Mike Albo

Mike Albo, MA creative writing, Columbia, authored the novels Hornito, The Underminer (with Heffernan), the novellas The Junket and Spermhood, and the plays Sexotheque, Three Women in Indecision, and The Junket (adapted from his novella). He has written columns and articles in countless sources including The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The Village Voice. He has also appeared on stage and screen. Read the Wikipedia page about him here.

Sherry Audette Morrow

Sherry Audette Morrow is the founding editor of Scribble magazine (www.scribblemagazine.us) where she publishes poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction. She is also a freelance writer and editor, and a past president of the Maryland Writers’ Association. Her articles, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in various publications in the U.S. and Canada, including Chesapeake Life, Baltimore magazine, New Lines from the Old Line State, and Mean Girls Grown Up: Adult Women Who Are Still Mean Bees, Middle Bees and Afraid-To-Bees. She is currently working on two novels.

John Beckman

John Beckman’s first novel, The Winter Zoo (Henry Holt), was a New York Times Notable Book of 2002. His nonfiction American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt (Pantheon, February 2014) is praised as “at once learned, thrilling, splendidly written and wicked smart…the best book I’ve read about popular culture in ages—or ever.”—Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Beckman’s stories and essays have appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Washington Post, Arizona Quarterly, and Book magazine. A professor of English at the United States Naval Academy, he has taught novel-writing workshops at The Writer’s Center, Bethesda, Maryland. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland with his wife, the critic Marcela Valdes, and their baby daughter. (Photo by Michael Lionstar)

Harrison Demchick

Harrison Demchick is an award-winning, twice-optioned screenwriter, and the author of literary horror novel The Listeners (Bancroft Press, 2012), and the editor of novels as diverse as Purple Jesus and Hume’s Fork by Ron Cooper, The Trials of the Core by Michael E. Thies, Renhala by Amy Joy Lutchen, The Understory and The Sinful Life of Lucy Burns by Elizabeth Leiknes, the Young Inventors Guild novels by Eden Unger Bowditch, The Goddess Letters by Vicki Matthews, and a couple dozen more.

Barbara Westwood Diehl

Deborah Furchtgott

Deborah Furchtgott is a PhD candidate in Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard.  She writes a children’s book review blog covering picture books to YA novels at The Children’s Bookroom.

2/1/15 Guest Blogger Clifford Garstang

Clifford Garstang’s collection of short stories, In an Uncharted Country, won the Maria Thomas Fiction Award and the IPPY Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction–Mid-Atlantic 2010. His novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know, won the 2013 Library of Virginia Award for Fiction. Most recently, Garstang served as curator and editor of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, published in 2014. He is also editor of Prime Number Magazine. Garstang’s work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Blackbird, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Cream City Review, Tampa Review, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere and has received Distinguished Mention in the Best American Series.

Barb Goffman

Barb Goffman is an award-winning writer of crime short stories. In 2013, her first story collection, Don’t Get

Mad, Get Even, was published by Wildside Press. Her stories have also appeared in several anthologies. Barb runs a

freelance crime-fiction editing service to support her short-story habit, and she co-edits the award-winning

Chesapeake Crimes series. Learn more at www.barbgoffman.com.

Eric D. Goodman

Eric D. Goodman writes about trains, wombs, and animals gone wild. He’s the author of Tracks: A Novel in Stories and Flightless Goose, a storybook for children. Learn more about Eric and his writing at www.EricDGoodman.com. He also invites you to connect at www.facebook.com/EricDGoodman.

Peter Gordon

Peter M. Gordon’s poems have appeared in Slipstream, 34th Parallel, the Provo Canyon Review, 5-2 Crime Poetry, Cultural Weekly, and several other magazines and websites. He’s President of the Orlando Area Poets and teaches in Full Sail University’s Film Production MFA program. His collection, Two Car Garage, was published by CHB Media and is available on Amazon.com and other bookselling sites.

Tawnysha Greene

Tawnysha Greene received her PhD from the University of Tennessee where she served as the fiction editor for Grist: The Journal for Writers. Her work has appeared in PANK, Bellingham Review, and Weave Magazine. Her first novel, A House Made of Stars, was released from Burlesque Press in 2015.

David Marshall Hunt

Kelly Ann Jacobson

Kelly Ann Jacobson is a fiction writer, poet, and lyricist who lives in Falls Church, Va. She received an MFA in Fiction at Johns Hopkins University, and she now teaches as an Adjunct Professor of English. Kelly is the author of the novels, Cairo in White and The Troublemakers, as well as several other books of poetry and prose. Her work can be found here.

Nancy Lynn Jarvis

Mystery author Nancy Lynn Jarvis finally acknowledged she’s having too much fun writing to ever sell another house and let her license lapse in May, 2013, after her twenty-fifth anniversary in real estate. After earning a BA in behavioral science from San Jose State University, she worked in the advertising department of the San Jose Mercury News. A move to Santa Cruz meant a new job as a librarian and later a stint as the business manager for Shakespeare Santa Cruz at UCSC. She invites you to take a peek into the real estate world through the stories that form the backdrop of her Regan McHenry Real Estate mysteries. Real estate details and ideas come from Nancy’s own experiences.

Martha Johnson

Martha Johnson is a leadership expert who draws on the lessons learned as an executive with a more than 30-year career in business and government.

She was nominated by President Obama and confirmed unanimously by the US Senate to be the Administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), a position she held for two years. She also served eight years with the Clinton Administration and was appointed to two commissions with the British Government.

Her private sector career has spanned the information technology, architecture, strategic consulting, and automotive industries.

Johnson has delivered over 50 public speeches on topics including leadership, organizational transformation, sustainability, and government innovation. She has been featured repeatedly in the press and has testified before the US Congress on government effectiveness. She is the author of On My Watch: Leadership, Innovation, and Personal Resilience, the real story of extraordinary innovation underway at GSA even as her own tenure as Administrator during the Obama Administration was cut short by scandal, as well as the novel In Our Midst.

Johnson was graduated with a BA from Oberlin College and MBA from Yale University’s School of Management.

Johnson was born in Connecticut and was raised in California and North Dakota. She is married, has two adult children, and resides in Annapolis, Maryland.

GUEST BLOGGER CANDACE LEVY

Candace Levy is a full-time freelance book editor whose clients include both major publishing firms and prominent independent presses. She is also a freelance book reviewer and journalist, covering books in a wide range of genres. When she’s not at her desk, you’ll inevitably find her listening to an audiobook while cooking, walking, making lace, or taking photographs. She was honored to be the Audio Publisher Association’s Audiobook Blogger of the year for 2016. To keep track of all her bookish adventures, follow Candace on Twitter (@BethFishReads) or visit her blog, Beth Fish Reads.

Millie Mack

Millie Mack is the author of the Faraday Murder Series and has just published the third book −Take a Byte Out of Murder. She enjoys everything mysterious including books, videos, plays and especially jigsaw puzzles where completion of the puzzle reveals the solution to a crime.
Millie Mack was born in Philadelphia, moved to Baltimore and worked in Washington which all influenced the creation of her fictional town of Tri-City featured in her current books.
She continues to live in the Baltimore area where she is working on the next book in her series featuring amateur sleuths Carrie and Charles Faraday. Millie also writes a blog all about mysteries at darkandstormynightmysteries.com and can be contacted at milliemack@verizon.net.

Betty May

Betty May is a theatrical director, writer, and clown. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she graduated from Wayne State University with majors in theater and history and a minor in science. For the past eight years Betty has worked with a group of Lifers at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women. She went into the prison in response to a somewhat bizarre request: write a comedy about life in prison. While she continues with her writing and her work as a theatrical director, clown, and circus coach, she is totally committed to advocating for the women who have become her friends, and lobbying for progressive changes in our judicial and penal systems.

Jen Michalski

Peggy Payne

Peggy Payne is a novelist, nonfiction writer, and private editorial consultant. Her novels include Revelation, Cobalt Blue, and Sister India, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In addition to her novels and short stories, Payne’s articles, reviews, or essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, Travel+Leisure, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, More and many others. An interview with Payne, “Writing and Revelation,” is included in Dale Brown’s Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk about Their Vision and Work.

Katherine Pickett

Katherine Pickett is the owner of POP Editorial Services, LLC, and the author of the award-winning book Perfect Bound: How to Navigate the Book Publishing Process Like a Pro. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Loyola University Chicago and has been involved in the publishing industry for more than 15 years.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Ellen Prentiss Campbell (www.ellencampbell.net) is the author of The Bowl with Gold Seams (Apprentice House Press), her debut novel inspired by the detainment of the Japanese Ambassador to Germany, his staff and their families, at the Bedford Springs Hotel in 1945. Her short story collection Contents Under Pressure (Broadkill River Press) was a 2015National Book Award nominee. Essays and reviews appear in The Fiction Writers Review, where she is a contributing editor, and The Washington Independent Review of Books. Campbell is also a practicing psychotherapist and lives with her husband in Washington D.C. and Manns Choice, Pennsylvania.

Carolyn Sienkiewicz

A reviewer, editor, and member of the editorial board of the Washington Independent Review of Books, Carolyn Sienkiewicz also is a Peabody-trained oboist and a sailor. She has written about sailing in Cruising World, Living Aboard, Chesapeake Bay Magazine and SpinSheet.

Lee Summerall

John Vanderslice

John Vanderslice, a native of the Washington DC metropolitan area, earned a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia in 1983.  After graduating, he worked as a writer for a major insurance corporation in Washington, DC.  In 1986 he entered the M.F.A. in creative writing program at George Mason University and graduated with that degree in 1991.  While at GMU his areas of concentration included poetry writing, modern and contemporary poetry, and the Irish Literary Revival.  Additionally, he helped arrange and edit a collection of primary documents from the Irish Literary Revival.  In 1993, he moved to Lafayette, Louisiana to enter the Ph.D. in English program at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette (formerly University of Southwestern Louisiana).  There his areas of concentration included fiction writing, twentieth-century American literature, twentieth-century British Literature, early American literature, and Renaissance literature.  His dissertation, titled Christopher Robin Lives, is a collection of short fiction with a critical introduction that examines the nature, development and use of epiphany in modern and postmodern fiction, particularly the short story.  After graduating from ULL in 1997, he moved to Conway, Arkansas and began teaching at the University of Central Arkansas.  To date he has published over fifty short stories.  He also publishes poetry, literary criticism, book reviews, creative nonfiction, and one-act plays.  His work has appeared in The Seattle Review, Laurel Review, Southern Humanities Review, Versal,1966, Sou’wester, South Carolina Review, and many other leading journals as well as several fiction anthologies including Chick for a Day, The Best of The First Line, and The Man-Date: Fifteen Bromance Stories.  “His collection of thematically linked short stories, Island Fog, is forthcoming from Lavender Ink press in 2014.”  He has recently completed the novel Days on Fire, a fictionalized life of Vincent Van Gogh.  He maintains a blog about this project, titled Creating Van Gogh along with a blog titled Payperazzi in which he muses on all matters related to writing and teaching writing.  His earlier novel Burnt Norway is available through Lulu.com.  His teaching interests include fiction writing, poetry writing, travel writing, contemporary fiction and poetry, and composition.

Carolyn Marie Wilkins

Carolyn Marie Wilkins is a Professor of Ensembles at Berklee College of Music and the author of Melody for Murder: A Bertie Bigelow Mystery; They Raised Me Up: A Black Single Mother and the Women Who Inspired Her; Damn Near White: An African American Family’s Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success; and Tips For Singers: Performing, Auditioning, Rehearsing. An accomplished jazz pianist, composer and vocalist, Carolyn’s performance experience includes radio and television appearances with her group SpiritJazz, a concert tour of South America as a Jazz Ambassador for the US State Department, performances with the Pittsburgh Symphony as a percussionist under Andre Previn, and shows featuring Melba Moore, Nancy Wilson and the Fifth Dimension. Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Carolyn now lives in Cambridge, MA.

3/1/15 Guest Blogger Tom Wood

Tom Wood’s debut novel is Vendetta Stone, a fictional true-crime thriller set in Nashville. The Middle Tennessee State University graduate was a sports writer and copy editor for 36 years at The Tennessean, where he covered area colleges, boxing, the Iroquois Steeplechase, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and numerous other events. He freelances for the Nashville Ledger, Knoxville News Sentinel, Country Family News, the Naples News and Ft. Myers News-Press. His short stories appear in Tennesseans West, Weird Western Yarns Vol. 1, Western Tales! Vol.3 andFiltered Through Time. Tom has worked on the ABC series Nashville as well as The Identical movie (2014) and other multi-media projects.

8/4/19 Guest Blogger Bill Woods

Bill Woods lives and writes beside the Duck River in Columbia, Tennessee, but considers Grande Case, St Martin FWI his second home. In addition to Orient Beach, Bill is the author of The Muse of Wallace Rose: Novella and Short Stories. He may be reached at OrientBeachBook@gmail.com or on Facebook at Bill Woods Author.

Pallas Snider Ziporyn

Pallas Snider Ziporyn is an award-winning playwright and author of the serial novel, A Cappella Drug Lord. She is also a private college counselor who writes regularly about colleges on her blog,  The College Matchmaker, and is the author of the non-fiction book, The International Student’s Guide to American Colleges.