Bios of all the authors appearing at the AJC Decatur Book Festival 2013

Gennifer Albin holds a master's degree in English literature from the University of Missouri and founded the tremendously popular blog theconnectedmom.com. She lives in Lenexa, KS, with her husband and two children. Learn more about her at genniferalbin.com.

Michael Alvear is a syndicated sex columnist who co-hosted the HBO series "The Sex Inspectors." His commentary has appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered," "The Tyra Banks Show," "The Today Show," and in The New York Times.

Tom Angleberger is the best-selling author of the Origami Yoda series. He is also the author of Horton Halfpott and Fake Mustache. Tom maintains the Origami Yoda–inspired blog, origamiyoda.wordpress.com. He is married to author-illustrator Cece Bell and lives in Christiansburg, VA.

Jennifer Armentrout, # 1 New York Times and USA Today best-selling author, lives in Martinsburg, WV. All the rumors you've heard about her state aren't true. When she's not hard at work writing. she spends her time reading, working out, watching really bad zombie movies, pretending to write, and hanging out with her husband and her Jack Russel, Loki. Her dreams of becoming an author started in algebra class, where she spent most of her time writing short stories . . . which explains her dismal grades in math. Jennifer writes Young Adult paranormal, science fiction, fantasy, and contemporary romance. She is published with Spencer Hill Press, Entangled Teen and Brazen, Disney/Hyperion and Harlequin Teen. She also writes Adult and New Adult romance under the name J. Lynn. She is published by Entangled Brazen and HarperCollins.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, PhD, who coined the term "emerging adulthood," is the author of Emerging Adulthood, the book that brought attention to this new stage of life. A research professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University, he is also editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research and executive director of the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood. Dr. Arnett lives with his family in Worcester, MA.

David Axe is a freelance reporter based in Columbia, South Carolina. Since 2005 he has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Chad, Congo, and other conflict zones for Wired, the BBC, Salon, Esquire, C-SPAN, Voice of America, and many others. David is the author of several graphic novels, including War Fix, War is Boring, and most recently, The Accidental Candidate: The Rise and Fall of Alvin Greene. David blogs at www.warisboring.com.

Andrew Aydin, an Atlanta native, currently serves in Rep. John Lewis's Washington, D.C., office, handling telecommunications and technology policy as well as new media. Previously, he served as communications director and press secretary during Rep. Lewis' 2008 and 2010 re-election campaigns; as District Aide to Rep. John Larson (D-CT); and as Special Assistant to Connecticut Lt. Gov. Kevin Sullivan. Andrew is a graduate of the Lovett School in Atlanta, Trinity College in Hartford, and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Tickets are required, but they are free, limit 2 per person. Tickets will be available Monday, August 5 at 10AM by visiting or calling the Arts at Emory Box Office at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts at Emory University, 404.727.5050 or online at tickets.arts.emory.edu. Phone and online orders will incur a $4.00 processing fee. You can also pick up tickets at select local independent bookstores.

Christopher Bakken is the author of two books of poetry: Goat Funeral and After Greece (for which he won the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry). In 2006, he co-translated The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios. His culinary memoir, Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table, was published in 2013 by University of California Press. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely in the U.S. and Europe, in places like The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, and PN Review. His other awards include the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction from the Southwest Review and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Bakken served as a Fulbright Scholar in American Studies at the University of Bucharest in 2008 and he is currently Department Chair and Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College.

Anna Banks's first novel, Of Poseidon, was a Macmillan Fierce Reads title. She lives in Crestview, on the Florida Panhandle, with her husband and their daughter.

Linwood Barclay, a former columnist for the Toronto Star, is the #1 international best-selling author of nine critically acclaimed novels, including The Accident, Never Look Away, and No Time for Goodbye, which has been optioned for film. He lives near Toronto with his wife and has two grown children.

Leigh Bardugo was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Los Angeles, and graduated from Yale University. These days, she hides out in Hollywood, where she indulges her fondness for glamour, ghouls, and costuming in her other life as a makeup artist in Hollywood. She can occasionally be heard singing with her band, Captain Automatic. Her first novel, Shadow and Bone, was a New York Times bestseller.

Wilton Barnhardt is the author of three previous novels: Emma Who Saved My Life, Gospel, and Show World. A native of Winston-Salem, NC, he is the director of the Masters in Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he lives.

Cece Bell is the author-illustrator of Itty Bitty, Bee-Wigged and the infamous Sock Monkey books. She also illustrated Bug Patrol for Clarion. Crankee Doodle is her first collaboration with her husband, Tom Angleberger. The couple lives in Virginia with their two children. Visit her online at www.cecebell.com.

Dr. Richard Besser, M.D., is ABC News's Chief Health and Medical Editor. In this role, he provides medical analysis and commentary for all ABC News broadcasts and platforms, including "World News with Diane Sawyer," "Good Morning America," and "Nightline," and he is a frequent contributor on "The View" and "Katie." For more than 25 years, Dr. Besser has given his patients and his viewers straightforward and practical advice to help them make informed decisions about their health. Dr. Besser came to ABC News in 2009 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where he served as Acting Director for the CDC and Acting Administrator for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry . He began his career at the CDC in 1991 in the Epidemic Intelligence Service investigating food- borne diseases. Beginning in 1993, he served for five years on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego as the pediatric residency director. He returned to CDC in 1998, where he served in various capacities, including as the medical director of "Get Smart: Know When Antibiotics Work," the CDC's national campaign to promote appropriate antibiotic use in the community. Dr. Besser received his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Williams College and his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed a residency and chief residency in pediatrics at John Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He met his wife, Jeanne, a food writer, while on his first outbreak investigation in 1991. They have two sons, Alex and Jack.

Richard Blanco was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States -- meaning his mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid where he was born. Only forty-five days later, the family emigrated once more and settled in New York City, then eventually in Miami where he was raised and educated. His acclaimed first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, explores the yearnings and negotiation of cultural identity as a Cuban-American. His second book is, Directions to The Beach of the Dead. And his third, Looking for The Gulf Motel, examines the blurred lines of gender, the frailty of his father-son relationship, and the intersection of his cultural and sexual identities as a Cuban-American gay man living in rural Maine. In January 2013, Blanco was selected by President Obama to be the inaugural poet, joining the ranks of Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. The New York Times wrote, "Like Mr. Obama, who chronicled his multicultural upbringing in a best-selling autobiography, Dream From My Father, Mr. Blanco has been on a quest for personal identity through the written word. He said his affinity for Mr. Obama springs from his own feeling of straddling different worlds; he is Latino and gay. His poems are laden with longing for the sights and smells of the land his parents left behind." President Obama said in a statement, "It is an honor to have Richard Blanco in our second inauguration. . . His work is well-suited for an opening that will celebrate the strength and diversity of our great country."

Francesca Lia Block, winner of the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, is the author of many acclaimed and best-selling books, including Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books, Roses and Bones: Myths, Tales and Secrets, and the adult novel The Elementals. Her work has been translated and published around the world. She lives in Los Angeles with her two children.

Susan M. Boyer has been making up stories her whole life. She tags along with her husband on business trips whenever she can because hotels are great places to write: fresh coffee all day and cookies at 4 p.m. They have a home in Greenville, SC, which they occasionally visit, and they run away to the beach as often as possible. Susan's debut novel, Lowcountry Boil is an Agatha Award winner for Best First Novel, a 2012 Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense recipient, and a 2012 RWA Golden Heart® finalist. Her next book, Lowcountry Bombshell, will be released September 3, 2013. Susan's short fiction has appeared in moonShine Review, Spinetingler Magazine, and Relief Journal, among others.

Kim Boykin learned about women and their hair in her mother's beauty shop in a tiny South Carolina town. She loves to write stories about strong southern women because that's what she knows. Boykin is an accomplished public speaker and serves on the board of the South Carolina Writer's Workshop. She lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband.

Stacy Braukman is an independent scholar and coauthor of Gay and Lesbian Atlanta.

Ward Briggs is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics Emeritus and Louis Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He has published widely on the history of American classical scholarship, the career of the classicist Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, and the classical tradition. He was a friend of James Dickey for more than thirty years.

Jericho Brown is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies including The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The New Yorker, Oxford American, The New Republic, and The Best American Poetry. His first book, Please, won the American Book Award, and his second book, , is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.

Peter Brown is the author and illustrator of many bestselling children's books, including Children Make Terrible Pets and The Curious Garden. He is the recipient of a Caldecott Honor for Creepy Carrots!, two E.B. White Read Aloud Awards, a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book award, and a Children's Choice Award for Illustrator of the Year. Peter's website is www.peterbrownstudio.com.

Sal Brownfield has been painting since childhood. For him art is a way to investigate the improbable life of human beings, to understand the journey. Transition and transformation are central to his work. He is engaged in the conjunction of art and ethics and activism. Among his commissions: eight paintings based on creations myths for the United Nations Expo in Genoa, a painting of St. Francis for the Hermes family in Paris. His series Metamorphosis includes eleven butterfly paintings with caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly. Brownfield has worked with twenty troubled boys in a treatment facility painting a fifteen-foot diptych for their space -- witnessing some of their metamorphosis through art. Brownfield's work has been shown in galleries across the United States as well as in El Salvador and Italy. His work is in numerous private collections. He has been a fellow at The Hambidge Center of Arts and Science and lectured at Emory University through the Art and Ethics program of the Center for Ethics.

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fourteen novels, including Hell, A Small Hotel, and the first Christopher Marlowe Cobb thriller, The Hot Country. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

Brenda Bynum has been an actor and director in Atlanta since 1973, working primarily at the Alliance Theater where she was also the Acting Teacher for the nationally-known Professional Intern Program . From 1983 until 2000 she was a Resident Artist and member of the Faculty at Emory University in the Department of Theater Studies. After her retirement her colleagues at Emory established The Brenda Bynum Award and in 2004 she received the Heilbrun Distinguished Emeritus Research Fellowship. In 2005 she was named by WABE as a Lexus Leader of the Arts. In the late seventies she was a co-founder of the first theater in Atlanta run exclusively by women, T.H.E. Theatre, Ltd., which produced critically acclaimed productions at Callanwolde Arts Center for seven years. During and since that time she has participated in the development of over a dozen original performance pieces based on the lives and works of real women. Ms. Bynum's professional papers are in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia.

Tim Byrd, the author of the Doc Wilde adventure series, lives with his adventurous son, a treacherous cat, and a hapless dog in Decatur. He is often barefoot, prone to irony, and interested in everything. He has been a soldier, game designer, independent filmmaker, and outdoor guide. He knows how to tie a tie, but doesn't care to.

Gennifer Choldenko (www.choldenko.com) has received many accolades from her Alcatraz trilogy including being named Amazon Top Ten Middle Grade Novels of the Year (2009), a Junior Library Guild Selection (2009), a Chicago Public Library Best of the Best (2009) and she was short-listed for a Carnegie Medal. She received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and had a lot of success in advertising before realizing she wanted to be a full-time writer. She writes both picture books and middle-grade novels.

Yangsze Choo is a fourth generation Malaysian of Chinese descent. Due to a childhood spent in various countries, she can eavesdrop (badly) in several languages. After graduating from Harvard, she worked as a management consultant and at a startup before writing her first novel. Yangsze loves to eat and read, and often does both at the same time. You can follow her blog about eating and reading at http://yschoo.com or on Twitter @yangszechoo

Roy Peter Clark is senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, one of the most prestigious schools for journalists in the world. He has taught writing at every level -- to schoolchildren and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors -- for more than thirty years. A writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, he has authored or edited seventeen books on writing and journalism, including Writing Tools, The Glamour of Grammar, and Help! for Writers. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Bridie Clark has worked as a book and magazine editor and written for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and New York magazine. Her novels Because She Can and The Overnight Socialite have been published in nineteen countries and featured in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Glamour UK. She was born in West Hartford, CT and currently lives in Greenwich, CT. bridieclark.com

Marcia Clark is a former Los Angeles deputy district attorney who was the lead prosecutor on the O. J. Simpson murder case. She co-wrote a best-selling nonfiction book about the trial, Without a Doubt, and is a frequent commentator on legal issues in high-profile trials, for multiple shows on CNN/HLN, NBC, and ABC.

Slash Coleman wrote, produced, and starred in the PBS special The Neon Man and Me, which also won the 2012 United Solo Award for best drama. The personal perspectives blogger for Psychology Today and a regular contributor to Storytelling magazine, he appeared on the NPR series "How Artists Make Money" and is creating "The New American Storyteller" series for PBS (to debut in 2014). A regular performer on the national storytelling circuit, Coleman lives in New York City.

Larry Colton is the author of several notable works, including Counting Coup, Goat Brothers and No Ordinary Joes. He has written for Esquire, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Magazine. A former pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, Colton himself played in the Southern League in 1966 for a farm team in Macon, GA.

Claire Conner was twelve years old when her parents dove into the world of paranoid politics, a world dominated by the John Birch Society, an anti-Communist, anti-federal government movement. Her parents were the first two Birch members in the city of Chicago. Her father, Stillwell J. Conner, became a National Council member and remained in top leadership for thirty-two years. Her mother was a partner in all things Birch. At first, eager to gain the approval of her parents, Claire embraced everything they embraced. As she matured, however, she began to disagree. At first, it was just a whisper here and a tiny "no" there, but every little rebellion made her stronger. The final break from her parents caused tremendous upheaval, leaving a rift that never healed. "Extremism broke my family," Claire says. "I don't want it to break my country." In her new book Wrapped in the Flag, Claire introduces us to the extreme ideas of a powerful political fringe group dispensing radical solutions to America's problems. Moving seamlessly between memoir and history, humor and pain, past and present, Wrapped in the Flag serves up keen insight into the impact of extremism on one woman, her family and, if unchecked, on our country. Claire Conner holds a degree in English with honors from the University of Dallas and a graduate degree from the University of Wisconsin. She lives in Dunedin, FL. She speaks widely on the John Birch Society and the impact of the radical Right.

Claire Cook wrote her first novel after decades of procrastination, in her minivan, while waiting for her daughter's swim practice to end. That first novel was published when she was 45, and at 50, she walked the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of the adaptation of her second novel, Must Love Dogs, starring Diane Lane and John Cusack. She has continued her dream of becoming an author with nine novels to her name. She truly believes that midlife is a chance for women to reinvent themselves and the career she almost didn't have is proof that it's never too late. Cook uses this inspiration to create her relatable main characters and each book draws on her own real-life experiences. In Time Flies, Melanie is a New England native who moves to Atlanta, just like Claire recently did!

Susan Cooper is the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her classic five-book fantasy sequence The Dark Is Rising won the Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor and has sold millions of copies worldwide. She is also the author of Victory, a Booklist Top Ten Historical Fiction for Youth book and a Washington Post Top Ten for Children novel; King of Shadows, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor book; The Boggart; Seaward and many other acclaimed novels for young readers and listeners. She lives in Massachusetts, and you can visit her online at TheLostLand.com.

Alfredo Corchado is a Neiman, Wilson, and Rockefeller fellow. He has received Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Award for his reporting. He lives in Mexico City.

Susan Crandall is an award-winning women's fiction, suspense, romance, and mystery author. Her first book, Back Roads, won the RITA award for best first book, as well as two National Reader's Choice awards. She has released eight more critically acclaimed and award-winning novels. She lives in Indiana.

Caprice Crane is the author of several novels for adults, including Stupid & Contagious, Family Affair, and With a Little Luck. Confessions of a Hater is her first YA novel. Born in Hollywood, she divides her time between Los Angeles and New York. capricecrane.com

Doreen Cronin is the author of many best-selling picture books, including Thump, Quack, Moo: A Whacky Adventure; Bounce; Wiggle; Duck for President; Giggle, Giggle, Quack; Dooby Dooby Moo; and the Caldecott Honor Book Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Visit her at DoreenCronin.com.

Alex Sayf Cummings is an assistant professor of History at Georgia State University. Born in West Virginia to a Libyan father and an American mother, he grew up in Indiana and North Carolina before landing in New York, where he received his PhD in History from Columbia University. His work has appeared in The Journal of American History, Salon, and Southern Cultures, among other publications, and his book Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century was just published by Oxford University Press. He is also co-editor of Tropics of Meta, a blog devoted to history, politics, and pop culture. He and his wife live in East Atlanta Village.

P. Scott Cunningham is the co-founder and director of "O, Miami": a month-long poetry festival with the goal of every single person in Miami-Dade County encountering a poem. His events and projects have been featured in The New Yorker, NPR's "Morning Edition," NPR's "The Takeaway", ESPN, TIME, The Guardian, Dwell Magazine, and many others. In 2011, Fast Company named him as one of 51 "Brilliant Urbanites" that are changing America. He is also the author of Chapbook of Poems for Morton Feldman and was a 2013 Finalist for Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Awl, The Rumpus, La Otra (Mexico), Court Green, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. A graduate of Wesleyan University, he lives in Miami.

Christopher Paul Curtis spent his first 13 years after high school on the assembly line of Flint's historic Fisher Body Plant # 1. His job entailed hanging car doors, and it left him with an aversion to getting into and out of large automobiles -- particularly big Buicks. Curtis's writing -- and his dedication to it -- has been greatly influenced by his family members. With grandfathers like Earl "Lefty" Lewis, a Negro Baseball League pitcher, and 1930s bandleader Herman E. Curtis, Sr., of Herman Curtis and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression, it is easy to see why he became an entertainer. The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 tells the story of 10-year-old Kenny and his family, the Weird Watsons of Flint, MI, and their unforgettable journey that leads them into one of the darkest moments in American history. It is by turns a hilarious, touching, and tragic story about civil rights and the impact of violence on one family. It received a Newbery Honor Award. Curtis's novel Bud, Not Buddy focuses on 10-year-old Bud Caldwell, who hits the road in search of his father and his home. Times may be hard in 1936 Flint, but orphaned Bud's got a few things going for him; he believes his mother left a clue of who his father was -- and nothing can stop Bud from trying to find him. It was the recipient of both the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award. He is also the author of Bucking the Sarge, Mr. Chickee's Funny Money, Mr. Chickee's Messy Mission, and The Mighty Miss Malone. He resides with his family in Michigan.

Stacey D'Erasmo is the author of The Sky Below, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year; A Seahorse Year; and Tea, also a New York Times Notable Book. Her first book of nonfiction, The Art of Intimacy, comes out in July from Graywolf Press. She teaches at Columbia University.

Carolyn Dalgliesh is the founder and owner of Systems for Sensory Kids and Simple Organizing Strategies, helping sensory families, individuals, and businesses get organized. She is a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) and also serves on the Board of Governors for Bradley Hospital, a neuropsychiatric hospital for children and adolescents. Carolyn lives in Rhode Island with her husband and two children.

Susanna Daniel was born and raised in Miami. She is a graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa and University of Wisconsin-Madison. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and son. Her first novel, Stiltsville, was awarded the PEN/Bingham Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction.

Diane Mott Davidson is the author of sixteen best-selling novels. She divides her time between Colorado and Florida.

Kathryn Davis is the author of six novels, including The Thin Place, Versailles, and The Walking Tour, among others. She has received a Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She teaches at Washington University, and lives in Vermont and St. Louis, Missouri.

Theresa Davis is one of Atlanta's favorite poets. She is the mother of three, a slam champion, and author of After This We Go Dark and Simon Says. Page or stage, her poetry will grab your attention and speaks to your heart. Her work finds that place were our human stories cross and we see how we are more alike than we are different.

Frans de Waal is a Dutch-American biologist who has been named among TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People" and Discover Magazine's "47 (all-time) Great Minds of Science." The author of Our Inner Ape among many other works, he is the C. H. Candler Professor at Emory University and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Primate Center, and is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Tomie dePaola  has more than 15 million books in print and is one of the most beloved creators of children's literature today. His many accolades include the Caldecott Honor Award, the Newbery Honor Award, a Smithsonian Medal, the 2011 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his substantial and lasting contribution to children's literature and, most recently, the 2012 Society of Illustrators Lifetime Achievement Award. He is one of only five author/illustrators to be awarded a Newbery Honor and a Caldecott Honor. He has written and illustrated over 200 books in his 40 years in book publishing. Foreign editions of his books are available in Taiwan, China, Australia, Korea, Japan, the UK, Germany, France, South Africa, Spain, Poland, Italy, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden.

Philip DePoy is the award-winning author of many novels and plays as well the director of the theatre program at Clayton State University. He lives in Decatur, Georgia.

Bronwen Dickey writes about the impact of history on modern cultures, politics, and the environment. She is a regular contributor to the Oxford American, and her work has also appeared in Newsweek, Outside, ISLANDS, Sport Diver, Scuba Diving, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Independent Weekly, among other publications. A South Carolina native and the youngest child of the late poet and novelist James Dickey, she is a graduate of Duke University, where she studied American history and English literature, and Columbia University, where she received two fellowships in creative writing and taught literary nonfiction. She lives with her husband in North Carolina.

Richard Diedrich is an architect who has consulted on more than eighty golf facilities throughout the world. Jack Nicklaus (Foreword) is considered one of the greatest golfers in the history of the game. Robert Trent Jones, Jr., (Preface) is a renowned golf architect.

Dianne Dixon is a screenwriter living in California who has twice been nominated for an Emmy, has won a Humanitas Award for work done in television, and has been a siting Professor of Creative Writing at Pitzer College. She is the author of The Book of Someday.

Kelly Dorfman, MS, LND, specializes in finding nutritional solutions to common ailments. She writes for The Huffington Post, is a columnist for Living Without Magazine, and has been featured in and written dozens of articles on health and nutrition. In addition, she lectures on diet and health around the country and has appeared on CNN and Fox News. Her practice is located outside of Washington, D.C.

Denise Duhamel is professor of English at Florida International University and the author of numerous poetry collections, including Ka-Ching, Two and Two and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, and her latest, Blowout. Duhamel has written five chapbooks of poetry and co-edited, with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. The recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, including Penguin Academics: Contemporary American Poetry; Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else; and Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" . Duhamel is guest editor for The Best American Poetry, 2013.

Tom Dunkel is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written for The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and others.

Nathalie Dupree is the author of twelve cookbooks, including two James Beard Award winners: Nathalie Dupree's Southern Memories and Nathalie Dupree's Comfortable Entertaining. Her latest books include Shrimp and Grits and Southern Biscuits. She has hosted more than 300 television shows and specials that have shown nationally on PBS, Food Network, and The Learning Channel. She was awarded the Grand Dame of Les Dames d'Escoffier in 2012. She lives in Charleston.

Candice Dyer is a longtime contributor to Atlanta magazine, and her work has appeared in Men's Journal, Paste Magazine, Garden & Gun, Country Living, American Profile, and Georgia Music Magazine. Her book, Street Singers, Soul Shakers, and Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon, covers the lives of Little Richard, Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers Band, and others, and her essay on Waffle House was anthologized in Cornbread Nation 4. She has been recognized by Green Eyeshades and holds a national feature-writing award from the American Association for Nude Recreation.

Clyde Edgerton has published ten novels and a memoir. Three of his novels have been made into movies and stage adaptations have been made from seven novels. Edgerton's short stories and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Short Stories, Southern Review, Oxford American, Garden & Gun and other publications. Five of his novels have been New York Times Notable Books. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and teaches in the creative writing department at UNCW. He lives in Wilmington NC with his wife and their children. His newest book is Papadaddy's Book for New Fathers (Little, Brown).

Jim Elledge is the award-winning author and editor of twenty-two books, including a textbook on publishing, four anthologies on queer culture, and numerous poetry collections and chapbooks. He is currently director of the M.A. in Professional Writing Program at Kennesaw State University. He lives in Atlanta.

Patricia Engel's debut, Vida, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award, Young Lions Fiction Award, winner of a Florida Book Award and Independent Publisher Book Award, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Barnes & Noble, and L.A. Weekly. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in A Public Space, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Guernica, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey, she is a graduate of New York University and earned her MFA at Florida International University. Patricia lives in Miami.

Sara Farizan lives near Boston. She is the daughter of Iranian immigrants to the United States. She is an MFA graduate of Lesley University and holds a BA in film and media studies from American University. This is her first novel.

Peter Farris is a graduate of Yale University. He lives in Cobb County. Last Call for the Living is his first published novel.

William Ferris is Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ferris is the author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues, among other books, and co-editor of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

Ernest Freeberg is a distinguished professor of humanities in the history department at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of The Education of Laura Bridgman and Democracy's Prisoner, which was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and winner of the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History and the Eli M. Oboler Award from the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Roundtable. Freeberg is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has produced a number of public radio documentaries on historical themes.

Samuel G. Freedman is a columnist for The New York Times and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of six acclaimed books, four of which have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Freedman also has written frequently for USA TODAY, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, The Jerusalem Post, Tablet, The Forward, and Salon.com. He lives in Manhattan with his fiance and his children.

Michael Fry is the co-creator and writer of several comic strips, including Over the Hedge, which is featured in newspapers nationwide and was adapted into the hit animated movie of the same name. In addition to his work as a cartoonist, Fry is the founder of RingTales, a company that animates print comics for all digital media, and is an active blogger, tweeter, and public speaker, as well as the proud father to two adult daughters. Originally from Minneapolis, hecurrently lives with his wife in Austin, Texas.

Edward M. Garnes, Jr. is an award- winning journalist, counselor, educator, editor, producer, and activist. He is the founder of From Afros to Shelltoes. He holds a B.A. in English Writing from DePauw University and a M.A. in Counseling from Michigan State University where he studied as a Competitive Fellow in Urban Counseling and currently serves as an Adjunct Professor of Public Speaking at Spelman College. Garnes' seminal essay, "Sweet Tea Ethics: Black Luv, Healthcare, and Cultural Mistrust," appears in Not In My Family: AIDS in the African American. A longtime music contributor to Creative Loafing, he has profiled and interviewed Spike Lee, Outkast, Gerald Levert, Erykah Badu, and Divinity Roxx. Garnes was honored during the 2004 National Black Arts Festival with an installation featuring his classic poem Contemplation Of A Looter Somewhere In The USA. A recognized expert in black male development, Garnes launched the State of Black Men Tour with Kevin Powell in 2004. Garnes is currently penning In Search of Dr. Garnes. Garnes is the co-owner of Babuke Brothers, LLC, a media relations, entertainment, and arts programming firm.

Geoffrey Girard graduated from Washington College with a literature degree and worked as an advertising copywriter and marketing manager before becoming a high school English teacher. He is currently the English department chair at a private boy's school in Ohio and is a Masters candidate in creative writing at Miami University of Ohio.

Ray Glier is a freelance journalist in Atlanta. He contributes to USA Today, The New York Times and The Miami Herald, among other publications. He has also served as the Executive Sports Editor of The Knoxville Journal. He has covered the Southeastern Conference for 26 years.

Abbi Glines is the author of The Vincent Boys and The Vincent Brothers in addition to several other YA novels. A devoted booklover, she lives with her family in Alabama. She maintains a Twitter addiction at @AbbiGlines and can also be found at AbbiGlines.com.

Adam Leith Gollner has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and Lucky Peach. The former editor of Vice magazine, his first book is The Fruit Hunters. He lives in Montreal.

Chris Grabenstein is the co-author of The New York Times bestseller Funny, written with James Patterson. He is the Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of The Crossroads and The Hanging Hill, as well as several adult thrillers. He used to write TV and radio commercials and has written for The Muppets. He was born in Buffalo, and moved to Chattanooga when he was 10. After college, he moved to New York City to become an actor and writer. Currently, Chris and his wife, JJ, live in New York City with three cats and a dog named Fred who starred in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on Broadway.

Cynthia Stevens Graubart is a James Beard Award winning author, speaker, former cooking show television producer, and most-recently the co-author with Nathalie Dupree of Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking, as well as the best-selling Southern Biscuits, also co-written with Nathalie Dupree. She emerged as an expert in her own right with the publication of her first book, The One-Armed Cook: How to Make Dinner with a Baby on Your Hip, and created the weekly food e-newsletter for Nickelodeon's on-line parenting portal, ParentsConnect, providing readers with recipes and a shopping list for the week, tripling the readership in less than four months. Graubert launched her television cooking show career producing Nathalie's first national public television series "New Southern Cooking." And continued for more than 10 years producing and consulting for television cooking programs, chefs, and authors known around the world. She is passionate about food -- from researching its origins, writing recipes, teaching technique, to bringing families together at the table. She appears on television and radio. She is a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and has spoken at its annual conference. She is a member of Les Dames d'Escoffier and has served on the board of the Atlanta Community Food Bank. She and her husband, Cliff, who owns the Old New York Book Shop, regularly travel to book festivals and host bookstore owners as well as authors on a regular basis in their Atlanta home. Their two children are away at college, causing her to adjust to the new reality of cooking for two -- great research for her next book, Slow Cooking for Two: The Basics.

Josh Green writes freelance magazine and newspaper stories, long and short fiction, and edits a popular news blog in his adopted home city of Atlanta. His first book, Dirtyville Rhapsodies, was published in May 2013. Men's Health magazine heralded the short story collection as a "Best Book for the Beach," alongside Khaled Hosseini, Dan Brown, and Stephen King. Declared Paste Magazine, "This fine book belongs on the shelf with any other (short story) collection published in recent years." His work has appeared in publications such as Atlanta magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, Los Angeles Review, Baltimore Review, Ascent, The MacGuffin, The Indianapolis Star, and Creative Loafing (Atlanta). He is steadily stabbing away at his first novel.

Clay and Susan Griffith are a married couple who have written and published together for more than a decade. Their credits not only include two novels for Bantam Doubleday Dell in the mid-1990s and another novel for Pinnacle Entertainment Group in 2002 but also numerous short stories published in many anthologies, some featuring noted genre characters like Kolchak the Night Stalker and the Phantom. They've also written scripts for television and published graphic novels.

Mac Griswold is a cultural landscape historian and the author of Washington's Gardens at Mount Vernon and The Golden Age of American Gardens. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Travel + Leisure. She lives in Sag Harbor, NY.

Lauren Grodstein is the author of the bestselling A Friend of the Family, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editor's Pick, a BookPage Best Book, and an Indie Next selection; the collection The Best of Animals; and the novel Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love, which was both a Breakout Book selection from Amazon and Borders New Voices pick. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.

Christine Gross-Loh is a parenting expert with a Ph.D. from Harvard University who raised her own children in Japan for five years. Her writing has appeared in Mothering Magazine, Parenting Magazine, Shape Magazine, and on Mothering.com.

Austin Grossman is a video game design consultant and the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible, which was nominated for the 2007 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. His writing has appeared in Granta, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Lev Grossman is the author of The New York Times best-selling fantasy novels The Magicians and The Magician King. The Magicians was named one of the best books of 2009 by The New Yorker, and NPR called The Magician King "triumphant -- a spellbinding stereograph, a literary adventure novel that is also about a privilege, power and the limits of being human." George R.R. Martin said, "The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea." They've been translated into over 20 languages, and Fox has optioned the screen rights. In 2011 Grossman won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer from the World Science Fiction Society. Grossman is also a widely known and respected cultural commentator. He is the book reviewer at TIME magazine, and he has appeared on "Charlie Rose" and "All Things Considered." "His writing on culture and technology has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, Lingua Franca, Wired, Time Out New York, Entertainment Weekly, US Weekly, The Week magazine and The Believer Magazine, as well as on Salon.com and elsewhere. He has degrees in literature from Harvard and Yale and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.

The Rev. Dr. Galen Guengerich currently serves as the senior minister of All Souls in New York City, one of the largest and most prominent Unitarian Universalist congregations in the nation. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and went on to earn a PhD in theology at the University of Chicago. His sermon "The Shaking of the Foundations" appeared in Representative American Speeches 2001-2002 as one of seven responses to September 11th, alongside former President George Bush and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Matthew Guinn is a native of the South, spending time in Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, where he served as the personal assistant to James Dickey. The release of The Ressurectionist heralds the arrival of a powerful new Southern voice, whose work will stand aside that of Brad Watson, Barry Hannah, and his own mentor, James Dickey.

Sandra A. Gutierrez, who grew up in the United States and Guatemala, is a food writer, culinary instructor, and recipe developer. She is author of The New Southern-Latino Table: Recipes That Bring Together the Bold and Beloved Flavors of Latin America and the American South. She lives in Cary, N.C.

Minrose Gwin is the Kenan Eminent Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is co-editor of The Literature of the American South and The Southern Literary Journal. Her most recent books are The Queen of Palmyra (a novel), Wishing for Snow (a memoir), and The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender, Space, and Reading.

Jennifer Haigh grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been published in The Best American Short Stories 2012, has won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England writer, and has been named a finalist for Book Sense Book of the Year. Her books have been published in sixteen languages.

Jessica Handler is the author of the forthcoming Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss Her first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir is one of the "Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read." Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Brevity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More magazine. Honors include residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writers Center, the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship, and special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize.

Nicole Hardy is the author of Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin,  a new memoir by inspired by her essay, "Single, Female, Mormon, Alone," published in The New York Times and selected as a "notable essay" in 2012's Best American series. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she is also the author of two poetry collections: This Blonde and Mud Flap Girl's XX Guide to Facial Profiling.

Dr. Brian Hare is associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University in North Carolina and a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, which is a division of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, founded the Hominoid Psychology Research Group while at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and subsequently founded the Duke Canine Cognition Center when arriving at Duke University. Dr. Hare has published dozens of empirical articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals including Proceedings of the Royal Society, Current Biology, Nature Neuroscience, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLOS Biology, Animal Behaviour, Animal Cognition and the Journal of Comparative Psychology. His publications on dog cognition are among the most heavily cited papers on dog behavior and intelligence. His research consistently received national and international media coverage over the last decade and has been featured in numerous international publications and other media. Dr. Hare is frequently invited to give lectures on his research on dog intelligence. In 2004 the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation named him a recipient of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, Germany's most prestigious award for scientists under age 40. In 2007 Smithsonian magazine named him one of the top 37 U.S. scientists under 36.

Kodac Harrison has made 16 recordings of original music and spoken word, made seven tours of Europe, co-edited four anthologies of poetry, and sold his original paintings. He held one the visiting McEver chairs of poetry at Georgia Tech in 2010. He is chairman of Poetry Atlanta and hosts the award winning Java Monkey Speaks. In the summer of 2013, Kodac Harrison released, The Turtle and the Moon, a book of his poems and lyrics.

Justin Heckert is a native of Cape Girardeau, MO and now lives in Indianapolis. He twice has been named City and Regional Magazine Association Writer of the Year. His work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, Men's Journal, ESPN.com, the Oxford American, and has been anthologized in Next Wave: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists, The Best American Crime Reporting, and "notable" in The Best American Essays, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Best American Sports Writing.

Jonathan Hennessey is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. His muse is American History. He is the author of The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation, and the upcoming The Comic Book Story of Beer . His first fictional graphic work, Synchroni-City, is forthcoming from Legendary Comics, the publishing arm of the Hollywood production company Legendary Pictures. In addition to writing, he has worked in production and development in the film and television industry. Jonathan was born on a U.S. Army base in Massachusetts, grew up in New England, and currently resides with his wife and family in California.

Patti Callahan Henry, a New York Times best-selling author,  has published nine novels: Losing the Moon, Where the River Runs, When Light Breaks, Between the Tides, The Art of Keeping Secrets, Driftwood Summer, The Perfect Love Song, Coming up for Air and the upcoming And Then I Found You which was released by St. Martin's Press in April 2013. Hailed as a fresh new voice in southern fiction, Henry has been shortlisted for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and nominated four different times for the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Novel of the Year. Her work is published in five languages, and in audio book by Brilliance Audio. Henry has appeared in numerous magazines including Good Housekeeping, skirt! Magazine, The South magazine, and Southern Living. Two of her novels were Okra Picks and Coming up For Air was selected for the August 2011 Indie Next List. She is a frequent speaker at fundraisers, library events and book festivals. A full time writer, wife, and mother of three -- Henry lives in Mountain Brook, AL.

Bridget Heos is the author of more than 60 books for children and teens, mainly nonfiction. She lives in Kansas City with her husband, three sons, and baby girl.

Jonathan Herman received his PhD in Chinese Religion from Harvard University in 1992. He is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State University, where he teaches courses in Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Shinto, world religions, comparative mysticism, and critical theory in the study of religion. He has also taught at Harvard, Boston College, Tufts University, University of Vermont, and Lewis & Clark College. He is the author of I and Tao: Martin Buber's Encounter with Chuang Tzu (SUNY), as well as several book chapters and journal articles on various aspects of Taoism and Chinese religion. He was an officer of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religion for twelve years, and served on the American Academy of Religion Committee on the Public Understanding of Religion for three years.

Linda Hirshman, a lawyer and a pundit, is the author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World and many other books. She received her JD from the University of Chicago Law School and her PhD in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and she taught philosophy and women's studies at Brandeis University. In recent years, she has appeared on network and cable television shows, including "60 Minutes" and "The Colbert Report." She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Newsweek, The Daily Beast and Salon.

Ann Hite is the critically acclaimed author of Ghost on Black Mountain, for which she won Best First Novel from the Georgia Author of the Year Awards and was nominated for the Townsend Award. She lives in Atlanta with her family.

Michelle Hodkin grew up in Florida, went to college in New York, and studied law in Michigan. She is the author of the Mara Dyer trilogy, including The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, The Evolution of Mara Dyer, and The Retribution of Mara Dyer.

Eve Hoffman is one of thirty alumna honored as "Remarkable Women" by her alma mater, Smith College. She has been identified as one of Georgia's one hundred most influential leaders. She is known as a strategic thinker, social entrepreneur, writer and poet. Hoffman has been published by the Georgia Humanities Council, Emory University Center for Ethics, New Southerner, Southern Women's Review and online. Her work is included in performances of the Senior Ensemble of The Academy Theatre. Hoffman founded and published three anthologies of Georgia K-12 public school student writing. She has worked with Georgia's Poet of the Year, North Carolina's Poet Laureate, as well as internationally honored poets in Paris. She has been a part of numerous intensive poetry workshops and participated in readings at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. Hoffman recently published Red Clay, her first book of poetry.

Lita Hooper is a poet and educator who lives in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in anthologies and online journals. She is the author of Thunder in Her Voice: The Narrative of Sojourner Truth and co-editor of 44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the Election of Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States. She has been a featured reader at colleges and universities and currently teaches creative writing online.

David Horton is a native of Durham, NC and holds a Bachelors in Civil Engineering from NC A&T and a Masters in Architecture from Georgia Institute of Technology. He will graduate with his law degree this May. Inspired by his friends and Carter G. Woodson, his first book, Negro Intellect -- a guide for young black males, became an Essence magazine bestseller and a surprise first time hit selling thousands of copies. His follow-up title, Black Princess -- a guide for young females, is still being sold in stores and on-line nearly sevem years after its release. Horton has also been featured in other titles and is currently planning to relaunch his publishing company upon graduation from law school. He continues to pursue an agenda of love and upliftment while taking on various consulting projects.

Kristen Iversen grew up in Arvada, Colorado, near the Rocky Flats nuclear weaponry facility and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. She is director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Memphis and also editor-in-chief of The Pinch, an award-winning literary journal. She is also the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. Iversen has two sons and currently lives in Memphis. Visit www.kristeniversen.com/.

Mitchell Jackson was born and raised in Portland, OR. He holds a Master's in Writing from Portland State and an M.F.A. from New York University. He teaches writing at NYU, Medgar Evers College, and John Jay College. He also works as a journalist, writing about entertainment and sports for Vibe, The Source, and various others. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals, and he is a winner of the Hurston Wright Award for College Writers. He lives in Brooklyn.

Joshilyn Jackson is The New York Times best-selling author of six novels, including gods in Alabama and A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. Jackson is also an award winning audio book narrator. She lives in Decatur with her husband, their two children, and way too many feckless animals. Her new book, Someone Else's Love Story, will be published on November 19, 2013.

Rebecca Janni (www.rebeccajanni.com) lives in Iowa with her husband and four children.

Myke Johns acts as Write Club Atlanta's Consigliere, wrangling combatants and lovingly crafting the WCA podcast. When not aiming microphones at angry, swearing writers, he aims microphones at radio hosts as a producer at Atlanta's NPR station WABE. And when not doing that, he is aiming microphones at his angry, swearing band, Mice in Cars. His story Indoor Fireworks placed in the 2013 Creative Loafing Fiction Contest. He apologizes for all the anger and the swears.

Sheri Joseph is the author of Stray, winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize, and Bear Me Safely Over. A resident of Atlanta, she teaches in the creative writing program at Georgia State University and serves as fiction editor of Five Points. She was also recently profiled in a Vanity Fair feature alongside Kathryn Stockett, Emily Giffin, and Karin Slaughter.

Tom Junod has been a Writer-At-Large for Esquire for 16 years. He got his start writing for Atlanta magazine, and has also written for Sports Illustrated and GQ. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award a record 11 times, and has won twice for Feature Writing. His work has been widely anthologized, and "The Falling Man," his 2003 story about a photograph taken on 9/11, has been named one of the seven top stories in Esquire's 80 year history. Born and raised in Long Island, he lives in Marietta, with his wife and his daughter and his dog. He can be found on Twitter, @TomJunod.

Richard Kadrey, a New York Times best-selling author, has published eight novels, including Sandman Slim, Kill the Dead, Aloha from Hell, Devil Said Bang, Butcher Bird, and Metrophage, and more than 50 stories. He has been immortalized as an action figure, his short story Goodbye Houston Street, Goodbye was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award, and his novel Butcher Bird was nominated for the Prix Elkaban in France. A freelance writer and photographer, he lives in San Francisco.

Kevin Kallaugher (KAL) is the international award-winning editorial cartoonist for The Economist magazine of London and The Baltimore Sun. In a distinguished career than spans 35 years, Kal has created over 8000 cartoons and 140 magazine covers. His resumé includes six collections of his published work, one-man exhibitions in six countries, international honors and awards in seven. Since 2006, the Norwalk, CT, native and Harvard University graduate has been the Artist-in-Residence at University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has created acclaimed animations and calendars, toured the US with Second City and addressed audiences around the world. In 1999, The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons said of him, "Commanding a masterful style, Kallaugher stands among the premier caricaturists of the (twentieth) century." Kal lives near Baltimore and when not drawing, enjoys snacking on crab cakes and fly-fishing in local waters.

Peter Kaminsky is the author of Culinary Intelligence, Pig Perfect, and collaborator on books with Francis Mallmann, Daniel Boulud, Gray Kunz, Sheila Lukins, and Coach John Madden. He is a former New York Times and New York magazine columnist, and is a Food & Wine contributor.

Collin Kelley is the author of the novels Conquering Venus and Remain In Light, which was a 2012 finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. His poetry collections include Better To Travel, Slow To Burn, After the Poison and Render. Kelley is also the author of the short story collection, Kiss Shot. A recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award, Deep South Festival of Writers Award and Goodreads Poetry Award, Kelley's poetry, essays and interviews have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies around the world. He lives in Atlanta.

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He is the author of six books, including Race, Crime, and the Law, for which he received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. A member of the bars of the Supreme Court of the United States and the District of Columbia, and of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he lives in Massachusetts.

Beth Kephart's first memoir was a National Book Award finalist and named best book of the year by several publications. Picked to chair juries for both the National Book Awards and PEN First Nonfiction Awards, she has reviewed and written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and many others. Chosen as the 2013 Master Writing Teacher for the national Young Arts program, Kephart has lectured and taught at universities, high schools, and venues across the country for the last 15 years, and has mentored and taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006. She is at work on a new novel that takes place in Florence, Italy, and blogs daily on literature and life at beth-kephart.blogspot.com

Denise Kiernan is the author of Signing Their Lives Away and Signing Their Rights Away. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Discover, Ms., Reader's Digest and other national publications.

Cassandra King's first novel, Making Waves in Zion, was published in 1995 by River City Press and reissued in 2004 by Hyperion. Her second novel, The Sunday Wife (2002), was a Booksense Pick, a People magazine Page-Turner of the Week, a Literary Guild Book-of-the-Month selection, a Books-a-Million President's Pick, a South Carolina State Readers' Circle selection, and a Salt Lake Library Readers' Choice Award nominee. In paperback, the novel was chosen by the Nestle Corporation in its campaign to promote reading groups. Released in 2005, King's third novel, The Same Sweet Girls, became a #1 Book Sense Selection and Book Sense bestseller, a Southeastern Bookseller Association bestseller, a New York Post Required Reading selection, and a Literary Guild Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and a Southeastern Bookseller Association Bestseller. King's latest novel is Queen of Broken Hearts. King's short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Callaloo, Alabama Bound: The Stories of a State (1995), Belles' Letters: Contemporary Fiction by Alabama Women (1999), Stories From Where We Live (2002), and Stories From The Blue Moon Café (2004). Outside her time working on her fiction, she has taught writing on the college, conducted corporate writing seminars, worked as a human-interest reporter for a Pelham, AL, weekly paper, and published an article on her second-favorite pastime, cooking, in Cooking Light magazine. A native of L.A. (Lower Alabama), King currently lives in the Low Country of South Carolina with her husband, novelist Pat Conroy, whom she met when he wrote a blurb for Making Waves.

Martin Luther King III is the eldest son of civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. He is a human rights advocate and community activist. He lives in Georgia with his wife and daughter.

David Kirby's books include The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. His biography Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll, was hailed by The Times Literary Supplement of London as a "hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense." His latest book of poetry is The Biscuit Joint. He is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University.

Michelle Knudsen is the author of The New York Times best-selling picture book Library Lion, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes; Argus, illustrated by Andréa Wesson; and the fantasy novels The Dragon of Trelian and The Princess of Trelian. She lives in Brooklyn.

Wayne Koestenbaum is an American poet and cultural critic. He received a BA from Harvard University, an MA from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD from Princeton University. He lives in New York City, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of four books of poems, including Equal to the Earth and Seven Studies for a Self Portrait, both from Bench Press. Born in Singapore, where he headed a public school, now he teaches English at an independent K-12 school in New York City. He blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter.

Heather Kopp is an author, editor, and blogger at Soberboots.com. She's published more than two-dozen non-fiction books. Her recovery memoir, Sober Mercies: How Love Caught Up with a Christian Drunk, was published by Jericho Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, in May 2013. She began writing in her early twenties with magazine articles and a column for a Christian woman's magazine. After writing several books of her own, she moved on to write numerous books with her husband, and to edit or collaborate with other authors These days, Kopp is returning to publishing after a personal hiatus during which time she focused on her recovery from alcoholism and on her spiritual connection to God and others. Today, she is especially interested in raising awareness in the Christian community about topics related to addiction and recovery. Heather loves to read books by authors who are willing to take risks to write honestly about their problems, doubts, and questions regarding their spiritual journey. She is particularly fond of authors who frequently find themselves baffled by God even as they fall more in love with Him. Heather loves novels, yoga, recovery meetings, biking or hiking, visiting her grown kids in Oregon, and having spiritually stimulating discussions with people from all walks of life and faith. She and her husband have five grown children and make their home in Colorado Springs, CO.

Lily Koppel is the bestselling author of The Red Leather Diary. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Huffington Post, and Glamour.

Gordon Korman is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of multiple titles in the international bestselling The 39 Clues series. He has written more than sixty books for children and young adults, including Swindle, Zoobreak, Framed, Showoff, and Son of the Mob, as well as the On the Run series and the Island, Everest, Dive, Titanic and Kidnapped trilogies. In August 2013, The Hypnotists, his new series that combines his trademark action and humor with supernatural elements will be published by Scholastic Press. His writing career began at the age of twelve when his seventh grade English assignment became his first novel, which was then published while he was a freshman in high school. Now, decades later, he is a full-time writer, with more than 15 million copies of his novels in print.

Nicola Kraus, with Emma McLaughlin, are The New York Times best-selling authors of The Nanny Diaries, Citizen Girl, Dedication, Nanny Returns, and their young adult novels, The Real Real and Over You. They work together in New York City. For more information visit EmmaAndNicola.com.

Nancy Krulik is the author of 150+ books for children and young adults, including three New York Times bestsellers. In addition to the Jack Gets a Clue and the How I Survived Middle School series, she is the author of the popular Katie Kazoo Switcheroo series and is also well known as a biographer of Hollywood's hottest young stars. She is a master of author school visits and has a way of engaging children that is second to none. The George Brown costume can also visit with Nancy at all of her stops!

Douglas Lain's short fiction has appeared in many magazines and journals here and abroad. Since 2009, he has produced the weekly podcast "Diet Soap," interviewing a wide range of fascinating, engaging people with insights for the new millennium: philosophers, mystics, economists, and a diverse group of fiction writers. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children.

Thomas Lake is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. His first story for the magazine, "2 on 5," won the Henry Luce Award for most outstanding story of 2008 from the nation's largest magazine publisher. Four of his stories have been chosen for the annual Best American Sports Writing collection. Another story, "The Boy Who Died of Football," was published in the anthology Next Wave: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. He lives in Decatur and is working on his first novel.

Kirby Larson heard a snippet of a story about her great-grandmother homesteading in eastern Montana, and she went on to write Hattie Big Sky, winner of a 2007 Newbery Honor Award. This sequel was written in part to answer many questions readers posed about the irrepressible Hattie. Connect with the author on her blog (www.kirbyslane.blogspot.com) or via Twitter (@kirbylarson).

Adam Lazarus is a freelance sportswriter and the author of three books. Best of Rivals, about the famous Joe Montana-Steve Young quarterback controversy, was released in September 2012 and published by Da Capo. It includes interviews with over 50 former NFL players as well as several rare photographs. Since its release in September, Best of Rivals has been featured on several radio and television shows. Super Bowl Monday, about Super Bowl XXV in 1991, centers on one of the greatest games in NFL history and the intersection with Operation Desert Storm. It includes interviews with dozens of NFL stars and was featured on ESPN Radio and XM Sirius Satellite. Chasing Greatness -- his first book, about the unforgettable 1973 U.S. Open at Oakmont -- was mentioned in Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest, and USA Today. In addition to being a member of the Professional Football Writers of America, his work has appeared in ESPN the Magazine and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Chuck Leavell has been pleasing the ears of music fans for more than thirty years now. His piano and keyboard work has been heard on the works of Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, The Black Crowes, George Harrison and many, many more. In addition to being a well established pianist/artist in the music industry, Leavell is also a published author, long time tree farmer, co-founder of the popular website The Mother Nature Network and keeps busy with his advocacy work on behalf of the environment. He and his wife, Rose Lane, were given the ultimate honor for their outstanding management of their own forestland, Charlane Plantation in Macon, Georgia, by being named National Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year in 1999. Today, Leavell plays a strong role in environmental issues in the US and beyond. He is a board member of several important and influential organizations. His name is well-known on Capitol Hill for his advocacy work on behalf of the environment, and he has played a solid role in forming the forest component of the past two US Farm Bills.

Justin Lee founded The Gay Christian Network (GCN) in 2001 and currently serves as its Executive Director, overseeing ministry operations around the world, and speaking at conferences, on college campuses, and at churches. He has been featured in numerous print, radio, and TV outlets, including The New York Times, OUT Magazine, NPR's "Weekend All Things Considered", The Associated Press, "The Dr. Phil Show," HLN's "Prime News," and CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360."

Esther Lee is the author of Spit, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, The Blank Missives. Her poems and articles have appeared in Ploughshares, Verse Daily, Hyphen, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University where she served as Editor-in-Chief for Indiana Review. A Kundiman fellow, she has been awarded the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, Snowcroft Prose Prize, and Utah Writer's Contest Award for Poetry selected by Brenda Shaughnessy, as well as twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She recently received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah. This fall she begins teaching as an Assistant Professor at Agnes Scott College and lives in Decatur with her husband and photographer, Michael Marcinek. She is currently working on her second book, which combines photography, memoir, and fiction.

David Lehman, who founded The Best American Poetry series in 1988, is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the author of seven books of poetry, including When a Woman Loves a Man. He teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School and lives in New York City and in Ithaca.

Allison Leotta was a federal sex-crimes prosecutor in Washington, DC, for twelve years. In 2011, she left the Justice Department to pursue writing full time. She is the acclaimed author of Law of Attraction and the upcoming Speak of the Devil, and founder of the award-winning blog, The Prime-Time Crime Review. Leotta lives with her husband, Michael, and their two sons outside of Washington.

Jay Erskine Leutze was born in Virginia in 1964. He now lives in the Southern Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. Trained as an attorney, he has become a leading voice for state and federal conservation funding for investment in public lands. He is a Trustee for Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, one of the nation's most established land trusts.

David Samuel Levinson's stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and The Brooklyn Review, among others. He lives in New York City. This is his first novel.

Jennifer Levison -- known to many as "Souper Jenny," the name of her flagship venture -- has defined her culinary career with spirit and generosity. The ever‐present lines trailing out the door at Souper Jenny in Buckhead attest not only to the creative goodness of the soups, salads and sandwiches but also to the restaurant's inviting warmth and the staff's exuberance. Levison has received consistent praise from The Atlanta Journal‐Constitution, Atlanta magazine, Creative Loafing, and other Atlanta publications since opening Souper Jenny in 1998. In 2011 she opened Cafe Jonah (named for her son), a sunny coffeehouse serving breakfast and lunch. Its upstairs adjunct business, the Magical Attic, offers meditation classes, psychic readings, and astrology consultations. Cafe Jonah donates ten percent of its sales to local charities; Levison's philanthropy landed her in O, The Oprah Magazine, June 2012 issue. Customers can choose the organization to which ten percent of their purchase is donated. The charities change quarterly, but Levison focuses on breast cancer foundations, small‐scale homeless shelters, and abuse hotlines. Levison's entrepreneurial savvy over the fifteen years has moved her career well past potage and established her as a national lifestyle expert. A regular guest on NBC's "Today Show," Levison is also the author of two books, Souper Jenny Cooks and Souper Jenny Does Salads. with a third in the works that will incorporate decorating and hospitality tips among recipes. Levison will continue her celebration of food and community by expanding the Souper Jenny brand in 2013 as well as introducing a new culinary concept. She is also available for cooking classes as well as speaking engagements on small‐business success and women in business.

David Levithan is a children's book editor in New York City, and the author of several books for young adults, including Boy Meets Boy, Love Is the Higher Law, and Every Day. He coauthored Will Grayson, Will Grayson with John Green, and Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and Dash & Lily's Book of Dares with Rachel Cohn.

Betsy Lewin is the Caldecott Honor-winning illustrator of Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type and its sequels, Giggle, Giggle, Quack; Duck for President; Dooby Dooby Moo; and Thump, Quack, Moo; in addition to a number of other picture books, including So, What's It Like to Be a Cat? and Two Eggs, Please. She lives in Brooklyn.

John Lewis is the U.S. Representative for Georgia's fifth congressional district and an American icon widely known for his role in the civil rights movement. As a student at American Baptist Theological Seminary in 1959, Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1961, he volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides. From 1963 to 1966, Lewis was Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At the age of 23, he was an architect of and a keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington in August 1963. In 1964, John Lewis coordinated SNCC efforts to organize voter registration drives and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The following year, Lewis helped spearhead one of the most seminal moments of the civil rights movement. With Hosea Williams, John Lewis led over 600 peaceful, orderly protestors across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965. The resultant attacks by Alabama state troopers became known as "Bloody Sunday." Despite physical attacks, serious injuries, and more than 40 arrests, Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. After leaving SNCC in 1966, he continued to work for civil rights, first as Associate Director of the Field Foundation, then with the Southern Regional Council, where he became Executive Director of the Voter Education Project (VEP). In 1977, he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to direct more than 250,000 volunteers of ACTION, the federal volunteer agency. In 1981, Lewis was elected to the Atlanta City Council. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1986 and has represented Georgia's fifth district there ever since. In 2011 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Lewis' 1998 memoir Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement won numerous honors. His most recent book, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change, has won the NAACP Image Award. Tickets are required, but they are free, limit 2 per person. Tickets will be available Monday, August 5 at 10AM by visiting or calling the Arts at Emory Box Office at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts at Emory University, 404.727.5050 or online at tickets.arts.emory.edu. Phone and online orders will incur a $4.00 processing fee. You can also pick up tickets at select local independent bookstores.

Scott O. Lilienfeld is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta.

Beth Lilly is a fine art photographer interested in telling stories -- her own as well as others. Her conceptually driven projects engage viewers in innovative ways. A book of her cell phone project, The Oracle@WiFi was published in 2012 and her work has been included in books Noplaceness and Earth Now. Recent solo exhibitions include The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, The Hagedorn Gallery and MOCA GA. Group shows include the Slow Exposure Photography Festival, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. A Hambidge Fellow, she also received grants from Atlanta Celebrates Photography and the Society for Photographic Education. She has received national coverage in the arts press and her work is included in both public and private collections. She was a photo editor and Director at Turner Broadcasting and she has taught photography at Kennesaw State University and the Art Institute of Atlanta. Lilly earned an M.F.A. in Fine Art Photography from Georgia State University, and received an A.B.J. in Mass Media from the University of Georgia. Born in Charlotte North Carolina, she currently lives in Atlanta.

Bettina L. Love is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Theory & Practice at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on the ways in which urban youth negotiate Hip Hop music and culture to form social, cultural, and political identities. A continuing thread of her scholarship involves exploring new ways of thinking about urban education and culturally relevant pedagogical approaches for urban learners. More specifically, she is interested in transforming urban classrooms through the use of non-traditional educational curricula (e.g., Hip Hop pedagogy, media literacy, Hip Hop feminism, and popular culture). Building on that theme, Dr. Love also has a passion for studying the school experiences of queer youth, along with race and equality in education. She is the author of Hip Hop's Li'l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. Her work has appeared in numerous books and journals, including The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Journal of LGBT Youth, Educational Studies, and Race, Gender & Class.

Charlie Lovett is a writer, teacher, and playwright whose plays for children have been seen in over 3000 productions worldwide. He served for more than a decade as Writer-in-Residence at Summit School in Winston-Salem, NC. He is a former antiquarian bookseller, and he has collected rare books and other materials related to Lewis Carroll for more than 25 years. He and his wife, Janice, split their time between Winston-Salem and Kingham, Oxfordshire.

Victoria Schochet Lustbader was born and raised in New York City. Drawn to the arts from a young age, she was always fascinated as well with the sciences and languages; she began college at SUNY Stony Brook as a biology major with a minor in Russian, but ultimately got her BA in English. After graduation, she spent 13 years as an editor of science fiction and fantasy, first at Harper & Row, then at Putnam/Berkley, and worked with authors such as Ursula LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Frank Herbert and Philip Jose Farmer. In 1982 she married author Eric Van Lustbader. In 2001, she made the tumultuous decision to become a writer herself. Her first novel, Hidden, was published in June of 2006 . Her second, Stone Creek was published in June 2008; her third, Approaching the Speed of Light releases this August from Forge Books. She and her husband reside on the east end of Long Island.

Thomas Lux holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times best-selling author, multiple Bram Stoker awards and Marvel Comics writer. He's the author of many novels, including Assassin's Code, Dead of Night, Patient Zero, and Rot & Ruin. His nonfiction books cover topics ranging from martial arts to zombie pop-culture. Jonathan continues to teach the celebrated Experimental Writing for Teens class, which he created. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founded The Liars Club, and he is a frequent speaker at schools and libraries, as well as a keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers' and genre conferences. He lives in Bucks County, PA, with his wife, Sara, and their son, Sam. Visit him at JonathanMaberry.com and on Twitter (@JonathanMaberry) and Facebook.

D. J. MacHale is the author of the #1 New York Times best-selling book series Pendragon -- Journal of an Adventure Through Time and Space; the spooky Morpheus Road trilogy and the whimsical picture book The Monster Princess. He has written, directed and produced numerous award-winning television series and movies for young people including Are You Afraid of the Dark? Flight 29 Down and Tower of Terror. MacHale has done extensive author tours over the past decade and is a seasoned presenter. He lives with his family in Southern California. Visit him online at www.djmachalebooks.com.

Ed Madden is an associate professor of English and the director of Women's & Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of three books of poetry: Signals (2008), which won the 2007 SC Poetry Book Prize; Prodigal: Variations (2011); and Nest (forthcoming 2014). His poems appear in Poetry Ireland, the Los Angeles Review, and other journals, as well as in Best New Poets 2007 and The Book of Irish American Poetry. His chapbook, My Father's House, a series about terminal illness, hospice care, and family reconciliation, was published this year by Seven Kitchens Press.

Maurice Manning is the author of four previous books of poems. His last book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning journalist and a Schuster Institute Fellow at Brandeis University. She has worked in international development on a child survival campaign, and in international human rights advocacy. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, Ms. magazine, More, Parents, Fit Pregnancy, Parenting, and The Walt Disney Internet Group.

Linda Marsa is an award-winning investigative journalist and a contributing editor at Discover who has covered medicine, health and science for more than two decades. A former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of Fevered: Why a Hotter Planet Will Harm Our Health and How We Can Save Ourselves , her work was selected for inclusion in The Best American Science Writing, 2012.

Pablo Miguel Martínez's collection of poems, Brazos, Carry Me, is published by Kórima Press. Individual poems have appeared in Americas Review, Harpur Palate, Gay & Lesbian Review, New Millennium Writings, and the San Antonio Express-News, among other publications. Martínez has been a recipient of the Robert L.B. Tobin Award for Artistic Excellence, the Oscar Wilde Award, and the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. His literary work has received support from the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation and the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. Martínez has taught English at Our Lady of the Lake University and at Lone Star College. In addition to being a co-founder of Canto Mundo, a national retreat-workshop for Latina/o poets, Martínez has participated in Sandra Cisneros' Macondo Writers' Workshop. He lives in Kentucky.

Adrian Matejka is a graduate of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale MFA program. His first collection of poems, The Devil's Garden, won the 2002 New York/New England Award from Alice James Books, and his second, Mixology, was selected by Kevin Young as a winner of the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. He teaches creative writing and English literature at Indiana University.

Taylor Mathis is a food and lifestyle photographer, a blogger at Taylor Takes a Taste, and a passionate fan of all college athletics. He lives in Charlotte.

Charles Mayfield began living a Paleo lifestyle in 2009 and brought his love of home cooking and the Paleo movement to the masses through his first work -- Paleo Comfort Foods: Homestyle Cooking for a Gluten-Free Kitchen. Charles graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in business and spent 13 years building a successful practice as a Certified Financial Planner. When not in the kitchen, he partially owns and operates BTB CrossFit Vinings, a CrossFit affiliate in the greater Atlanta area, where he has spearheaded several Paleo challenges for hundreds of clients, resulting in many inches lost and lives changed. He lives in Smyrna.

Julie Mayfield began living a Paleo lifestyle in 2009 and brought her love of home cooking and the Paleo movement to the masses through her first work -- Paleo Comfort Foods: Homestyle Cooking for a Gluten-Free Kitchen. Julie has nearly 15 years of culinary experience in educational settings, commercial kitchens and private homes. When not in the kitchen, she partially owns and operates BTB CrossFit Vinings, a CrossFit affiliate in the greater Atlanta area, where she has spearheaded several Paleo challenges for hundreds of clients, resulting in many inches lost and lives changed. She lives in Smyrna, GA.

Carl McColman is a writer, speaker, retreat leader and spiritual director. He is the author of numerous books, including Answering the Contemplative Call, The Big Book of Christian Mysticism and The Lion, the Mouse and the Dawn Treader. His work celebrates the mystical and contemplative dimensions of both Christian and world spirituality. In addition to his own blog (www.carlmccolman.com), his work has appeared in The Huffington Post, Beliefnet, Patheos, and various print publications. He studied Christian meditation at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, and received training in the art of spiritual direction from the Institute for Pastoral Studies in Atlanta. He is a professed member of the Lay Cistercians of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit, a community under the spiritual guidance of the Trappist monks of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. He is also an active participant in the Atlanta interfaith community. Carl McColman attended college at James Madison University and received an MA in professional writing and editing at George Mason University. A not-too-strict vegan (he cheats with honey and eggs), he lives in Stone Mountain, GA, with his wife, stepdaughter and three well-pampered cats.

David McConnell is the author of the acclaimed novels The Silver Hearted and Firebrat; and the author of the nonfiction, true crime book, American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men. His short fiction and journalism have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Literary Review (UK), Granta, and Prospect Magazine (UK). He is the former co-chair of the Lambda Literary Foundation, and lives in New York City.

Jill McCorkle is the author of nine previous books -- four story collections and five novels -- five of which have been selected as New York Times Notable Books. The recipient of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Prize for Literature, she teaches writing at North Carolina State University and lives in Hillsborough, NC.

Laura McCullough is the author of several books of poems, most recently Rigger Death & Hoist Another, Panic, and Speech Acts. She is the editor of two forthcoming anthologies, The Room and the World: Essays on Stephen Dunn and A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. She edits the journal Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations. Her essays, short fiction, and poetry have appeared recently in journals such as The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, American Poetry Review, and others. She has recently completed a full-length memoir, The Belt of Venus, excerpts of which appeared or are forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, WSQ: the Feminist Press, Great River Review, Sweet, and Sugar Mule. Her website is www.lauramccullough.weebly.com. Her blog can be read at www.feistyover50.com

Tracee McDaniel is the CEO and Founder of Juxtaposed Center for Transformation, Incorporated in Atlanta which is an advocacy, consulting and social services referral organization for Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming people. Tracee's life and mission provides her with the insight to advocate for all transgender and gender non-conforming people.

Myra McEntire has had her nose in a book since she could hold one. She was once caught reading in the shower (true story) and only stopped when her father disconnected the hot water heater. She lives in Nashville, with her husband and two boys. She is the author of Hourglass and Timepiece. You can learn more about the Hourglass world at www.murphyslawcoffee.com.

Emma McLaughlin, with Nicola Kraus, are The New York Times best-selling authors of The Nanny Diaries, Citizen Girl, Dedication, Nanny Returns, and their young adult novels, The Real Real and Over You. They work together in New York City.

Lisa Earle McLeod is a sales leadership consultant. Organizations like Apple, Kimberly-Clark, and Pfizer hire her to help them create passionate, purpose-driven sales forces. McLeod established her own firm, McLeod & More, Inc. a sales leadership consultancy, in 1993. Prior to that she served as a sales leader and coach at Procter & Gamble and Vice President of Business Development at Vital Learning (formerly McGraw-Hill Training Systems). Her offerings include executive coaching sessions, strategy workshops and high impact keynote speeches. McLeod is also a best-selling author. In 2011 The Washington Post named her book, The Triangle of Truth, a top five book for leaders. Her previous book Forget Perfect was featured on "The Today Show" and the NBC "Nightly News." She writes leadership commentary for Forbes.com and has been quoted in major news outlets such as The New York Times, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. On the more personal side, McLeod was voted most talkative in her senior class and her 2007 humor essay collection Finding Grace When You Can't Even Find Clean Underwear was enthusiastically endorsed by Erma Bombeck's daughter, Betsy Bombeck. Her first job was working at The Donut King in Arlington, VA, where at the age of 14 she sold over 700 glazed donuts in a single shift.

Charles McNair, a native of the Yellowhammer State of Alabama, released his first novel, Land O' Goshen, to critical acclaim. Land O' Goshen was a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1994. Charles currently lives in Atlanta where he writes full-time, combining freelance literary duties with assignments for corporations and businesses, including "Power of Storytelling" workshops. Since 2005, he has served as Books Editor for Paste magazine and shared his reviews on Atlanta radio station WMLB 1690 AM. He is currently at work on his third novel, The Epicureans.

Terra Elan McVoy has held a variety of jobs centered around reading and writing, from managing an independent children's bookstore, to teaching writing classes, and even answering fan mail for Captain Underpants. She lives and works in the same Atlanta neighborhood where her novels After the Kiss, Being Friends with Boys, and Pure are set. She is also the author of The Summer of Firsts and Lasts and Criminal. To learn more, visit TerraElan.com and follow Terra on Twitter at @TerraMcVoy.

Robin Mellom has taught grades five through eight and has a master's degree in education. She is the author of The Classroom: The Epic Documentary of a Not-Yet Epic Kid, as well as the young adult novel Ditched: A Love Story. She lives with her husband and son on the Central Coast of California. Follow her on Twitter (@robinmellom).

Maile Meloy is the award-winning author of The Apothecary, as well as the adult short story collections Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It and Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter. You can visit Maile at www.mailemeloy.com.

Ahmad Meradji , Ceo of Booklogix, has over 25 years of experience in publishing and on-demand printing. Born in Iran, Meradji came to the United States to attend college in Boston, receiving an architectural degree. He later found himself working in the print industry, taking a position with Xerox in the '80s. He obtained his Masters and was a senior manager with Xerox. He was involved in setting up the first digital book publishing and on-demand printing models at Xerox, later serving as a consultant in the publishing industry. In 2003, he accepted a position as Sr. Vice President with RSM McGladrey, an H&R Block Company. In 2007, he fulfilled a lifelong dream of opening his own business, co-founding Apex Book Manufacturing. As Apex grew, Meradji and his business partner, Akash Mangru, saw a growing need for a resource for authors who wanted to self-publish their books, and BookLogix was created. He is passionate about helping authors self-publish their work, and sharing his extensive knowledge of self-publishing and on-demand printing.

David Mezzapelle has been motivating others to be positive since his childhood. He is a major proponent of optimism. And was inspired to write this book series based on his life's experiences and his contagious optimism. Throughout his life he has encountered great peaks and valleys, all of which he is thankful for. He never lost sight along the way and has kept his positive attitude and confidence at 110 percent. He has influenced many people with his outlook and these books are his way of offering optimism to others that have never met him. He has been a guest on various radio and television programs. He is also a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal and various other publications around the globe. He resides in Jupiter, FL, with his wife, Courtney.

Lauren Miller is an entertainment lawyer and television writer. Her TV pilot, TEACH, co–written with Abigail Spencer is a fun, soapy drama about three young teachers in New Orleans, which was bought earlier this year by and is being produced by Alloy and Warner Horizon. Lauren graduated cum laude from Yale in 2002 and received her law degree from UC-Berkeley in 2005. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Adrian Miller is a writer, attorney, and certified barbecue judge who lives in Denver, CO. He served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, a senior policy analyst for Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter Jr., and as a Southern Foodways Alliance board member.

Melody Moezzi is an Iranian-American Muslim activist, attorney, writer, and award-winning author. She is a UN Global Expert and a blogger for The Huffington Post and Ms. Moezzi is also a featured columnist and blogger for Bipolar Magazine, and her writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications worldwide. She has provided commentaries for CNN, NPR, BBC, HLN, PRI and other media outlets. She lives in Raleigh.

Mary Alice Monroe is The New York Times best-selling and award-winning author of fourteen novels, including Beach House Memories, The Butterfly's Daughter, Time Is a River, and Last Light Over Carolina. Her latest novel, Beach House Memories, is the prequel to her bestsellers The Beach House and Swimming Lessons.

Marissa Monteilh, writing as Pynk, is a former model, television news reporter, and commercial actress. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now resides just outside Atlanta. For more information on Pynk, please visit her website or find her on FaceBook.

Patricia Moore-Pastides is the first lady of the University of South Carolina, where she teaches healthy Mediterranean cooking classes for USC students. In addition Moore-Pastides, who earned a master's in public health from Yale University, teaches adults and children through "Columbia's Cooking!", a community program offered by the university's Cancer Prevention and Control Program. As part of being an active participant in Healthy Carolina's farmers' market, she cultivates an organic vegetable garden at the President's House. Moore-Pastides also works to support sustainability initiatives on campus and lectures on wellness, specifically the health benefits of the traditional Mediterranean diet and lifestyle. She is the author of Greek Revival: Cooking for Life.

Virginia Morell is an acclaimed science journalist and author. A contributing correspondent for Science, she has covered evolutionary and conservation biology since 1990. Morell is also a regular contributor to National Geographic and Conde Nast Traveler. In addition to her journalistic work, Morell is the author of three celebrated books. The New York Times awarded a Notable Book of the Year to Ancestral Passions , her dramatic biography of the famed Leakey family and their notable findings. Blue Nile, about her journey down the Blue Nile to Sudan, was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Travel Book. And The Washington Post listed Wildlife Wars, which she co-authored with Richard Leakey, as one of their Best Books of the Year. An accomplished public speaker, Morell spent March 2009 as a principal lecturer for National Geographic Society's Expeditions Program on one of its exclusive, round-the-world trips. She lives in Ashland, OR, with her husband, writer Michael McRae.

Robert Morgan has created a body of work that includes, in addition to fiction, both poetry and biography. A native of North Carolina, he currently resides in Ithaca, NY, where he is a Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the recipient of grants from the NEA as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations.

Lauren Morrill grew up in Maryville, TN, where she was a short-term Girl Scout, a (not so) proud member of the marching band, and a trouble-making editor for the school newspaper. She graduated from Indiana University with a major in history and a minor in rock & roll, and now lives in Georgia with her husband and their dog, Lucy. When she's not writing, she plays roller derby as a member of the Women's Flat Track Roller Derby Association. Meant to Be is her first novel.

Mary B. Morrison, a New York Times best-selling author, believes that women should shape their own destiny. Born in Aurora, IL, and raised in New Orleans, she took a chance and quit her near six-figure government job to self-publish her first book, Soulmates Dissipate. Her books have appeared on numerous bestseller lists, and she's a frequent contributor to "The Michael Baisden Show." She is also actively involved in a variety of philanthropic endeavors, and in 2006 she sponsored the publication of an anthology written by 33 sixth-graders. In 2010, she produced a play based on her novel, Single Husbands, which she wrote under her pseudonym, HoneyB. In addition to her novels and play, Morrison has a multi-film development deal with Codeblack Entertainment for her Soulmates Dissipate series. She currently resides in Oakland, CA, with her wonderful son, Jesse Byrd, Jr., who is following in his mother's creative footsteps and pursuing a career in TV/film and writing. Visit Mary online at www.marymorrison.com.

Jason Mott is a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and author of two poetry collections, who has been published in numerous literary journals. His debut novel, The Returned, was optioned by ABC Studios and will premier in January 2014 as an ABC-TV drama series produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B. Mott holds a BA in fiction and an MFA in poetry.

Michael Muller is a photographer, collage artist, and proprietor of the Mirabelle line of greeting cards. He and Mirabelle, a real Boston terrier, began their lives together in 2006. They live in Washington, D.C.

Elaine Neil Orr was born in Nigeria in 1954, the daughter of American missionaries. At four-year intervals, her family came to the U.S. on leave but otherwise she grew up on compounds in Nigerian towns, leaving the country at age sixteen to go to college in America. Her 2004 memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life, was a BookSense pick and SIBA Book Award Nominee. When Orr was a child, her mother gave her a diary from Lurana Bowman, about her and her husband's time in Africa as the first Southern Baptist missionaries there in the mid-1800s. She uses that as the genesis to write her touching novel centered around Emma and Henry Bowman.

Jim Ottaviani has written nonfiction, science-oriented comics since 1997, notably the number one New York Times bestseller, Feynman and Fallout which was nominated for an Ignatz Award. He has worked as a nuclear engineer, caddy, programmer, and reference librarian. Primates is his first collaboration with artist Maris Wicks. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Gyanendra Pandey is currently the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, and Director of Interdisciplinary Workshop in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, of the Department of History at Emory University. A founding member and leading theorist of the Subaltern Studies project, Pandey has written extensively on questions of violence, nationalism, marginality and citizenship. He has lectured and held teaching and visiting appointments at universities and research institutions in India, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia and the United States of America. His most recent work is A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste and Difference in India and the United States. Three of his books have been brought together in The Gyanendra Pandey Omnibus. One of them, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, has been reissued as an Oxford India Perennial to mark the centenary of Oxford University Press in 2012.

Susan Beth Pfeffer is the author of the best-selling novel Life As We Knew It, which was nominated for many state awards, and its companion books, The Dead & The Gone, This World We Live In, and The Shade of the Moon. She lives in Middletown, NY.

Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Speak Low, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives (and teaches at Washington University) in St. Louis.

Jerry Pinkney is a Caldecott medalist, five-time Caldecott Honor winner, five-time Coretta Scott King Award winner, and a United States nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award, among many other honors. Recently a member of the National Council of the Arts, he has also served on the U.S. Postal Service advisory committee. His books have been translated into sixteen languages and published in fourteen countries. A career retrospective, Witness: The Art of Jerry Pinkney, organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, will be on view at the High Museum of Art Atlanta from October 12, 2013 - January 5, 2014. He lives with his wife, the author Gloria Jean Pinkney, in Croton-on-Hudson, NY.Visit him at www.jerrypinkneystudio.com

Jane Porter, an award-winning novelist with over 5 million books in print, is still a small town girl at heart. When she was 13 her family moved to Europe for a year; she later spent much of her high school and college years abroad, studying in South Africa, Japan and Ireland. Armed with a Bachelors degree in American Studies from UCLA, followed by another six years in the teaching trenches of junior high school, she became a full-time fiction writer with an MA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Porter's first published novel, The Italian Groom, sold to Harlequin Presents in 2000. Since then, Jane has been prolific, penning 30 novels. With the publication of The Frog Prince Jane stayed close to home, using the backdrop of exciting San Francisco to look at the complex relationships between mothers, daughters and the men they love. Her second multi-bestselling modern lit novel, Flirting With Forty, set in Seattle and Hawaii. It was reprinted seven times in six weeks before being optioned by Sony for Lifetime TV. The film was one of Lifetime's three most successful films of 2008 and is now available on DVD at major retail stores. Mrs. Perfect, the follow up to Odd Mom Out pleased both the critics and readers. USA Today called Mrs. Perfect 'the perfect beach read'. Both are currently being developed into a television series. After sixteen years in Greater Seattle, she has returned to California, and is now making her home in a historic Ole Hanson home in San Clemente, with her surfer husband and three active sons. When she's not on the beach or speaking to writers, she's at her desk working on her next novel. She is excited about the September 2013 release of her new book, the last in a trilogy about sisters, The Good Wife.

Nate Powell is a New York Times best-selling comic book artist/writer born in Little Rock, AR, in 1978. He began self-publishing at age 14, and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2000. His work includes the critically acclaimed Any Empire, Swallow Me Whole (winner of the Eisner Award and Ignatz Award, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), The Year of the Beasts, The Silence of Our Friends, and Sounds of Your Name. Powell appeared at the United Nations in 2011, discussing his contribution to the fund-raising fiction anthology What You Wish For: A Book For Darfur alongside some of the world's foremost writers of young adult fiction. In addition to March, Powell is also currently drawing the graphic novel adaptation of Rick Riordan's #1 international bestseller Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero, while writing and drawing his own forthcoming graphic novel Cover and assembling the short story collection You Don't Say. Tickets are required, but they are free, limit 2 per person. Tickets will be available Monday, August 5 at 10AM by visiting or calling the Arts at Emory Box Office at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts at Emory University, 404.727.5050 or online at tickets.arts.emory.edu. Phone and online orders will incur a $4.00 processing fee. You can also pick up tickets at select local independent bookstores.

Christal Presley, PhD, is the founder of United Children of Veterans (www.unitedchildrenofveterans.com), a website that provides resources about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children of war veterans. She obtained her PhD in education in 2009, and is an instructional mentor teacher in Atlanta Public Schools. This is her first book.

Susan Puckett is a native of Jackson, Mississippi, and a graduate of the University of Mississippi. She was the food editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for eighteen years and has written for many national food and culture magazines. She is an author of six previous books, including A Cook's Tour of Mississippi and The 5:30 Challenge Cookbook. Puckett lives in Atlanta.

Ashok Rajamani lives in New York City. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Scholars & Rogues, South Asian Review, Danse Macabre, and 3:AM Magazine. This is his first book.

Sharman Burson Ramsey, genealogist and historian, discovered her Native American heritage and began writing a family saga beginning with Swimming With Serpents. This Alabama native and graduate of the University of Alabama (BSE) and Troy University (MSE) splits her time between Dothan, AL and Panama City, FL, with her husband. She writes on Southern culture on her website, southern-style.com.

Tom Rankin is director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Nikki Rashan's passion for writing began at the early age of 9 through her pre-adolescent Dear Diary entries. She chronicled her young life's daily activities, school-girl crushes, pre-teen emotions, and worldly observations. At age 12, she expanded her writing to include poetry and short stories. While admitting the story themes may have been a bit advanced for her age, she wrote tales of teen love and first experiences, which, unbeknownst to her, were previews of the sensual stories she'd later tell. It was in 1999 that she had the idea to write a novel, and 2001 when the inner nudge pressed even deeper. After years of struggling with revealing her truth, she wrote her first novel, Double Pleasure Double Pain, the story of Kyla, a woman who falls in love with another woman for the first time. Though the story is not a biography, Rashan wrote with first-hand experience of the battle some women face when struggling to let their true self shine. The sequel, You Make Me Wanna, continued to follow Kyla's journey of self-discovery. Cyber Case, her third novel, explores the intricacies of social networking and the detriment it can cause to a relationship. One of her greatest passions lies in helping others to honor their truth. In 2004, she shared her coming out story on Oprah with the hope of reaching out to other women who faced a similar inner crisis. The response was massive, as she received innumerable emails from gracious viewers whose stories resonated with hers. Rashan has been featured in Milwaukee Magazine, Swerv Magazine, Studs Magazine, MKE, and she also participated in the GayNeighbor.org campaign, which helped promote awareness and visibility of LGBT families throughout Southeastern Wisconsin. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California with her partner, Brandy. Together they have three girls. Nikki has been featured in Milwaukee Magazine, Swerv magazine, Studs magazine, mke, and she also participated in the GayNeighbor.org campaign, which helped promote awareness and visibility of LGBT families throughout Southeastern Wisconsin. Nikki currently resides in Los Angeles, California with her partner, Brandy. Together they have three girls.

Chelsea Rathburn is author of two poetry collections, A Raft of Grief and The Shifting Line. Her poems have been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and The New England Review, among other journals, and her prose has been published in Creative Nonfiction. In 2009, she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Decatur resident for the past ten years, she recently moved to Young Harris, Georgia, where she teaches English and creative writing at Young Harris College. She lives with her husband, the poet James Davis May, and their daughter, Adelyn.

Tony Rehagen is a senior editor at Atlanta magazine. His work has also appeared in Men's Health and Indianapolis Monthly. He has been a finalist for the City and Regional Magazine Association Writer of the Year award in each of the last four years.

Kathy Reichs, like her character Temperance Brennan, is a forensic anthropologist, formerly for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and for the province of Quebec. A professor in the department of anthropology at the UNC at Charlotte, she is one of only 88 forensic anthropologists ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, is past Vice President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and serves on the National Police Services Advisory Council in Canada.

Joey Reiman, named one of the 100 people who will change the way the world thinks by Fast Company,  is CEO and founder of the global consultancy, BrightHouse, a company whose sole purpose is to bring soul to the world of business. Father of ideation -- a term he coined -- Reiman has emerged as the subject matter expert in the area of purpose-inspired leadership, marketing and innovation. His breakthrough purpose methodology and frameworks have been adopted by the likes of Procter & Gamble, The Coca Cola Company, McDonald's and many other Fortune 500 companies across the globe. As a professor at the Goizueta School of Business at Emory University, he teaches tomorrow's executives his revolutionary theories and applications for purpose- inspired profit. Reiman's newest book, The Story of Purpose: The Path to Creating a Brighter Brand, a Greater Company, and a Lasting Legacy, promises to bring business back for good. It follows in the tradition of his wildly selling business book, Thinking For A Living, which spawned a movement celebrating the power of ideas. In April, 2012, Joey was the recipient of the Graham Executive in Residence at Sewanee University. In addition, he was the recipient of the Maynard Jackson Youth Foundation Ladder Award. Winner of hundreds of awards, Reiman says his greatest accolade is his self-proclaimed title of "Famillionaire," a person whose real wealth is in his family. In April, 2012, Joey was the recipient of the Graham Executive in Residence at Sewanee University. In addition, he was the recipient of the Maynard Jackson Youth Foundation Ladder Award. Winner of hundreds of awards, Reiman says his greatest accolade is his self-proclaimed title of "Famillionaire," a person whose real wealth is in his family.

Adam Rex is The New York Times best-selling author and illustrator of Frankenstein Makes A Sandwich. His other books include Pssst!, The True Meaning of Smekday, Fat Vampire, and Cold Cereal. He also illustrated the Brixton Brothers series, Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem, and Chloe and the Lion, all by Mac Barnett and Chu's Day by Neil Gaiman. He lives in Tucson.

Aaron Reynolds is a New York Times best-selling author and has written many highly acclaimed books for kids, including Carnivores, Creepy Carrots!, Chicks and Salsa, Back of the Bus, and the Joey Fly, Private Eye graphic novel series. He has a passion for kids' books and seeing kids reading them. He regularly makes time to visit schools where his hilarious hands-on presentations keep kids spellbound. Aaron lives in Chicago with his wife, two kids, four cats, and anywhere between zero and ten goldfish, depending on the day.

Amanda Ripley is a literary journalist whose stories on human behavior and public policy have appeared in TIME magazine, The Atlantic, and Slate. She helped TIME win two National Magazine Awards. To discuss her work, she has appeared on ABC, NBC, CNN, FOX News, and NPR. Ripley's first book, The Unthinkable, was published in fifteen countries and turned into a PBS documentary.

Daniel Winunwe Rivers is associate research scholar at the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Randy Roberts is Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University. Many of his books have examined sports and popular culture in America. He has served frequently as a consultant and on-camera commentator for PBS, HBO, and the History Channel. He lives in Lafayette, IN, with his wife, Marjie, and his Shih Tzu, Coco.

Gil L. Robertson IV is one of America's foremost authorities on African American pop culture. As a journalist, author, lecturer and media consultant, he is responsible for literary works and intellectual properties that provide platforms for social change and personal growth. Robertson is the editor of the bestselling anthology, Where Did Our Love Go: Love and Relationships in the African American Community. He is also the author of Writing as a Tool of Empowerment, a resource book for aspiring journalists, and is a regular contributor to The African American Almanac. Robertson's first children's book, Great African American Political Leaders that will be released in 2014. He is also a popular national lecturer who speaks on issues that impact professional growth strategies and personal development. Robertson is a co-founder and President of the African American Film Critics Association. He is also the founder of the Robertson Treatment's Media Workshop, an annual journalism initiative presented at the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Robertson earned a B.A. degree in Political Science from California State University, Los Angeles. He is the founder and editor of the nationally syndicated column, the "Robertson Treatment." Now in its 16th year, the column appears in 30 newspapers across the country boasting a readership in excess of 2 million. Over his career Robertson has written over 50 national magazine covers and has also penned stories for the Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Billboard, Essence and Ebony magazines. He is a professional member of the National Press Club, The National Association of Black Journalists, The National Academy of Recording Arts & Science, The National Academy of Television Arts and Science and The Motion Picture Academy. Robertson is currently producing two documentaries based on his earlier works.

Kimberla Lawson Roby is The New York Times best-selling author of the acclaimed Reverend Curtis Black Series. A House Divided is her 19th novel. She is winner of the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction as well as the recipient of the 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Author of the Year – Female award presented by the African-American Literary Award Show in New York. Roby has sold more than 2 million copies of her books. She resides in Illinois with her husband, Will.

Bill Roorbach is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction. His work has been published in Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and dozens of other magazines and journals.

Gillian Royes'  personal mantra of "Leave no stone unturned" has led to a life of adventure in five countries. It was not her intention to become a writer, although she was a prolific journal-keeper from the age of 12. But after being an editor, an entrepreneur, a corporate executive, a communications consultant, a project manager and a university lecturer, the only occupation left to her was writing. Born in Jamaica on the shores of Kingston Harbor, she left the island to attend Colorado College in Colorado Springs -- the beginning of her life journey. She experienced California in the mid sixties, Europe in the late sixties, Brazil in the early seventies, the heyday of youth empowerment. She authored her first book, Business is Good, a history of the Canning's Corporation, a historical Caribbean company, while living in Trinidad. Atlanta was calling, however, and she returned to work as a communications consultant, and to lecture at Clark Atlanta and Georgia State Universities. Now living in the US Virgin Islands, she writes and teaches journalism, the gorgeous Caribbean Sea within sight every day.

Jacqueline Jones Royster is a professor of English and Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her previous books include Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women and Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803-2003.

Rachel Renée Russell is an attorney who prefers writing tween books to legal briefs. (Mainly because books are a lot more fun and pajamas and bunny slippers aren't allowed in court.) Rachel lives in Chantilly, VA.

Marie Rutkoski is the author of The Kronos Chronicles. The Cabinet of Wonders, her debut novel, was named an Indie Next Kids' List Great Read and a Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year, among other honors. Rutkoski grew up in Bolingbrook, IL, as the oldest of four children. She attended the University of Iowa, where she took Writers' Workshop classes and studied with Pulitzer Prizewinner James Alan McPherson. After graduating, she lived in Moscow and Prague. Upon receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard, she held dual appointments as a lecturer there in both English and American Literature and Language, and History and Literature. Rutkoski is currently a professor at Brooklyn College, where she teaches Renaissance Drama, children's literature and creative writing. She lives in New York City.

Rebecca Ryan is a human spark plug. Part futurist, part economist, and always engaging, she is one of the most influential futurists and experts on generational behaviors working today. Ryan's previous book Live First, Work Second: Getting Inside the Head of the Next Generation is considered a must-read for leaders of cities and companies. In the book's forward, best-selling author Dr. Richard Florida calls Ryan "One of the most reliable sources for leaders who want to attract and retain the next generation of creative workers." After earning a degree in Economics and International Relations from Drake University, Ryan founded Next Generation Consulting, a marketing research firm committed to helping cities and companies think around the corner to what's next. Ryan is the Resident Futurist at the Alliance for Innovation, a Senior Fellow at CEOs for Cities and named by Accounting Today in its Top 100 Most Influential People.

Dan Santat is the author/illustrator of Sidekicks and the winner of the Silver Medal from the Society of Illustrators for Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World) by Mac Barnett. He lives in Los Angeles.

Caleb Scharf is the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center. He writes the Life, Unbounded blog for Scientific American; has written for New Scientist, Science, and Nature, among other publications; and has served as a consultant for the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, The New York Times, and more. Scharf has served as a keynote speaker for the American Museum of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art, and is the author of Extrasolar Planets and Astrobiology, winner of the 2011 Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award from the American Astronomical Society. He lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters.

Pamela Schoenewaldt lived for ten years in a small town outside Naples, Italy. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines in England, France, Italy and the United States. She taught writing for the University of Maryland, European Division and the University of Tennessee and now lives in Knoxville, with her husband, Maurizio Conti, a physicist, and their dog, Jesse.

Anderson Scott is a photographer and lawyer from Atlanta. He has an MFA from Yale University.

Bob Shacochis, a contributing editor for Outside and Harper's, has been a GQ columnist and writer for numerous other national publications. He is the author of Easy in the Islands, a collection of stories; the novel Swimming in the Volcano; a work of literary reportage about Haiti, The Immaculate Invasion; a second collection of stories, The Next New World; and a collection of essays on food and love, Domesticity.

Rob Sheffield is a columnist for Rolling Stone, where he has been writing about music, TV, and pop culture since 1997. He is the author of two national bestsellers. Love Is a Mix Tape: Love and Loss, One Song at a Time and Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut. He also appears regularly on VH1. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn.

Dave Sheinin has been covering sports and writing features and enterprise stories for The Washington Post since 1999, and has spent the past year focused on Robert Griffin III's rookie year as quarterback for the Washington Redskins. Sheinin's work has been recognized with awards six times by the Associated Press Sports Editors, and in 2010 he received a first-place National Headliner Award for sportswriting for his season-long coverage of Stephen Strasburg's rookie year with the Washington Nationals. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, where he studied English and music and trained as an opera singer, Sheinin lives in Maryland with his wife and their two daughters.

Sara Shepard's first story ever, which she both wrote and illustrated, was about friendly yellow creatures that lived in a backyard garden. It won second prize at the State College, Pennsylvania, library, and was bound and placed on the shelf. Her second story was about a five-legged camel named Lloyd and his band of friends journeying through the human circulatory system. When Shepard was young, the thing she wanted most to be when she grew was a writer. She grew up in Pennyslvania, on Philadelphia's Main Line, and went to college at New York University. She had a series of jobs -- interning at Elle magazine, filing important documents at J.P. Morgan, and writing and editing at Time Inc. At each of these jobs, she kept a separate folder on her computer of stories she wrote when she had free time. Eventually, she got an MFA at Brooklyn College. Shepard did have all these ideas when preparing for her young adult series, Pretty Little Liars It's now thirteen books strong – the thirteenth in the series, Crushed. She's also the author of an adult novel, The Visibles, as well as the reluctant parent of three slobbery dogs. She and her sister, Alison, have also been creating many joint creative projects for years based on a world they made up when they were 6 and 9 years old. They're pretty sure they're the only ones who find the world funny, though.

Joel Shepherd is the author of three previous novels in the Cassandra Kresvovseries -- Crossover, Breakaway, and Killswitch -- and four previous novels in the Trial of Blood and Steel series -- Sasha, Petrodor, Tracato, and Haven. He is currently midway through a doctoral program in International Relations. Shepherd has also studied film and television, interned on Capitol Hill in Washington, and traveled widely in Asia.

Robert Sherer is an internationally exhibiting artist who explores race, gender, sexuality, and Southern identity in his work. He is best known for his use of unconventional media and for four incidents of art censorship. Sherer represented the USA in the 2002 Triennale de Paris, the 2001 Florence Biennale and was awarded a Lorenzo de Medici (il Magnifico) medal for his mixed media work in the 2007 Florence Biennale. Art galleries currently representing his work are Kunstbehandlung Galerie, Munich, Lyman-Eyer Gallery, Provincetown, MA, and Kibbee Gallery in Atlanta. His work is the subject of an art book titled Blood Works: the Sanguineous Art of Robert Sherer, published by the KSU Press. He is a professor of art at Kennesaw State University.

Jeff Shinabarger is a social entrepreneur, experience designer, cofounder of the "Q event," and creative director at "Catalyst." He is also the founder of "GiftCardGiver.com" and "Plywood People," an innovative community addressing social needs through creative services. He and his family live in East Atlanta Village.

Laurie Shock is president of Shock Design Books, an independent publishing house in Atlanta that specializes in finely-crafted books covering a wide range of genres with an emphasis on art and photography books. She has designed and produced over two hundred books, including Isaac Asimov's Library of the Universe book series and A Century of Women, the companion book to the Turner Broadcasting series. Among her clients are The Centers for Disease Control, The Carter Center, Shepherd Center, the American Cancer Society, Longstreet Press, Peachtree Publishers, and Fall Line Press. Her books have been published internationally, including a children's cancer memoir published in Japan. Her books have won multiple awards including International Book Awards, CASE Circle of Excellence, Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs), and Benjamin Franklin Book Awards. She designed and produced the documentary photography book, Bottom of da Boot, by Kael Alford, the fine-art photography book, America 101, by Arthur Grace, both to accompany exhibits at Atlanta's High Museum of Art. She wrote and published How to Publish Your Own Photography Book, which was named the best book in 2013 on writing and publishing by the IPPY Awards in 2013, and the best How-To Photography Book in 2013 by the International Book Awards.

Skyy, born April Blair, is a 28-year-old author, screenwriter and playwright from Memphis. Her first novel, Choices was released in 2006 and quickly gained popularity both within the gay, lesbian and urban fiction community. The highly anticipated sequel, Consequences was released three years later. Since the release of Choices, Skyy has been a featured guest on the "Michael Baisden Show." In 2010 she debuted her first sold out stage play entitled III (Three), receiving high praise. Skyy was raised by her grandmother, aunt and uncle in a close-knit church. Being exposed to the truths about her mother's drug addiction at a young age, something her grandmother had attempted to hide for many years, became a constant reminder that she was different. She didn't look, talk or act like the people she grew up around. With teachers in the home, her somewhat "proper" demeanor caused her to stand out; she was bullied, teased and called names like "White Girl". It was in high school when she came into her own, finally embracing the things other considered strange about her, no longer hiding her love for the arts, nor her sexuality. She began to lead, becoming involved in major roles. It was during this time that she took on her nickname. It was during a short stint in university that Skyy found her true passion. Two years in, she realized university life was not for her, and finally embraced her love of women, coming out at the age of 22. A year later she experienced her first lesbian love. One night whilst laying on her couch in a drunken daze, she began to hear voices. Unsure, but wanting to explore, she began to write. The characters instantly came alive. Three days later, she had the first draft to her debut novel. Her fiction blurs the lines between lesbian and straight communities. The books resonate with truisms among women of all ages and gender identities. She is hoping to take her novels and other projects to the big and small screens in the near future.

Karin Slaughter is The New York Times and #1 internationally best-selling author of Criminal, Fallen, Broken, Undone, Beyond Reach, Triptych, Faithless, Indelible, A Faint,Cold Fear, Kisscut, and Blindsighted; she contributed to and edited Like a Charm. To date, her books have been translated into over thirty languages. She is a native of Atlanta, where she currently lives, and is working on her next novel.

Laura Lee Smith's short fiction was selected by guest editor Amy Hempel for inclusion in New Stories from the South 2010. Her work has also been published in The Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Bayou, and other journals. She has taught creative writing at Flagler College and works as an advertising copywriter.

Manil Suri, a native of Mumbai, is a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of The Death of Vishnu, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and The Age of Shiva.

Brian Switek is an online columnist for National Geographic and is the author of Written in Stone. He has written for Smithsonian, Wired, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Nature, Scientific American, and other publications. His examinations of fossil discoveries have been featured by the BBC and NPR. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Nicholas Tecosky, a writer and filmmaker, is the host of Write Club Atlanta.

Amy Tintera grew up in Texas and now lives in Los Angeles. She has degrees in journalism and film and can usually be found staring into space, dreaming up ways to make her characters run for their lives.

Charles Todd is the author of the Bess Crawford mysteries, the Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries, and two stand-alone novels. A mother and son writing team, they live in Delaware and North Carolina.

Rich Tommaso has been writing and illustrating original comics and graphic novels for 19 years, working with various publishers including: Fantagraphics Books, Dark Horse Comics, Top Shelf Productions, Chronicle Books, Hyperion Books For Children and Alternative Comics. Many of his works have also been translated into two languages: Spanish (Ediciones La Cupula) and French (Editions Ca Et La). His works have been favorably reviewed in Publisher's Weekly, SPIN Magazine, CBG, Wizard, The New York Times Book Review and The Comics Journal. His last graphic novel with writer James Sturm, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, received great praise by The New York Times and in 2008 won him an Eisner award for Best Reality-Based Work.

Kate Tuttle writes "In Brief," a weekly book review column for The Boston Globe. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, Atlantic, and the Boston Book Review. She was a contributing writer for Parenting Magazine, Babble, executive editor of the African American National Biography project at Harvard University, and founding managing editor of Africana.com.

Megan Volpert is the editor of This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013). She is the author of four books on communication and popular culture, most notably about Andy Warhol. Volpert lives in Atlanta, where she has been teaching high school English for the better part of a decade. Predictably, www.meganvolpert.com is her website.

Bobbin Wages runs Hot Dog Beehonkus, a blog comprising humorous, joyful, and gut-wrenching stories about her father's progression through Alzheimer's disease. Wages also contributes to Scene Missing Magazine and has read essays at local literary events such as Write Club Atlanta, Titans of Talking, and PUSH; check out her personal website for a listing of upcoming readings. Wages lives in Atlanta with her husband and two cat-children.

Cassandra Wanzo is a highly experienced psychiatrist serving the Atlanta area for over two decades. She has been helping individuals struggling with depression, anxiety, stress, women's issues and lifestyle management. Dr. Wanzo has been frequently quoted as an expert source by a variety of publications such as Upscale magazine and Heart and Soul Magazine. Dr. Wanzos's column, "The MindBodySpirit Connection" is also featured in the Girlfriends Health Guide. She also has been quoted in the book Let's All Get High, by Olympic gold medalist Derrick Adkins. As an Atlanta psychiatrist, Dr. Wanzo incorporates multiple techniques and treatments and psychiatric interventions to help resolve the emotional challenges holding patients back in their lives. Her supportive and non-judgmental psychotherapy encourages individuals to reach their full potential. She specializes in affective disorders, addictive disorders, psychopharmacology, women's issues and transcultural psychiatry.

Jessica Wapner is a freelance science writer focused mainly on health care and medicine. Her work has appeared in publications including Scientific American, Slate, The New York Times, theatlantic.com, New York, Science, Nature Medicine, the Ecologist, the Scientist, and Psychology Today. Her writing on cancer research and treatment has also appeared in the patient-focused magazines CR and Cure, and she has been a frequent contributor to the industry publication Oncology Business Review. She lives with her family in Beacon, NY.

Kent Wascom was born in New Orleans in 1986, attended Louisiana State University and received his MFA from Florida State University. He was awarded the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for Fiction. The Blood of Heaven is his first novel.

Robin Wasserman is the author of The Book of Blood Shadow, the Seven Deadly Sins series, Hacking Harvard, and the Skinned trilogy, which bestselling author Scott Westerfeld called "spellbinding." She has a master's degree in the history of science, and is fascinated by Renaissance philosophy, religion, magic, science, and the interplay among them. Her next novel, The Waking Dark combines the best elements of horror and literary thriller with bestselling author Cassandra Clare calling it, "a book you won't soon forget." Follow her on Twitter (@robinwasserman).

Wendy Wax is the author of eight previous novels, including Ocean Beach and Ten Beach Road. Her books have been highly praised and featured in national publications such as USA Today, Cosmopolitan, FIRST for Women, and Woman's World. A Florida native, Wax lives in Atlanta.

Teresa K. Weaver writes a monthly book column for Atlanta magazine and serves as Editorial Director at Habitat for Humanity International. Formerly the book editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she was elected to the board of the National Book Critics Circle for six years and was a longtime member of the Southern Book Critics Circle.

Gina Webb has reviewed books for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 2009. Her reviews appeared in Creative Loafing from 1980-1998, where she also served as contributing writer and music editor. Between newspapers, she worked as editor, writer, and researcher for Longstreet Press, Turner Publishing, Lionheart Books and other Atlanta publishers. She blogs on books at www.gswebb.wordpress.com.

Robert Weintraub is the author of The House That Ruth Built and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times sports pages. He is a sports columnist of Slate, and his writing has also aired on ESPN, ABC Sports, CBS Sports, and dozens of other outlets. He lives in Decatur.

Scott S. Weiss is President and CEO of Speakeasy, a globally renowned communications consulting. The company works with executives and teams in developing the impact and effectiveness of their communication, both internally with staff and externally with their clients. Last year the company worked with some 3500 executives in 10 countries. Clients include CSX, Cisco, Norfolk Southern, Accenture, Coca-Cola, and numerous Fortune 500 companies. Weiss is also the author of the new bestselling book Dare: Accepting the Challenge of Trusting Leadership. Weiss emphasized the need for business leaders to "make their word good and be as good as their word", promoting consistent and authentic communication as the required means of mending the trust breach in our culture. Weiss was one of the founding members of Turner Broadcasting, serving as Executive Vice President for Turner Private Networks and Turner Home Satellite. In this capacity, Weiss had direct P&L responsibility for this sdivision responsible for the sales and marketing to affiliates of CNN, TNT, and all the Turner networks. Weiss' own transformational experience began with an executive communications workshop at Speakeasy. Forced to re-examine his own presentation and public speaking habits. Within a year after his initial introduction to Speakeasy, Weiss left Turner and went to work for Speakeasy. Ten years later he bought the company and became CEO. His own humbling and hard-earned lessons about the importance of authentic communication became his life's mission, compellingly presented in "DARE". Weiss is the founder of the T. Howard Foundation, a non-profit that promotes diversity in the broadcast and electronic media industry. He also serves as an "Emmy" voting member and serves on the Board of Advisors of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

Shayne Wheeler is the founding pastor of All Souls Fellowship in Decatur, Georgia, an eclectic and funky church about five miles east of downtown Atlanta. Prior to starting All Souls, Shayne served churches in Missouri, Virginia, and the suburbs of Atlanta. Before he became a professional Christian, he was a shoe salesman, mattress mover, warehouse worker, and waiter in a few different restaurants. He met his wife, Carrie, at Western Kentucky University, and she quickly became his best friend. They married in 1992 and now share a very noisy home with their three busy kids and two very articulate but mostly illiterate dogs. In his free time, Shayne enjoys exercising, traveling with his family, riding motorcycles, and reading quietly on his awesome front porch. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy and religion from Western Kentucky University, and an MDiv from Covenant Theological Seminary.

Karen White knew she wanted to be a writer -- or become Scarlett O'Hara -- after playing hooky one day in the seventh grade to read Gone with the Wind. In spite of these aspirations, she pursued a degree in business and graduated cum laude with a BS in Management from Tulane University. Ten years later, after leaving the business world, she fulfilled her dream of becoming a writer and wrote her first book, In the Shadow of the Moon. This book was nominated for the prestigious RITA award in 2001 in two separate categories. Her books have since been nominated for numerous national contests including two more RITAs, the Georgia Author of the Year Award and she has twice won the National Readers' Choice Award for her novels, Learning to Breathe and On Folly Beach. White currently writes what she refers to as 'grit lit' -- southern women's fiction -- and has recently expanded her horizons into writing a bestselling mystery series set in Charleston. White hails from a long line of Southerners but spent most of her growing up years in London, England. She currently lives near Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, two children, and a spoiled Havanese dog named Quincy (who also appears in several of her books).

Susan Rebecca White earned a B.A. in English from Brown University, then moved to San Francisco where she taught and waited tables for several years before moving to Virginia to earn her MFA in creative writing at Hollins University. At Hollins she was a teaching fellow and the recipient of the James Purdy prize for outstanding fiction. Her debut novel, Bound South, received wide critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Townsend Prize. Bound South was followed by A Soft Place to Land, also critically acclaimed and a Target "Club Pick." Susan's third novel, A Place at the Table, is receiving early praise and was on the American Booksellers Association "Indie Next List" for June of 2013. The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) also selected A Place at the Table as a 2013 Summer "Okra Pick." She has been invited to festivals and book events around the country, and has been a speaker at numerous academic and cultural institutions, including SCAD Atlanta, the Carter Center, the Margaret Mitchell house, and Birmingham's Hoover library. Susan appeared in the February 2011 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, in a photograph and accompanying essay celebrating women authors living in Atlanta. During the summer of 2011, Susan lived in Manhattan so she could have on-the-ground knowledge of the city, and so that she could better research the history of Café Nicholson, the real-life restaurant that inspired Café Andres in A Place at the Table. White currently lives in Atlanta where she teaches creative writing at Emory University. During the winter of 2011 she was the writer-in-residence at SCAD Atlanta. She is married to Sam Redburn Reid, also an Atlanta native, meaning she and Sam both grew up eating Varsity hamburgers and riding the Pink Pig at the Rich's downtown.

Henry Wiencek, a nationally prominent historian and writer, is the author of several books, including The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999, and An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. His most recent book is Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. He lives with his wife in Charlottesville, VA.

Victoria Wilcox was born in California to a pioneer Hollywood film industry family and grew up loving dramatic stories of all kinds, especially those with a sense of history. As a young woman she developed a passion for the stories of royal families found in English historical fiction. She began her college career as a Medieval English History major before receiving a degree in English Literature and doing graduate work in Playwriting. In her professional life she has been a teacher of English and composition on the college level and worked as a technical writer and instructional designer for industry and universities. A move to Atlanta, Georgia inspired a love of all things Southern. Wilcox founded a non-profit organization to save Holliday House and turn it into a museum site. It was while researching the history of the house and its former owners that she discovered the untold story that led to Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday. Victoria Wilcox is a member of the Western Writers of America. Her writings are featured in such publications as True West Magazine, North Georgia Journal, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. As Founding Director of the Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House Museum she has lectured extensively and been a guest on various television programs. To celebrate the release of Inheritance, the first book of Southern Son: The Saga of Doc Holliday, she began a national speaking tour in the fall of 2012 with a return to Tombstone, AZ, site of Doc Holliday's legendary gunfight at the OK Corral. Gone West, book two of the saga, will be released in May 2014.

Amanda Kyle Williams has contributed to numerous short story collections and worked as a freelance writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In order to lend authenticity to her Keye Street series, she studied criminal profiling under Brent Turvey, a nationally known criminologist and profiler, took courses geared to law enforcement in serial homicide investigation, worked with a PI firm in her hometown of Atlanta on surveillance operations, became a court appointed process server, and consulted with professionals in bond and law enforcement. Williams' third Keye Street thriller, Don't Talk to Strangers, is due out February 2014.

Mary Williams's work has appeared in The Believer, McSweeney's, and O: The Oprah Magazine. She is the author of the children's book Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan. She lives in the Southwest. She is Jane Fonda's adoptive daughter.

Naomi Wolf is the author of seven books, including The New York Times bestsellers The Beauty Myth, Promiscuities, Misconceptions, The End of America, and Give Me Liberty. She speaks to audiences in the US and globally about feminism, social justice and the defense of civil freedoms. She writes for The New Republic, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, and the London Sunday Times, among many other publications. She writes a weekly column for The Guardian US and a monthly column for Project Syndicate, which is reproduced in newspapers around the world. A graduate of Yale University, she was a Rhodes Scholar. She is currently working toward a doctorate in Victorian literature and its discourses about sexuality at New College, Oxford University. She lives with her family in New York City.

Margaret Wrinkle is a writer, filmmaker, educator, and visual artist. Her award-winning documentary, broken\ground, about the racial divide in her historically conflicted hometown, was featured on NPR's "Morning Edition" and it won the Council on Foundations Film Festival.

Rick Yancey is the author of several adult novels and the memoir Confessions of a Tax Collector. His first young-adult novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. In 2010, his novel, The Monstrumologist, received the Michael L. Printz Honor, and the sequel, The Curse of the Wendigo, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. When he isn't writing or thinking about writing or traveling the country talking about writing, Yancey is hanging out with his family.

Joe Yonan is the food and travel editor for The Washington Post, where he writes regular features, including the monthly "Cooking for One" column that inspired his first book, Serve Yourself. Yonan has won awards for writing and editing from the James Beard Foundation, the Association of Food Journalists, and the Society of American Travel Writers, and his work has been featured three times in the Best Food Writing anthology.

Kevin Young is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation, one who finds meaning and inspiration in African American music, particularly the blues, and in the bittersweet history of Black America. Lucille Clifton said of Young, "[His] gift of storytelling and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American." Young was a 1993 National Poetry Series winner for Most Way Home, which also received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award of Ploughshares magazine. Other collections include To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor, a poetic tribute to painter and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; and Jelly Roll: A Blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Young's poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Callaloo. His awards include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. He is currently Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English, and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Karen Spears Zacharias is a daughter of Appalachia, a descendant of founding families of Hawkins County, TN. She learned the craft of storytelling from her aunt Cil Christian of Christian Bend, TN. She is the author of A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of Murder. Zacharias has written for The Huffington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and National Public Radio. She teaches at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington.

Zane is The New York Times best-selling author of 27 titles. In addition to writing, Zane is the publisher of Strebor Books International, an imprint of ATRIA/Simon and Schuster. Under Strebor, Zane is responsible for acquiring dozens of titles per year and currently has more than 75 authors under her imprint including the Honorable Judge Greg Mathis, R & B singer and radio personality Keith Sweat and New York Times best-selling author Omar Tyree. In December 2005, Strebor Books became the first major publishing house to implement an independent sales representative program. In 2007, Zane launched two new lines of books and published a record 60 titles. In 2009, she launched another line of books called Strebor Quickiez. She is also the producer of the upcoming film adaption of her NY Times bestselling novel, Addicted the Cinemax series, The Sex Chronicles and Zane's the Jump Off, which premiered in March, 2013

Fiona Zedde  was born in Jamaica and currently lives and writes in Atlanta. She is the author of several novellas and novels of lesbian love and desire, including the Lambda Literary Award finalists Bliss and Every Dark Desire. Her novel, Dangerous Pleasures, was winner of the About.com Readers' Choice Award for Best Lesbian Novel or Memoir of 2012. Her new book, Broken in Soft Places, is out now.