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Adam Plantinga’s first book, 400 Things Cops Know, was nominated for an Agatha Award and won the 2015 Silver Falchion award for best nonfiction crime reference. It was hailed as “truly excellent” by author Lee Child and deemed “the new Bible for crime writers” by The Wall Street Journal. His second book, also nonfiction, is Police Craft. Plantinga is currently a sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department assigned to street patrol. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, daughters, and Chow Chow named Ziggy. The Ascent is his debut novel. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, was a USA Today bestseller, and was recently optioned by Universal for television. 

KIRBY LARSON is the acclaimed author of many books for young people, including the 2007 Newbery Honor Book Hattie Big Sky; Dash, winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction; Duke; Liberty; Code Word Courage; Audacity Jones to the Rescue, and Audacity Jones Steals the Show, and the new Shermy and Shake chapter book series, to name a few. QUINN WYATT has lived with Crohn’s for most of her life and is encouraged by all the progress that has been made over the years in the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases. This is her first book. A mother-daughter writing team, both Quinn and Kirby live in Kenmore, Washington.

Cherry Lou Sy is a writer and playwright originally from the Philippines and currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she has been an adjunct lecturer in the English and American Studies departments. Cherry is also a teacher with PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud. She has received fellowships and residencies from VONA, Tin House, and elsewhere. Love Can’t Feed You is her debut novel.

Andrew Bridgeman’s debut novel has it all – characters you fall in love with, a plot that keeps you racing from page to page, twists that leave you dumbfounded and thrilled, a satisfying conclusion, a final wish when you close the book that you could start all over again. Fortunate Son, by Andrew Bridgeman (Mission Point Press, September 24, 2024), a “propulsive, brilliantly executed thriller that will keep readers guessing . . .” (Kirkus Reviews) is more than just a wild, suspenseful ride. It’s a fascinating study of an American Family – of their secrets, corruption, greed, and betrayal. It’s a story about trust and sacrifice, and the risks we take in order to succeed.

Sebastian Smee is an art critic for the Washington Post and the author of "Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism" (Norton) and “The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art” (Random House), which was translated into a dozen languages. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism while at the Boston Globe in 2011, after being runner up in 2008. Living in the UK between 2000 and 2004, he worked for the Daily Telegraph, The Art Newspaper, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Financial Times, Prospect, and The Spectator. In Australia, he worked as the art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian. He was awarded the Rabkin Prize for art journalism in 2018 and was a MacDowell Fellow in 2021. He taught the Garis Seminar for Creative Non-fiction at Wellesley College between 2010 and 2022.  He has authored books on Mark Bradford and Lucian Freud and contributed essays to books on an array of other artists. He has been invited to speak at, among other places, Harvard University, Boston College, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. 

As a mythopoeic scholar, Nadia Salem researches mythic structures in narrative throughout literature and film. By understanding mythology’s influence in creating classics, bestsellers, and blockbusters, she studies cross-cultural, genre-bending, marginalized stories for popular and political impact. Nadia has a doctorate in Creative Writing and has taught mythic structure at Georgetown and Northwestern Universities. She is a produced playwright, and the author of The Monomyth Reboot: A Transmodern Update for Mythopoeia.

David Rocklin is the author of The Luminist and Foreward LGBTQIA award-winning The Night Language. He also wrote The Write Formula: Twelve Weeks From Concept To Completion, a craft book which accompanies his editorial and book coaching services. He hosts and curates “Roar Shack,” a long-running Los Angeles reading series, and has established a writers’ retreat based in Idyllwild, CA. The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger is his latest novel. 

Molly Giles is an award-winning fiction writer. Her first collection of stories, ROUGH TRANSLATIONS won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, the Boston Globe Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers award. Four subsequent collections—CREEK WALK, BOTHERED, ALL THE WRONG PLACES, and WIFE WITH KNIFE, have also won awards, including the Small Press Best Fiction Award, the California Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, the Spokane Short Fiction Award, and the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize.  She published her first novel, IRON SHOES, in 2000, and twenty-three years later, published its sequel, THE HOME FOR UNWED HUSBANDS. Giles has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaii, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at numerous writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. Her work has been included in many anthologies including the O.Henry and Pushcart Prize (three times), and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arkansas Arts Council. She has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Book Reviewing, been awarded residences at MacDowell, Yadoo, and The House of Literature in Paros, Greece. Life Spans is her first memoir.

Bill revisits his conversation with Andre Dubus last year after his release of Such Kindness.Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie, a #4 New York Times bestseller and a New York Times "Editors Choice". His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies, and his novel, House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His 2013 novella collection, Dirty Love, was listed as a “Notable Book” by The Washington Post and The New York Times, and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice” and a Kirkus “Starred Best Book of 2013”.  His 2018 novel, Gone So Long, was named on many “Best Books” lists, including selection for The Boston Globe’s “Twenty Best Books of 2018” and “The Best Books of 2018, Top 100”, Amazon. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was one of Amazon’s “The Best Books of 2023, Top 100”. His acclaimed collection of personal essays, Ghost Dog: On Killers and Kin, was published in March 2024. He is also the editor of Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories, 

Miles Harvey is the author of The Registry of Forgotten Objects: Stories, which won The Journal Non/Fiction Prize and was published by Mad Creek Books, the trade imprint of The Ohio State University Press. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Conjunctions, AGNI, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Fiction Magazine, and others, and has received a Distinguished Story in The Best American Short Stories, 2004, a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses, 2013, and the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award from Mid-American Review, 2015. His most recent work of nonfiction, The King of Confidence (Little, Brown & Co., 2020), was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and was named as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection. He also wrote The Island of Lost Maps (a national and international bestseller for Random House, 2000) and Painter in a Savage Land (Random House, 2008). His play, How Long Will I Cry, premiered in 2013 at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Harvey teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he chairs the Department of English and is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, a nonprofit, social-justice publisher.