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Where Awesome Book Readers Meet Awesome Writers

1. The Pat O’Malley Historical Steampunk Mystery Trilogy by Jim Musgrave
   Jim Musgrave (1946-) was born in Fall River, Massachusetts (home to Lizzie Borden). He worked for Caltech in Pasadena (home of the "Big Bang Theory") and continues to use his fascination with technology in his "Detective Pat O'Malley Steampunk Mystery" series. Jim was also a professor of English for 24 years, and he runs an editing business with his wife, Ellen, in San Diego. He has won many awards, including being a finalist in the Bram Stoker Awards and the Heekin Foundation Awards.
2. The Terminus by Oliver Eade
   A physician, born in London now living in the Scottish Borders, Oliver Eade has published over forty short stories and four children’s novels. One, Moon Rabbit, a winner of the WAAYB 2007 New Novel Competition, was long-listed for the 2008 Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize. His debut adult novel, A Single Petal, set in Tang Dynasty China (Oliver’s wife is Chinese) was the winner of the 2012 Local Legend Writing Competition and his first young adult novel, The Terminus, has just been published. His one act surreal play, The Gap, went on tour in the Scottish Borders in 2012 and he was also SCPSW 2010 ‘Writer of the Year’. Oliver follows no particular genre but is often drawn to that space that lies between reality and fantasy – the space into and out of which children slip so easily in their play, the place of myths and legends and the magical realism of Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. He is also a keen photographer, having completed a diploma in photography.
3. Night Chill
   Jeff Gunhus is the author of the Middle Grade/YA series The Templar Chronicles. The first book, Jack Templar Monster Hunter, was written in an effort to get his reluctant reader eleven-year old son excited about reading. It worked and a new series was born. Jeff is also the co-CEO of a national company with over 4,000 employees that has been featured in national media for its unique opportunity for college students to learn entrepreneurial skills. He is the author of the motivational career guides No Parachute Required (Hyperion) and Wake Up Call (Seven Guns Press). After his experience with his son, he is passionate about helping parents reach young reluctant readers and is active in child literacy issues. As a father of five, he leads an active lifestyle in Maryland with his wife Nicole by trying to constantly keep up with his kids. In rare moments of quiet, he can be found in the back of the City Dock Cafe in Annapolis working on his next novel
4. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Other People in Norman Rockwell’s America by Jane Allen Petrick
   The nuns told me I ought to be a writer way back when I was a fourteen year old freshman at Notre Dame Girls’ High School. But I didn’t want to hear it. I did not want to be a writer. I did not want the isolation that sets in when a writer gets into “the zone”, what the author Mavis Gallant calls “the plunging in (that) frightens me.” So I set off to Barnard College and majored in Economics. But life is what happens when we’ve made other plans. After completing a doctorate in Organizational Psychology, I established my own consulting practice. One of my clients, who had connections with Addison-Wesley, told the publishing house about my psychological approach to time management. The next thing I knew, I had written and published Beyond Time Management: Organizing the Organization. Then one of my in-laws began dating a staff writer at Ridge Press/ Routledge Books. During a cocktail party, he bemoaned the fact that he had an assignment to write a biography of Otis Redding for young adult readers and he didn’t know where to begin. Without thinking (maybe it was the cocktails), I began babbling on about research steps that were, thanks to a good liberal arts education and the gauntlet of earning a doctorate, second nature to me. The nextthing I knew, I had a contract with Ridge Press and had written and published The Otis Redding Story. The final confirmation of my destiny to write came with my first “in-house” job as a Ph.D: a corporate directorship with Knight Ridder, the newspaper syndicate. When the Business Monday editor of The Miami Herald asked me, during lunch one day in the staff dining room, about topics for a psychologically healthy workplace column. . . you guessed it. I started babbling again and ended up publishing an article every two weeks for the next four years on the Knight Ridder Newswire. Three times the charm. I went on to write articles numerous other publications including The New York Times, Stepping Stone Magazine and Chronogram. My work at Knight Ridder and subsequently at ATT Wireless led to my writing two books on creating and maintaining mentally healthy workplaces, and to my being named by Ebony Magazine as "one of the best and brightest business women in America." I now happily embrace the power of good writing (including, hopefully, my own writing) to explain, inform and improve each of our lives. It is my hope that my writing will do that for you, and that you will gain as much from reading it as I have learned from creating it for you.