Network Conferences

Faculty Biographies: Fall Conference 2007

Fall Conference 2007 was held in Winston-Salem, NC, at The Hawthorne Inn. The conference is over, but we have left this conference information on the site so that you can refer to it as a model of what our Fall Conference is like.

Anthony Abbott was educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities. He has taught at Davidson College since 1964. He is currently the Charles A. Dana Professor of English Emeritus. He is the author of a prize-winning novel, Leaving Maggie Hope (2003), and four books of poems: The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat (1989), A Small Thing Like a Breath (1993), The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World (2000), and The Man Who (2005). He has served as President of the N.C.Writers Network and of the Charlotte Writers Club. In the spring of 2007 he was Writer-in-Residence at Lenoir Rhyne College.

Joseph Anderson is a writer, a licensed pilot, a practicing yogi, and a board certified trial lawyer in Winston-Salem specializing in aviation disasters, nursing home abuse, and medical malpractice. He is also a competitive marathon runner, who has completed the Boston Marathon, the Chicago Marathon, the Marine Corps Marathon, and an ultra-marathon (150 miles) across the Sahara Desert. Mr. Anderson lives in Winston-Salem with his wife and daughter. His memoir The Light Within: a Travel Log of India (Press 53, 2006) is the result of a 33-day journey across India in late 2004 and early 2005, a trip he chronicled in a journal and then transferred to a travel blog so his mother and friends could trace his steps. What begins as a sometimes-awkward diary develops into a deeply moving dialogue by a man coming to terms with the death of his own father and with the lives of the poor street urchins he encounters.
www.josephanderson.com

Joseph Bathanti is Professor of Creative Writing, and Co-Director of the Visiting Writers Series, at Appalachian State University. He is the author of four books of poetry: Communion Partners, Anson County, The Feast of All Saints, and This Metal. His first novel, East Liberty, winner of the Carolina Novel Award, was published in 2001 by Banks Channel Books in Wilmington, NC. His novel, Coventry, winner of the 2006 Novello Literary Award, was published by Novello Festival Press in Charlotte, NC. His collection of short stories, The High Heart, winner of the 2007 Spokane Prize, was recently published by Eastern Washington University Press.

Amy Knox Brown is a native of Lincoln, Nebraska. She holds a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska and a J.D. from Nebraska's College of Law. Most recently she received an MFA from North Carolina State University, where she studied with Jill McCorkle. Her collection of stories, Three Versions of the Truth, has just been published by Press 53. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and English at Salem College, where she directs the college's new creative writing major.

Pamela King Cable's publications include Southern Fried Women, a collection of short stories. Since its launch in June 2006, the self-published book has sold over 3,000 copies. It was also a finalist in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year and USABookNews.com Fiction and Literature-Short Story, Best Books of 2006 Book Awards. She is a frequent speaker at national-level groups such as the International Women's Writing Guild, Sisters in Crime, and various writing conferences. Regional bookings at over 150 venues last year include the Southern Festival of Books, the Kentucky Book Fair, the Kentucky Bluegrass Festival of the Book, and many churches and civic groups throughout the South.
www.pamelacable.com

Elizabeth Cox has completed four novels: Familiar Ground, The Ragged Way People Fall Out Of Love, Night Talk, and The Slow Moon. She has also published a collection of short stories, Bargains in the Real World. One of these stories, "The Third of July," was chosen for the O.Henry Collection. She has written essays for Ms. Magazine, Lears, North Carolina Magazine, and The Oxford American. She has published poetry in Southern Poetry Review, The Kentucky Review, The Southern Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and others. She teaches at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.
www.elizabethcox.net

C. Michael Curtis is the John C. Cobb Professor of Humanities at Wofford College. He also edits fiction for The Atlantic Monthly, for whom he has worked since 1963. He is the editor of six anthologies of short fiction: American Stories: Fiction from The Atlantic Monthly, Volumes I and II; Contemporary New England Stories; Contemporary West Coast Stories; God: Stories; and Faith: Stories; and has published poetry, essays, reporting, and reviews in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The National Review, and many other periodicals. He has taught creative writing and composition at Harvard, Cornell, MIT, Tufts, Boston University, Simmons College, Bennington College, Northeastern University, and elsewhere. He lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina with his wife, novelist Elizabeth Cox, with whom he shares the Cobb Chair.

Quinn Dalton is the author of a novel, High Strung, and two story collections, Bulletproof Girl and Stories from the Afterlife. Her stories have appeared in publications such as Glimmer Train, One Story, and Verb and in anthologies such as New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. She lives in Greensboro, NC with her husband and two daughters.
quinndalton.com

Susanna Einstein began her career in editorial at Warner Books (now Grand Central Publishing) in 1995. During her six years there, she edited crime fiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and non-fiction. In 2002, Susanna became a senior scout at Maria B. Campbell Associates. There, she read widely on behalf of the company's clients, which include major publishers from twelve countries and Warner Bros. Pictures. In December 2005 she was one of the three founding agents at LJK Literary Management. Susanna's recent U.S. sales include historical fiction (the Rashi's Daughters trilogy to Plume), non-fiction (Funding Fertility to Touchstone) and young adult fiction (Donut Days to Putnam). Other areas of interest include crime fiction, literary fiction, and books for middle-grade readers.
www.ljkliterary.com

Lyle Estill is the V.P. of Stuff for Piedmont Biofuels, one of North Carolina's first biodiesel facilities. Estill created Energy Blog in the fall of 2003 as a communication vehicle for his students at Central Carolina Community College. Energy Blog gained a rapid following, and became a touchstone of the grassroots biodiesel industry. Estill's blogging led to a book deal with New Society, which published Biodiesel Power: the Passion, the People, and the Politics of the Next Renewable Fuel, now in its second printing. His second book, Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy will be appearing in spring of 2008.

Keith Flynn is the author of five books, including four collections of poetry: The Talking Drum (1991), The Book of Monsters (1994), The Lost Sea (2000), and The Golden Ratio (Iris Press, 2007), which was recently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of a collection of essays, entitled The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing (Writer's Digest Books, 2007). From 1987-1998, he was lyricist and lead singer for the nationally acclaimed rock band, The Crystal Zoo, which produced three albums: "Swimming Through Lake Eerie" (1992), "Pouch" (1996), and the spoken-word and music compilation, "Nervous Splendor" (Animal Records, 2003). His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world, including The Colorado Review, Poetry Wales, The Cuirt Journal (Ireland), Takahe (New Zealand), The Southern Poetry Review, Margie, Rattle, Shenandoah, Word and Witness: 100 Years of NC Poetry and many others. He has been awarded the Sandburg Prize for poetry, the ASCAP Emerging Songwriter Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award and was twice named the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for NC. Flynn is founder and managing editor of the Asheville Poetry Review.

Nathan Ross Freeman, scriptwriter, filmmaker and educator, was awarded the 2005 San Francisco Black Film Festival Screenplay Contest Second in Overall Scoring for "Hannah Elias," awarded the 1997 North Carolina Arts Council Playwrights Fellowship for "Hannah Elias," awarded Third Runner Up, 2005 Great Lakes Film Festival Screenplay Contest for "Geist," and the 1997 North Carolina Arts Council Playwrights Fellowship for "Hannah Elias." Freeman, the Founder of Montage Showcase Ensemble, is a director of film and stage and teacher of professional acting. Currently, Freeman is a teacher of Playwriting and Screenwriting; Member of the Intensive Writing Faculty at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC; Member of the NC Humanities Speakers Bureau; Artistic Director of the Winston-Salem Summer Youth Film, Theatre and Visual Arts Institute, Winston-Salem; Founder-Partner of Mr. Bones Films, LLC.; Producer, Writer and Director of the Independent Feature Film, Mr. Bones; Pen & Voice Consultants, Partner; and Member of North Carolina Playwrights Alliance.
nathanrossfreeman.com

Dena Harris has published hundreds of articles in national and international trade and consumer magazines. She is the Assistant Editor for NC Career Network Magazine, a marketing columnist for Art Jewelry and writes national bi-monthly humor columns for family and pet magazines. Her work has appeared in Writer's Digest, The Toastmaster, Writer's Journal, College Preview Magazine, Career Focus, and Self-Publishing Essentials, among others. The true-to-life stories in her short story humor collection, Lessons in Stalking - Life With Cats, have earned numerous awards. Dena gives keynote speeches and teaches workshops around the country. Her book The Perfect Speaker (Doesn't Exist) is due out in 2008.
www.denaharris.com

John Hart, author of the bestselling mystery novel King of Lies, has just come out with his second novel, Down River, based in Salisbury, NC. He has held jobs ranging from bartending in a London pub to being a banker at Wachovia. With a degree in French Literature from Davidson College, a Masters in accounting from UNC-Chapel Hill and finally a law degree from Franklin Pierce Law Center, Hart finally chose to pursue a career in law. At a small firm in Salisbury, North Carolina, he worked primarily on criminal defense cases. Shortly after the birth of his daughter he was assigned to defend a child molester -- an assignment he refused. Eventually leaving the law firm, he started writing King of Lies, and sold the novel to St. Martin's Press. Hart is currently working on his second novel.
www.johnhartfiction.com

Louise Hawes teaches fiction at the Spalding University MFA in Writing program, at Meredith College's Focusing on Form summer workshop, and at Mainely Writing, a writers' retreat off the New England coast. She is the author of more than a dozen award-winning novels, as well as the 2007 short fiction collection, Anteaters Don't Dream (University Press of Mississippi) and the forthcoming collection, The Cinderella Files, Tales Your Mother Never Told You (Houghton Mifflin). Her short fiction is included in Be Careful What You Wish (Scholastic), Such a Pretty Face, Stories about Beauty (Abrams), Love and Sex, Ten Stories of Truth (Simon and Schuster) and The Reader Writes the Story, Canadian and World Fiction (Prentice-Hall).
www.louisehawes.com
http://myspace.com/louisehawes

Marjorie Hudson is author of Searching for Virginia Dare, a personal journey into the mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke Colony, a selection of the BookWomen Traveling Book Club. In 2000, she was recipient of the Sarah Belk Gambrell Award for Excellence in Arts Education. In 2003 she was a Sherwood Anderson Award finalist, and in 2005 she was Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, Ca.). Two of Hudson's short stories recently won Pushcart Special Mentions, and an essay, "Sufi Dancing with Dad," is forthcoming from Fulcrum Press in the anthology Wild in Our Breast: Women Speak to the Recurring Realities of War. Hudson is founder of the Kitchen Table Workshops and has taught through Duke Continuing Education, the Center for Documentary Studies, and the University of Alaska-Anchorage MFA program, among others.
www.marjoriehudson.com

Roy Jacobstein is a 2007-08 Fellow in Literature of the North Carolina Arts Council. He has been a Scholar and Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Sewanee Writers Conference. His book of poetry, Fuchsia in Cambodia, will appear in 2008 from Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books. His earlier books, A Form of Optimism (U Press of New England, 2006) and Ripe (U Wisc Press, 2002) won the Morse Prize and Pollak Prize, respectively. His poetry appears in TriQuarterly, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily, and The Gettsysburg Review, and in the textbook LITERATURE: Reading Fiction, Poetry & Drama (McGraw-Hill, 2006). He is a physician working in international women's reproductive health, and Adjunct Professor of Maternal and Child Health in UNC's School of Public Health.

Susan Stafford Kelly grew up in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. She graduated from UNC-CH and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Her first novel How Close We Come won the Carolina Novel Award in 1997, was reissued nationally by Warner Books, was an Alternate Selection in the Book-of-the-Month Club, and was published in Russian and German. In 2001 Warner published her second novel, Even Now. In 2006 The Last of Something was published by Pegasus Books, and Susan's fourth novel Now You Know will come out in October 2007. Susan is a member of the North Carolina Writers Conference, has three grown children, and lives in Greensboro with her husband Sterling.

Randall Kenan is currently on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits; a young adult biography of James Baldwin; two works of non-fiction, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century and The Fire This Time; and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Dos Passos Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Prix de Rome.

Stephen Kirk has been the editor at John F. Blair, Publisher, since 1988. He is the author of Scribblers: Stalking the Authors of Appalachia and First in Flight: The Wright Brothers in North Carolina.

Mur Lafferty is a writer, podcaster and open media evangelist. She has written for role-playing games, magazines, and fiction publications. She co-wrote Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, a top 10 research book for Amazon.com in 2006. She has been podcasting since 2004 with her hall of fame podcast Geek Fu Action Grip and her award-winning podcast I Should Be Writing. Her award-nominated novellas, the Heaven series, have been enjoyed by thousands of podcast listeners. Her podcasts can be found at www.murlafferty.com.

Sebastian Matthews is the author of a collection of poems, We Generous (Red Hen Press), and a memoir, In My Father�s Footsteps (Norton). He co-edited, with Stanley Plumly, Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews. Matthews teaches at Warren Wilson College and is on faculty in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte. His poetry and prose has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, Seneca Review, Tin House and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Matthews was a recent recipient of a 2006 North Carolina Artist Grant. He co-edits Rivendell, a place-based literary journal.

Jill McCorkle is the author of five novels: The Cheerleader, July 7th, Tending to Virginia, Ferris Beach and Carolina Moon and three story collections, most recently Creatures of Habit. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South, among other publications. The recipient of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize and the North Carolina Award for Literature, she has taught creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts, Harvard, Brandeis and Bennington College. She is currently on faculty at NC State University as the Lee Smith Writer in Residence.

Debbie McGill has been at the North Carolina Arts Council (an agency of the state's Department of Cultural Resources) since 1989. As Literature Director, she works to support and promote the state's writers and literary organizations through grants, information, and other services. Before joining the Council's staff, she was an editor at The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's.
www.ncarts.org

Laura Hart McKinny is a member of the founding faculty at the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts. She received her BA, Lifetime Teaching Credential and graduate coursework from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was the recipient of Writer's Guild of America, East Foundation Fellowship Grant for an original screenplay. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and has written numerous screenplays, documentaries and shorts. She is the writer of "One in Eight," and a writer and co-producer of the feature documentary, "In Broad Daylight." She is also the writer of the stage adaptation of The Land Breakers by John Ehle.

Sheryl Monks is a writer and editor and co-owner of Press 53, an independent literary publishing company in Winston-Salem, NC. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and a BA in English from Salem College. In 2005, she was awarded a Northwest North Carolina Regional Artist Project Grant and has recently been named a finalist for an artist's residency fellowship to Headlands, CA. Her work has been awarded the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award and named a finalist in contests sponsored by Backwards City Review and VERB: An Audioquarterly. She has published short stories in various literary magazines as well as a travel book and a book of folk tales. When she isn't publishing the work of other excellent writers, she pecks away at finishing her own short story collection, All the Girls in France, and an untitled novel. She teaches literature at Surry Community College, and an occasional creative writing class at Salem College, where she also serves on the board for the Center of Women Writers.
www.Press53.com

Robert Morgan was born in 1944 in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He has published eleven books of poetry, most recently The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems, 2004; and eight books of fiction, most recently Brave Enemies: A Novel of the American Revolution, 2003. Boone: A Biography will be published in October 2007. Morgan has received the Hanes Award in Poetry, the Southern Book Award, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 1971 he has taught at Cornell University.
www.robert-morgan.com

Lauren Mosko is an editor at Writer's Digest Books and is the former editor of Novel & Short Story Writer's Market. Her recent editorial projects include The Pirate Primer: Mastering the Language of Swashbucklers & Rogues, by George Choundas; The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction, by Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies; The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How to Make Your Poetry Swing, by Keith Flynn; and The Lost Saranac Interviews: Forgotten Conversations With Famous Writers, by Joe David Bellamy and Connie Bellamy. When she's not slaving over manuscripts, she loves reading fiction, poetry, and graphic novels; listening to music; traveling; and appreciating the magic of baseball.
www.fwpublications.com

Valerie Nieman is the author of a poetry collection, Wake Wake Wake, as well as a collection of short fiction, Fidelities, and two novels, Survivors and Neena Gathering. Her work has appeared in such journals as Poetry, New Letters, REDiViDER, The Kenyon Review and Blackbird, and numerous anthologies. She has received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1998 and 2002 Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes in fiction and the 1999 Greg Grummer Prize in poetry. She was a founding editor of Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art in the New World. Nieman graduated from West Virginia University and worked as a journalist before earning an M.F.A. in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte and joining the writing faculty at North Carolina A&T State University.
http://www.myspace.com/139903568
http://www.newletters.org/PDFs/LombardoNieman.pdf (a review in New Letters)
http://www.mainstreetrag.com/Reviews_2007.html (a review in Main Street Rag)

Penelope Niven is the author of Carl Sandburg: A Biography (Scribner) and Steichen: A Biography (Clarkson Potter/Crown); co-author with James Earl Jones of Voices and Silences (Scribner); author of Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet (Harcourt), a children's book that received the International Reading Association Prize; and author of Swimming Lessons (Harcourt), a memoir. Her biography of Thornton Wilder will be published by HarperCollins. She has received two honorary doctorates, three National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowships, and the North Carolina Award in Literature. She is writer-in-residence at Salem College, and the mother of author Jennifer Niven.

Jacqueline K. Ogburn recently received her 15 minutes of fame when Daniel Pinkwater read her most recent book, The Bake Shop Ghost, on National Public Radio. "Delicious," he said. "It's a yummy book." That led to Ogburn working with composer Jonathan Schwabe to turn the story into a musical, which premiered at the Maud Powell Music Festival in June 2007. A North Carolina native, Ogburn has written eight picture books. Her previous book, The Magic Nesting Doll, received a starred review from Publishers' Weekly. Ogburn has worked in the publishing industry in New York, primarily as a children's book editor, and has taught writing for children at several venues including the Friday Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. She currently works for the Continuing Studies Department of Duke University.

Ellen Pepus started her agency in 2006 after working at the Graybill and English Literary Agency in Washington DC. She has a BA in English from Indiana University, a law degree from George Washington University, and experience in marketing, writing and editing. She is actively building a client list, and is particularly interested in narrative non-fiction, including history, true crime, science, biography and memoir, food and cooking, arts, culture and travel writing. She is also looking for commercial and literary fiction, including historical fiction, mysteries, thrillers, and women's fiction.
www.epliterary.com

Al Perry, past president of Winston-Salem Writers Inc., is a longtime member of NCWN. A novelist and editor, he leads workshops in this state as well as in the adult education program of Coastal Carolina University. An affiliate of Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA), Al was the NCWN member who first recommended that we bring Pat Schneider, AWA founder, to North Carolina for our summer program. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, Al has participated in the University of Iowa's Summer Writing Festival as well as the Advanced Fiction Workshop in San Francisco and the Stonecoast Conference in Maine.

Ron Rash holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. In 2005 his novel Saints at the River was named Fiction Book of the Year by both the Southern Book Critics Circle and the Southeastern Booksellers Association. In 2005 he also won an O. Henry award for his story "Speckled Trout." He is author of two collections of short stories, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Casualties; three books of poetry, Eureka Mill, Among the Believers and Raising the Dead; and three novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River and The World Made Straight, which won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award. Chemistry and Other Stories, his latest book, was published in April 2007. In March 2005 he was given the James Still Award by the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Bess Reed, a New Orleans native, has been an agent with Regal Literary in New York City for five years, and was an editor at the Oxford American magazine in Oxford, Mississippi, for three years prior to that. The agency represents many Southerners -- among them, Tony Earley (Jim the Boy), Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), and Martin Clark (The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living) -- and Bess is interested in fiction (preferably Southern and humorous) and narrative non-fiction (particularly self-help and women's issues). She divides her time between New York and Oxford, where she recently returned to get married.

Pat Riviere-Seel's first collection of poetry, No Turning Back Now, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2004 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including the Asheville Poetry Review, Crucible, Main Street Rag and recently in Passager and Kakalak 2007: An Anthology of Carolina Poets. She received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and is immediate past president of the NC Poetry Society. She teaches in UNCA's Great Smokies Writing Program.

Amy Rogers, the founder and publisher of Novello Press, is an award-winning writer and editor. Books she has written include Hungry for Home: Stories of Food from Across the Carolinas, and Red Pepper Fudge and Blue Ribbon Biscuits. Rogers is a frequent commentator for NPR station WFAE. She is a past winner of the SELA President�s Award, given by the Southeast Library Association for her work with NFP, the nation�s only library-funded literary publisher. She is a past vice-president of the Publishers� Association of the South. Rogers has presented numerous educational and outreach programs at conferences, festivals, schools, arts centers, and libraries. She lives in Charlotte, N.C.
novellopress.org

Ed Southern is the editor of The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony, 1605-1614, and the co-author of the first two editions of Travel North Carolina. He is vice president of John F. Blair, Publisher, in Winston-Salem, and serves on the board of the North Carolina Writers Network.

Amy Tiemann, Ph. D., was a scientist and educator before reinventing herself as a writer. Her book Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family guides women through the transformation of motherhood, encouraging readers to reclaim a sense of self and creative spirit. Amy embraced the opportunity to develop an online author platform. She continues to build upon her work through her well-regarded blog at MojoMom.com, as well as regular posts to MomsRising.org, and CNET.com. Amy's work has been covered by national media including a recent appearance on The Today Show.

Kevin Watson is a proud Salem Sister, having earned his BA in English and a minor in creative writing from Salem College, the oldest all-women's college in the US (est. 1772). His short stories and poetry have appeared in several publications, but his current love is finding great stories and poems and making beautiful books. He lives in Winston-Salem, NC, and serves as publisher and editor of Press 53, a small independent literary publishing company he founded in October, 2005, and now co-owns with fellow Salem Sister Sheryl Monks. Winston-Salem-based Press 53 published literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry, as well as the anthologies Surreal South, and the forthcoming Press 53 Open Awards Anthology.
www.Press53.com

Carole Boston Weatherford, New York Times best-selling author, has 25 books to her credit. Her books have won the American Library's Association's Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Award, the NAACP Image Award, the Carter G. Woodson Award from the National Council for the Social Studies and two North Carolina Juvenile Literature Awards. Her books for children include Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, Dear Mr. Rosenwald, Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins, and Remember the Bridge: Poems of a People. The recipient of two North Carolina Arts Council Fellowships, Carole teaches at Fayetteville State University and lives in High Point, N.C.

Samm-Art Williams was born in Philadelphia, PA and grew up in Burgaw, NC. After graduating from Morgan State College in Baltimore, he studied with the Freedom Theater's Acting workshop in Philadelphia, under the direction of John Allen and Bob Leslie. As a member of the Negro Ensemble company, he performed in such plays as "The First Breeze of Summer," "Eden," and "Nevis Mountain Dew." He also wrote many plays, including "Home," which received a Tony nomination in the category of Best Broadway Play and toured internationally. He had a lucrative career in television, where he took on roles as an actor, a writer, and executive producer for popular shows such as "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" and "Martin." He has been nominated for two Emmy awards.