. She spent nine months portraying Suzanne Stanwyck on General Hospital and was often seen as Oswald’s mom on The Drew Carey Show. Currently, she is portraying Victoria Grayson’s (Madeline Stowe) mother on ABC’s hit series Revenge. Movie fans know her best for her performances in The Fog, Escape From New York, Creepshow, Swamp Thing, Back to School, and Cannonball Run. Her recent films include Reach for Me, with Seymour Cassell and Alfre Woodard, and the award winning “zombie film” Alice Jacobs is Dead. She can currently be seen in the Academy Award Best Picture film Argo. Off-camera, she is the author of a best-selling memoir and witty romantic thrillers Vampyres of Hollywood and Love Bites.
After winning the Greater London Essay Competition in her teens, Carrie has spent a lifetime writing for pleasure and business. Over the last thirty years, she has published articles in technology and business journals, served as editor for a magazine publisher, and more recently co-owned and managed a Silicon Valley public relations firm. She has an Honors degree in English Language and Literature from Manchester University in England. Carrie grew up in London and has lived in Switzerland, France, Spain and Italy. An enthusiastic traveler, she draws on her experiences in her writing. She wrote her debut novel, Nobilissima, while living in Italy, where she researched the life and times of the Empress Placidia. The Aura is set in London and Florence. She now lives in California with her husband, their two daughters, two yellow labs and a calico cat who assists in edit cycles by taking random walks on the keyboard.
Anneke Campbell was born and raised in The Netherlands and immigrated to America when she was 17. She has had a number of careers: midwife, practical nurse, masseuse, yoga teacher, college teacher of English literature and of writing. She is a scriptwriter, and a journalist and an award-winning poet. Her first novel, Mary of Bellingham, was published in 2004. She was the writer/producer of the ten-part series, ACLU Freedom Files for LINK and Court TV in 2005. Her manual for activists with Thomas Linzey, “Be The Change: How To Get What You Want in Your Community,” was published in 2009. She edited an anthology on women’s leadership, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading From The Heart, which will be published in October of 2010. She lives with her companion, director Jeremy Kagan, in Venice, California.
Dick Cluster is the author of the novels Return to Sender, Repulse Monkey, and Obligations of the Bone. He has written both crime novels and history books, as well as popular economics (another mystery, for sure). Some of these have been translated into Japanese, Danish, Hungarian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Bulgarian. He landed in Havana’s José Martí airport for the first time in 1969 and has been fascinated by that city ever since, exploring it by foot, bicycle, bus, car and other means. He is co-author of The History of Havanaand a translator of Cuban literature. Previous nonfiction books include They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee, about U.S. radical movements of the ’60s and ’70s, and Shrinking Dollars, Vanishing Jobs, about the U.S. economy. He taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he was Associate Director of the University Honors Program. He now lives in Oakland, California and is hoping to set a new book in his new home.
Tony Dunbar is a lawyer and the author of the Tubby Dubonnet mystery series set in New Orleans. The seventh episode, Tubby Meets Katrina, was the first novel set in the city to be published after the storm. He is the winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, and his mysteries have been nominated for the Anthony and the Edgar Allen Poe “Edgar” Awards. He has also written non-fiction books about the South and civil rights and has lived for more than thirty years in this beautiful and complicated city.
Patty Friedmann is the author of several darkly comic literary novels set in New Orleans: The Exact Image of Mother, Eleanor Rushing, Odds, Secondhand Smoke, Side Effects, A Little Bit Ruined, Taken Away, and No Takebacks, as well as the humor book Too Smart to Be Rich. Her novels have been chosen as Discover Great New Writers, Original Voices, and Book Sense 76 selections, and her humor book was syndicated by the New York Times. She has published reviews, essays, and short stories in Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Oxford American, Speakeasy, Horn Gallery, Short Story, LA LIT, Brightleaf, New Orleans Review, and The Times-Picayune and in anthologies The Great New American Writers Cookbook, Above Ground, Christmas Stories from Louisiana, My New Orleans, New Orleans Noir, and Life in the Wake. Her stage pieces have been part of Native Tongues. Recently Oxford American listed Secondhand Smoke with 29 titles that included Gone With the Wind, Deliverance, and A Lesson Before Dying as the greatest Underrated Southern Books. With slight interruptions for education and natural disasters, she always has lived in New Orleans.
M. A. Harper, a farmer’s daughter, was born in South Carolina. She was supposed to become a commercial artist but switched to fiction upon her discovery in New York City that a picture is NOT always worth 1,000 words. Her novels have appeared on the BookSense 76 list and have been featured in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. She lives in New Orleans.
Henry Massie is a psychiatrist, award-winning author, and pioneering researcher in the field of autism. His most recent book is Felice’s Worlds-From the Holocaust to the Halls of Modern Art. It is the biography of a brilliant and beautiful woman who participated in many of the most critical periods of the 20th Century, times which shaped our modern world. Henry Massie lives with his wife, the author Bridget Connelly, in Berkeley, California. His daughter and granddaughter, Felice, live nearby. He practices psychiatry in Berkeley and has been a professor of psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco.
Shelley Singer has had 13 novels, including a Shamus Award nominee, and several short stories published. Most are mysteries, including the six books in the Jake Samson series. Her most recent novel is Blackjack, a near-future thriller, written as Lee Singer. She teaches writing online and does manuscript consulting. She has served as a judge in a number of fiction writing contests, including the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction writing competition. She lives in Petaluma, CA with two dogs and the love of her life.
Julie Smith is a New Orleans writer and former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Times-Picayune. New Orleans Mourning, her first novel featuring New Orleans cop Skip Langdon, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, and she has since published eight more highly acclaimed books in the series, plus spun off a second New Orleans series featuring PI and poet Talba Wallis. She is also the author of the Rebecca Schwartz series and the Paul McDonald series, plus the YA novels CURSEBUSTERS! and Exposed. In addition to her novels, she’s written numerous essays and short stories and is the editor of New Orleans Noir, an anthology of dark stories, each set in a different New Orleans neighborhood.
Rob Swigart is the author of one nonfiction book, four electronic fiction titles, and 11 novels, including Little America, declared as “Wildly funny…” by the LA Times, and hailed as a “Bold and brassy…breathless romp with prose that crackles like a live wire, bites like a rabid dog, [and] smoothes like 30-year-old Scotch,” by the San Francisco Review of Books. His classic and highly revered interactive novel Portal has attained near cult status as the first ever narrative “game” produced by Activision, published two years later as a hard copy novel by St. Martin’s Press, and heralded as “spooky, audacious, breakthrough science fiction” by Timothy Leary. Now a former visiting scholar at the Stanford University Archeology Center, Swigart’s most recent books include The Delphi Agenda, as well as two teaching novels, Xibalbá Gate, a novel of the Ancient Maya, published by AltaMira, and Stone Mirror, a novel of the Neolithic, by Left Coast Press. These works weave near-future science fiction with famous and obscure archeological events, melding true fact and fiction as a conscious product of Swigart’s lifelong passion for using narrative to tell stories of the past as found in material records. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about the Neolithic.
Michaela Thompson is the author of seven mystery novels, all of them originally published under the name Mickey Friedman. She grew up on the Gulf Coast in the Northwest Florida Panhandle, the locale described in Hurricane Season, and still spends a significant amount of time there. She has worked as a newspaper reporter and a freelance journalist, and has contributed mystery short stories to a number of anthologies. She and her husband, Alan Friedman, live in New York City.
Tracy Whiting is also known as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, the award-winning Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University. Tracy received her Ph.D. in French Studies at Brown University in Providence, RI. She has been a commentator on NPR, MSNBC, and CNN. Her work has been reviewed in the Washington Post, the Nashville Scene, and Ms. Magazine. Tracy’s favorite places to write are Paris, France and Newport, Rhode Island. Otherwise, she resides in Nashville, Tennessee with her daughter and husband. Photo Credit: Haviland Whiting
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