Fall Conference 2004

Faculty Biographies

Miriam Altshuler began her career as a literary agent at Russell & Volkening Literary Agency, where she worked for 12 years with such writers as Anne Tyler, Eudora Welty, Joseph Campbell, Nadine Gordimer, and Bernard Malamud. She established her own agency in 1994 and focuses on literary commercial fiction and nonfiction, but most important to her are the quality of the writing and how the subject is approached. She represents a number of award winning and best selling authors. Her fiction writers include Robb Forman Dew, Barbara Esstman, Alice Lichtenstein, Walter Dean Myers, and Joanna Catherine Scott. In nonfiction, she is interested in general nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, memoirs, psychology, travel, nature and biography. The nonfiction authors she represents include Andrew Carroll, Itabari Njeri, Michael Reynolds, Barry Sanders, Janna Malamud Smith, and Allen Mikaelian.

Darnell Arnoult has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals including Nantahala Review, Southern Cultures, Southern Exposure, Asheville Poetry Review, Sandhills Review, Sow's Ear, and Now and Then Magazine. Arnoult has over twelve years of experience teaching and coaching creative writing and creative practice. She is a long-standing member of the Duke Writers Workshop faculty and teaches writing workshops around the country. She holds a BA in American Studies from UNC-CH and an MA in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. Her first full-length collection of poems, What Travels with Us, is forthcoming from LSU Press, and she has just completed her first novel. She lives in Brush Creek, Tennessee.

Ramin Bahrani graduated from Columbia University with a degree in film theory. He has made several 16mm short films, which screened at international film festivals as well as on PBS. His first 35mm feature film, "Strangers" (2000), was exhibited around the globe, as well as theatrically in the United States and on PBS. Bahrani has served as a juror in film festivals, lectured at the University level, and received numerous grants and residencies for his screenplays and films. He is an adjunct screenwriting instructor at the P.I.T (People's Improv Theater of New York) and occasionally teaches an acting class at One on One in NYC. Currently he is preparing for his second feature film, "Man Push Cart," which is being shot in the autumn of 2004.

Pam Bernard, a poet and painter from Boston, MA, holds her BA from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Ms. Bernard is an adjunct professor at Emerson College where she teaches creative writing and literature on the graduate and undergraduate levels. Her most recent awards are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry, 2002 (and 1999), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, and a MacDowell Fellowship. Her second collection of poems, entitled Across the Dark, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa and published by Main Street Rag Press in February 2003.

Virginia Boyd worked as a writer for the Duke University News Service for many years before earning a master's degree in creative writing from NC State University. She has taught English -- literature, composition, and creative writing -- at the high school level and currently leads creative nonfiction workshops for the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement, a division of Duke Continuing Education. She is at work on a novel titled Gone to Graceland that was excerpted in the "Sunday Reader" section of Raleigh's News & Observer.

Peter Bowerman is an Atlanta-based freelance commercial writer, columnist and self-publishing author of the award-winning Book-of-the-Month Club selection, The Well-Fed Writer (2000) and its companion volume, The Well-Fed Writer: Back For Seconds (2004), how-to "standards" on starting a lucrative commercial freelancing business -- writing for corporations and creative agencies and for rates of $50-125+ an hour. In 1993, with NO industry experience, NO previous paid writing experience and NO writing background, he built a freelance writing business from fantasy to full-time in less than four months. His commercial client list has included The Coca-Cola Company, BellSouth, IBM, UPS, American Express, Mercedes-Benz, The Discovery Channel, Junior Achievement and many others. He has published over 250 columns and articles and leads seminars on writing. Visit www.wellfedwriter.com (book site) and www.writeinc.biz (commercial writing site).

Amy Cherry has spent her entire career at the independent, employee-owned publisher W. W. Norton (1984-present). A Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she first bought paperback reprint rights, including reissuing classic works by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Rhys while also buying frontlist rights for such works as Barry Unsworth's Booker Prize-winning Sacred Hunger. She expanded into hardcover and paperback original acquisitions, primarily of nonfiction works in history, women's issues, narrative nonfiction, and African American studies. She currently heads up Norton's paperback division, as well. Recent nonfiction publications include Laura Schenone's A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, winner of the James Beard Award, and Suzanne Lebsock's A Murder in Virginia, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize for History. Her fiction acquisitions include Helen Humphreys' The Lost Garden, Irvine (Trainspotting) Welsh's Porno, and Christine Balint's Ophelia's Fan.

Born and raised in the hills of the Virginia Blue Ridge, Michael Chitwood is now a free-lance writer and a visiting lecturer at UNC-CH. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry, Ohio Review, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, and numerous others. Ohio Review Books has published two books of his poetry-- Salt Works and Whet. His third book, The Weave Room, was published by The University of Chicago Press in the Phoenix Poets series. His collection of essays, Hitting Below the Bible Belt, was published by Down Home Press in 1998. His most recent collection of poems, Gospel Road Going, was awarded the 2003 Roanoke-Chowan Prize for Poetry. A new book of poems, From Whence, is slated for publication by Louisiana State University Press. Mike is a regular commentator for radio stations WUNC-FM in Chapel Hill, NC, and WVTF-FM in Roanoke, VA.

Elizabeth Cox attended the graduate writing program at UNC-Greensboro. Her first story, "Land of Goshen," was published in fiction international, and was cited for excellence by Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Press. Since that time she has published stories in Antaeus, Story Magazine, American Short Fiction, The Crescent Review, and The Rough Road Home: Stories by NC Writers. Her work has been widely anthologized in fiction and essay collections. Ms. Cox has completed three novels: Familiar Ground, The Ragged Way People Fall Out Of Love, and Night Talk, which won the Lillian Smith Award. Her collection of short stories is Bargains in the Real World. Cox taught creative writing at Duke University for seventeen years and in graduate writing programs at the University of Michigan, Tufts University, Boston University, and in the undergraduate program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Last year she taught at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, and was chosen as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in Residence at UMass-Lowell. She is also core faculty in the Low Residency Graduate Writers Program at Bennington College.

Senior editor C. Michael Curtis edits virtually all Atlantic fiction, the Letters to the Editor, and other pieces. He also screens book-length first serial submissions and most unsolicited stories, which number some 12,000 manuscripts annually. Under his direction The Atlantic Monthly's fiction is nominated for a National Magazine Award virtually every year; in 1988 The Atlantic won this prestigious prize. Year after year short stories from the magazine are chosen for inclusion in the important annual prize collections. Curtis himself was the editor of American Stories: Fiction From The Atlantic Monthly and several other. The collections God: Stories, and Faith Stories were published by Houghton Mifflin. His own essays, articles, reviews, and poems have been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, National Review, and Sport, among other periodicals. Curtis is also renowned for his teaching: he has taught creative writing, ethics, grammar, and other subjects for more than thirty years at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington, and elsewhere. Curtis earned a B.A. in English from Cornell. He lives in Littleton, Massachusetts, with his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Cox.

Quinn Dalton's first novel, High Strung, was released by Simon & Schuster's Atria Books, with a collection of short stories, Bulletproof Girl, to follow in spring 2005. Her stories have appeared in many literary journals including Glimmer Train, Indiana Review, and The Kenyon Review, and in several anthologies. She is the winner of the Pearl 2002 Fiction Prize for her short story, "Back on Earth" and a recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council 2002-2003 artist fellowship. Currently she teaches fiction writing one-on-one and through the North Carolina Writers' Network. She received a BA in English at Kent State University, and completed an MFA in creative writing at UNC-Greensboro. She lives with her husband and daughter in Greensboro, NC.

Joan Darling, Emmy award and Directors Guild of America award winning director and actress, is currently teaching at the University of North Carolina. She was the "first woman director" in Hollywood and directed the "Chuckles" episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show which was named the number one TV episode of all time by TV Guide. Prior to directing she was an Emmy nominated actress and starred at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival and starred as Viola in Twelfth Night at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford Connecticut.

Sarah Dessen grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attended UNC-CH. Her first book, That Summer, was published in 1996. She has written four other novels, including Someone Like You and This Lullaby, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A motion picture based on her first two books, entitled How to Deal, was released in July 2003. Her latest novel, The Truth About Forever, was published in the summer of 2004. Dessen teaches in the UNC-CH Creative Writing Department.

Abigail DeWitt is the award-winning author of Lili and numerous short stories, which have been published in The Carolina Quarterly, Salamander, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is at work on her second novel, Dogs, for which she has received both an NC Arts Council Regional Artists Project Grant and a Tyrone Guthrie Fellowship from the McColl Center for the Arts and the NC Arts Council. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Harvard University, she has taught fiction at the Duke Writers' Workshop, Harvard Summer School, Appalachian State University, and UNC-Asheville.

Frances O'Roark Dowell is the author of four children's novels, Dovey Coe, winner of a 2001 Edgar Award, Where I'd Like to Be, The Secret Language of Girls, and the forthcoming Chicken Boy, all from Atheneum Books for Younger Readers/Simon & Schuster. She lives in Durham, NC, with her husband and two young sons.

Pamela Duncan was on the faculty of the 2003 Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2002 Sewanee Writers' Conference. She has workshopped with authors such as Lee Smith, Doris Betts, Angela Davis-Gardner, John Kessel, William Henderson, Daphne Athas, and Bland Simpson. Her first novel, Moon Women, was a finalist for the Southeast Booksellers Association 2001 Book Award, and her second novel, Plant Life, was published in 2003. She has recently signed a two-book contract. Pamela has taught several writing workshops at the Network and for other organizations.

Paul Ferguson (Writer, Adapter, Director) Paul has adapted and staged the works of twenty-four prominent Southern writers, often combining their texts with the works of Southern songwriters (some famous, some just-not-famous-yet). He has directed professionally all over the Southeast, in Los Angeles, and in New York City, and he worked as script and performance consultant for the national tour and Broadway productions of "Sexaholix," John Leguizamo's one-person show and for Fighting Words, an independent film shot in Los Angeles. Paul is currently collaborating on the adaptation of Lee Smith's novella, "The Christmas Letters," into a full-length musical with songwriters Karren Pell, Tommy Goldsmith, and Tom House. He also directed last fall's tour of Good Ol' Girls (a narrative musical revue which he adapted from the works of Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle and songwriters Matraca Berg and Marshall Chapman) for North Carolina Theatre. Paul is Artistic Director of Ride Again Productions, a professional theatre company he formed with his wife, actress/producer Andrea Powell Ferguson, and which premiered his adaptation of Killer Diller last fall in Chapel Hill. Paul is a member of the Dramatists Guild and an Associate Professor of Performance Studies at UNC-CH, where he teaches directing, adaptation, and performance.

Judy Goldman is the author of the just-published novel Early Leaving. Her first novel, The Slow Way Back, was a finalist for the Southeast Booksellers Associations' Novel of the Year and won both the Sir Walter Raleigh Fiction Award and the Mary Ruffin Poole First Work of Fiction Award. She is also the author of two books of poetry. A long-time teacher, Judy received the Fortner Writer and Community Award for "outstanding generosity to other writers and the larger community." Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Ohio Review, Kenyon Review, and other publications.

Stephanie Greene is the author of a dozen early readers, chapter books, and middle grade novels. The sixth book in her popular Owen Foote series will be published in the fall of 2004. Using what she has learned about voice to write this series, The Horn Book said, "Greene ... has one of the surest senses in the business of the inner working of nine-year-old boys..." Her books have won the School Library Journal Best Book of the Year award, as well as Bank Street College Best Children's Books of the Year, and been a Children's Choice nominee in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Iowa. Her new book, Queen Sophie Hartley, will be published in the spring of 2005.

Marvin Hunt has been writing travel stories for nearly twenty years. His work has appeared widely in magazines and newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He is currently finishing a book on his travels in The Bahamas. A specialist in the English Renaissance, he teaches English at North Carolina State University.

Bridgette Lacy is an award-winning feature writer for The News and Observer in Raleigh, NC. She's also working on a healing memoir about her medical and spiritual journey after being diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. She has written grants for many organizations and has netted personal fellowships from La Napoule, the Vermont Studio Center, and the United Arts Council of Raleigh. She is currently completing a memoir.

Ann Loomis is President of the C.G. Jung Society of the Triangle and a qualified Myers-Briggs facilitator. She teaches writing classes throughout the Triangle and is author of Write from the Start: Discover your Writing Potential through the Power of Psychological Type. Visit her Web site at www.writestyles.com.

Lucinda H. MacKethan, alumni distinguished professor of English at North Carolina State University, teaches courses in American literature, African-American literature, and Southern writers and serves as coordinator of the teacher-certification program in English. A director of several National Endowment for the Humanities summer institutes for high school and college teachers, she has also worked with the National Humanities Center to implement in-service enrichment programs for high school faculty. Her publications include Daughters of Time: Creating Woman's Voice in Southern Story and The Dream of Arcady:Place and Time in Southern Literature, with James A. Miller. She has published articles on Flannery O'Connor, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and gender in plantation fiction. She gives talks throughout the state on race and gender in American literature.

Sebastian Matthews grew up the son of writers and moved back and forth across the country, coast to coast and many points between. From this experience comes an interest in when are we at home? Out of what do we make art? He and his wife moved to Asheville, NC five years ago, where he teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Michigan. A memoir, In My Father's Footsteps, is just out and Search Party: Collected Poems of William co-edited, with Stanley Plumly, is published by Houghton Mifflin.

John May has combined a business career with a lifelong love of books and writing. He received his MFA degree from Bennington College and is a past chairman of the board of directors of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro Friends of the Library. He is managing partner of Bonaventure Co., a manufacturer of children's wear. He lives with his wife in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Sally McMillan is a literary agent in Charlotte, North Carolina, specializing in Southern authors. She has been in the publishing business for 30 years, having owned and sold a publishing company (East Woods Press-sold in 1987 to Globe Pequot Press), and formed her agency in 1990. She works with all major publishers as well as specialty houses. Hers is a boutique agency, and she uses co-agents for film rights and foreign translations. Her fiction authors include Lynne Hinton, Linda Lenhoff, Joe Martin, Nancy Peacock, and Mike Stewart. Nonfiction authors include Lois Trigg Chaplin, Andrea Engber, Ray Jones, Dr. Sally Kneidel, and Dr. Bryan Robinson. Special interests: Nonfiction: Americana, health, home and garden, history, how-to, nature, psychology, Southern themes, memoir. Fiction: Southern, women's mainstream, mystery/suspense, literary, historical.

Folklorist and writer Kirsten Mullen, the former literature director for the North Carolina Arts Council, is the project coordinator for Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium of arts presenters, who have come together to create a statewide writers & readers series. Over the course of her 20-year-long professional life, she has worn every possible hat in the grant world -- grants officer, grants panelist and grant recipient--and enjoys demystifying the process for others. Among the individual grants and internships she has received are the Archie Green Occupational Folklore Fellowship, the Southern Oral History Project Fellowship, the North Carolina Arts Council's Folklife Program internship, and the graduate internship of the Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Ann Marie Oliva is an award-winning playwright with many honors and productions to her credit, including four full-length plays. Her work has been performed on stage, television and radio. She is the founder of Playwrights in Progress, the resident playwrights group of Theatre Charlotte, and she is Artistic Director of AppleBox Playwrights' Cooperative. Ann Marie is also a founder of the North Carolina Playwrights Alliance and was Vice President in their inaugural year. Most recently, her play, "Alice Neel," was performed at Theatre Charlotte in April 2004. She has a television program on a Time-Warner cable access station called, ARTS à la Mode. The show highlights performances and inteviews with theatre, performing, visual and literary artists. Ann Marie is a member of The Dramatists Guild.

David Perry is Editor-in-Chief of the University of North Carolina Press, where he acquires Civil War, history, and regional trade books. Perry has worked as editor at UNC Press since 1979. He has also been a Board Member of the North Carolina Arts Council since 1995. In 1991, Workman Publishing brought out his Good Old Grits Cookbook, which Perry co-authored with Bill Neal.

After many years as an editor at Houghton Mifflin Co. in Boston, Shannon Ravenel co-founded Algonquin Books in 1983. She was Editorial Director of Algonquin from 1992-2001 when she stepped down to direct her own imprint with Algonquin--Shannon Ravenel Books. Ravenel was Series Editor of The Best American Short Stories from 1977-1990 and inaugurated Algonquin's annual anthology, New Stories from the South, in 1986. She will bring out the 20th annual volume in June 2005.

A former editor with major New York houses, Rita Rosenkranz founded Rita Rosenkranz Literary Agency in 1990. Her adult non-fiction list stretches from the decorative to the dark. Her titles include An Exultation of Soups by Pat Solley, Wolf Pack: The American Strategy that Helped Defeat Japan by Steven Trent Smith, and Customer Branded Service by Janelle Barlow and John Stewart. She represents health, history, parenting, music, how-to, popular science, business, biography, popular reference, cooking, spirituality, and general interest titles. Rita works with major publishing houses, as well as regional publishers that handle niche markets. Rita looks for projects that present familiar subjects freshly or less-known subjects presented commercially.

In her ten years as an editor as Simon & Schuster, Denise Roy has focused on literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, and history in a list of books she calls "Adventures in Americana." She is particularly interested in books that transport the reader to a particular time and place, allowing the reader to live in that moment, even if only for a little while. She works with such fiction writers as Marianne Wiggins, Alice Elliott Dark, Steve Erickson, and Janice Galloway. She also publishes Jennifer Chiaverini's bestselling historical "Elm Creek Quilts" series, as well as Terry Ryan's memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, soon to be a major motion picture starring Julianne Moore. In the works are First Man, the authorized biography of Neil Armstrong, as well as Finding Betty Crocker, a "biography" of America's First Lady of Food.

Katharine Sands, a literary agent in New York City, is a frequent and popular speaker for writer conferences from New York to Hawaii to Paris. Her new book, Making the Perfect Pitch, includes articles by top New York agents. She is a literary agent with the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency, representing a wide range of authors in a broad range of categories-from literary fiction, chick lit, and dysfiction to faction to nonfiction (popular culture, entertainment, personal growth, leisure activities) to home arts (lifestyle, cookbooks, home design) to the more eclectic (travel, humor, and spirituality). She has represented the literary estate of Norman Wexler, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter for Saturday Night Fever, XTC: SongStories; Under the Hula Moon by Jocelyn Fuji (as co-agent); The Tao of Beauty by model Helen Lee; Make Up, Don't Break Up by Oprah guest Dr.Bonnie Eaker Weil, among many others. Katharine has been a guest speaker on writing and publishing topics for Poets and Writers, The American Society of Journalists and Authors, New York University and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her book reviews have appeared in Publishers Weekly and the New York Times Book Review.

Joanna Catherine Scott's most recent novel Cassandra, Lost was inspired by the elopement of a real life 18th century Maryland heiress with a lieutenant from General Rochambeau's French army. Booklist calls it: "A spellbinding tale brimming with romance, intrigue, and adventure." Scott's previous novel, The Lucky Gourd Shop, set in South Korea, was a Book Sense Top Ten Titles choice and nominee for Book Sense Book-of-the-Year. Excerpts won awards from Literal Latté, Georgia State University Review, and Crucible. Her first novel, Charlie and the Children, a novel of Vietnam, was Book-of-the-Month for the Vietnam Veteran Association's journal Veteran. Scott is also the author of Indochina's Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and Breakfast at the Shangri La, a collection of poems set in the Philippines, for which she won the Black Zinnias Award from the California Institute of Arts and Letters. Scott was born in England, raised in Australia, and took her graduate degree in Philosophy at Duke University. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Phillip Shabazz is a poet, community organizer, and arts educator best known for the unique way in which he teaches poetry workshops--part literary and part performance. Since moving to North Carolina, he has edited dozens of volumes of student poetry, and has conducted writing workshops at over 300 public schools, colleges and universities. He is the author of two poetry collections Freestyle and Visitation, and XYZoom. Shabazz is also Executive Director of SpiritHouse, a community and cultural arts organization in Durham.

David Sontag is the Wesley Wallace Distinguished Professor and Director of the Writing for the Screen and Stage program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Still active in the industry he is an award winning motion picture/TV writer-producer having written for the major Hollywood studios. He also has been responsible for a number of hit television series. Mr Sontag's career has also seen him as a network executive at NBC, CBS Films and ABC and as the Senior Vice President, Creative Affairs at 20th Century Fox's Television division.

Writer and book reviewer Bella Stander conducts day-long Book Promotion 101 workshops for authors. She resides in Charlottesville, Va., where she serves on the program committee of the Virginia Festival of the Book. Stander was the book editor for Albemarle (Va.) magazine and a contributing editor for Publishers Weekly, and has written for People, The Wall St. Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. She is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle and the National Press Club.

Tony Tost was born in Springfield, Missouri and raised in Enumclaw, Washington. He is a graduate of Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington, and College of the Ozarks in Pt. Lookout, Missouri. He has recently graduated with an MFA from University of Arkansas. Tost's book Invisible Bride (LSU Press) is the winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award. His poems have appeared in the literary journals Fence, Field, Spinning Jenny, Typo, Quarter After Eight, Goodfoot, Localist, can we have our ball back?, and others. He currently resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

In October of 2003, Emily van Beek, formerly a children's book editor at Hyperion Books for Children, joined Pippin Properties, Inc., a leading children's literary agency located in New York City. Fluent in French and with an affinity for all languages, Emily is the Director of Foreign Rights in addition to being an essential player on the Pippin team.

Daniel Wallace is the author of three novels: Big Fish (1998), Ray in Reverse (2000), and The Watermelon King (2003). His stories have been published far and wide in many magazines and anthologies, including the Yale Review, the Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah, and Glimmer Train. Big Fish was made into a major motion picture, and a screenplay, Timeless, is currently being produced by Shady Acres for Universal Pictures. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, his teaching engagements include Breadloaf Writers' Conference and the Creative Writing Department at UNC-CH. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and son.

Katharine Walton is the president of Katharine Walton Represents, which is both a literary agency and a promotions agency, representing writers and arts organizations such as the soon to be revamped Oxford American Magazine and the internationally significant, NC-based Music Maker Relief Foundation. Her strength is representing southern writers and artists to media and publishers. Her first work in book publishing was serving as publicity director for eight years at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman. Before working in promotions and publicity she was editor of Charleston Magazine -- where she excerpted a Lewis Nordan novel called Music of the Swamp. Along with editing Charleston magazine she was editorial director for other Gulfstream Communications magazines. She began her career in journalism as a writer and contributing editor for Whittle Communications while she was studying news and magazine writing at the University of South Carolina.

Donna L. Washington is a professional storyteller, actress, and author. She started performing at age six. She has adapted folktales into two full-length stage productions at Chicago's Upstage Downstage Theater and performed at numerous storytelling festivals. She is the author of The Story of Kwanzaa, and she received a Parents' Choice Award for her recording Live and Learn: The Exploding Frog and Other Stories.

Susie Wilde, M.Ed. has reviewed for magazines and papers across the country including Baby Talk, Book Page and Learning magazines. Currently, she reviews for The Raleigh News and Observer and writes columns and reviews for the Durham Herald Sun. Her published works include a picture book, Extraordinary Chester and a book for teachers, Write-A-Thon! How to Conduct a Writing Marathon in Your 3-5th Class. Susie Wilde, a read-aloud advocate and children¹s book crusader, has spent twelve years sharing books with children and adults-and developing a secret pile of really bad books!

Lynn York has been a Writer-in-Residence at Brush Creek Writers' Workshop. She leads craft discussion groups and offers as well as one-on-one critiques. She is a Workshop facilitator and craft lecturer for a private Hillsborough writing group. Participants included published writers, journalists, and MFA candidates. She does ongoing work with numerous local writers, critiquing their manuscripts and shepherding them through the publication process. Her first novel, The Piano Teacher, published earlier in 2004 by Plume, is in its fifth printing.

J. Peder Zane is the Book Review Editor and books columnist for the News & Observer of Raleigh. His national awards include the 1999 Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. His Sunday column is syndicated by the Scripps Howard News Service. He edited and contributed to the essay collection, "Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading" (W.W. Norton). Born and reared in New York City, he is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.