Justin Madson is a self-taught cartoonist who has been telling stories through comic books and graphic novels for nearly two decades. Over the years he has created a number of graphic novels, including the post-apocalyptic tale Breathers, and Carbon, a supernatural mystery. Madson’s forthcomic graphic novel with Abrams/Amulet Books is Tin Man, a young adult graphic novel about unlikely friends—a tin man seeking a heart and a high schooler trying to come to terms with the death of her grandmother. He resides in a small town in Wisconsin with his wife, two kids, two dogs, and a slew of backyard chickens.

Read More

Lucy Score is a Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon bestselling author. Small town contemporary rom-coms are her lady jam and she enjoys delivering the feels with a huge side of happily ever after. Her books have been translated into several languages, making readers around the world snort laugh, swoon, and sob. Lucy lives in Pennsylvania with the devastatingly handsome Mr. Lucy and their horrible cat. In her spare time she enjoys sleeping, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and reading all the romance novels in the universe. Her next major rom-com is forthcoming from Hachette Books.

Read More

Lesley Kagen is a multi-award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of nine previous novels, the latest of which is Every Now and Then. She has worked as an actress, voice-over-talent, sought-after speaker, child advocate, student storyteller, and writing instructor. The mother of two and grandmother of two, Kagen lives in a hundred and fifty year old farmhouse in a small town in Wisconsin.

Read More

Marko Perko is a graduate of the University of Southern California. He has always had an insatiable thirst for knowledge of all types, and as such, he is highly regarded as a modern-day Renaissance man, author, historian, polymath, and polemicist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and wildly popular book entitled Did You Know That...? now in its fourth edition. He is the author of the upcoming novel Lethal Action: A Nick Raasay Thriller and the co-author of the work of fiction entitled Khamsin: A Thriller. Moreover, he is the writer of the international bestselling knowledge-based board game Twenty Questions. He is also the creator of the Cultural Enrichment Programs education series, and he is active in software development―Krypti.com. Perko has also written for and edited numerous publications, and he has worked as a columnist, speechwriter, composer, musician, lecturer, and playwright. He is a member of …

Read More

G. M. Malliet’s first DCI St. Just mystery won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel and was later nominated for Anthony, Macavity, and Left Coast Crime awards. The series continues in Oct 2021 with Death in Cornwall. A new series with Augusta Hawke appears in 2022, also from Severn House. Malliet was nominated for a 2020 Macavity Award for best short story for “Whiteout,” which also placed 3rd in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s Readers Choice Awards. Her novella Murder at Morehead Mews was nominated for a Derringer and was a finalist in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s Readers Choice Awards.

Read More

The year was 1417; the Renaissance was not yet in full bloom; there was no printing press; Columbus was decades away from sailing the ocean blue; and Martin Luther’s Reformation was still a century in the future. But an event of epic proportions occurred, one hard winter day that year, when a man fast approaching forty, short in physical stature but keenly alert, made an astonishing discovery that had laid hidden to the world for some fifteen centuries. His name was Poggio Bracciolini. He was a writer, scholar, and Renaissance humanist, and he had once been the personal secretary, the Apostolicus Secretarius, of Pope Martin V. In his vaunted position, he regularly took dictation from the pope and wrote letters on his behalf. Subsequently, as a book hunter, he was responsible for discovering many original Latin manuscripts and seeing that they were preserved, by copying each one with great precision. As such, he became famous for his exquisite and highly-readable book hand. In fact, other …

Read More

T. Jefferson Parker is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-six novels, including Silent Joe and California Girl, both of which won the Edgar Award for best mystery. His next novel, A Thousand Steps, is due out from Forge in January 2022. When not writing, Jeff likes to fish in Baja, hike in San Diego and settle in for the evening with a good book.

Read More

Carl Smith is Commissioning Editor at Severn House (an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd), where he acquires genre fiction—mysteries, thrillers, cozies and science-fiction & fantasy. Prior to starting at Severn House in 2018, he spent four years working across non-fiction, covering content as diverse as political essays and children’s craft books. Carl lives and works in London, England, but his list comprises primarily U.S.-based authors. Carl has acquired Agatha and Anthony Award-winning authors during his time with Severn House. His list includes G.M. Malliet, Catriona McPherson, Qiu Xiaolong, Elaine Viets, and more. Carl can be found at on Twitter at @thatpubblogger where he offers career advice to publishing hopefuls, or emailed at carl@severnhouse.com regarding submissions.

Read More

New York Times bestselling investigative journalist and serial crime expert M. William Phelps is the author of more than thirty nonfiction books, with over one million copies of his books in print worldwide, and has made over 200 television appearances (Early Show, The Today Show, The View, Fox & Friends, Discovery Channel, Fox News Channel, GMA, TLC, History, Oxygen, OWN, and many others). He appeared on USA Radio Network, Catholic Radio, Wall Street Journal Radio, ABC News Radio, and many more. Phelps created, produced and starred in the series Dark Minds and is one of the stars of Deadly Women and Oxygen’s Snapped, Killer Couples and KillerPost. He is the winner of the Excellence in (Investigative) Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and the New England Book Festival Award. A respected reporter, Phelps has written for numerous publications—including …

Read More

Having grown up in a remote and forgotten place myself, surrounded by uninhabited forest wilderness punctuated by lawlessness and constantly-looming human threat, I find myself always reaching for novels where settings of the remote or the forgotten are driving forces, inhabiting the story as much as the characters, shaping the story’s emotional tenor, functioning as the story’s beating heart. Remote and forgotten settings often demonstrate both intense beauty and intense hardship, highlighting everything in society over which we both celebrate or despair. These are places that inform who we are as humans, and also who we might become.

Read More

Jacob Surpin is currently senior editor and associate publisher at Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Parallax Press, which is distributed by Penguin Random House and is based in Berkeley, California. A Brooklyn native, he has also worked at Unnamed Press and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He was exposed to Buddhist thought in high school and it has been a presence in his life ever since. He first heard of Thich Nhat Hanh in college, when one of his classes read Thay’s response to the beating of Rodney King, printed in the Los Angeles Times in 1991. As an editor, Jacob is most interested in projects that have the potential to change and challenge the way we think and live. When he’s not editing, he enjoys getting outside with his family, friends, and dog, and being unabashedly hopeful (there’s always next year) about the New York Mets.

Read More

William F. Nolan was a multi-award-winning author of science fiction, fantasy and horror novels—most notably the creator of Logan’s Run, which went on to become a cult classic film, based on the novel of the same name, with a remake due out from Warner Bros. Among his many accolades, Nolan was nominated for Best Paperback Original by the Mystery Writers of America. He was voted a Living Legend in Dark Fantasy by the International Horror Guild in 2002, and in 2006 was bestowed the honorary title of Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. In 2010, he received the Lifetime Achievement Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association (HWA). In 2013, he was a recipient of the World Fantasy Convention Award in Brighton, England by the World Fantasy Convention. …

Read More

James Chapman is an illustrator from Birmingham, England. A little further north in Manchester now, he’s working on all kinds of illustration and art projects—often themed around language and diversity. He worked on the series Sounds All Around, a set of illustrations about the exciting world of international onomatopoeia. (While in English a dog goes, "Woof" and a pig goes, "Oink," in Romanian, dogs go, "Ham" and in German, pigs go, "Grunz") From animals to people to cars to fireworks, everything makes a sound and every language interprets those sounds differently—and Chapman did his best to illustrate them all. The illustrations have drawn a lot of attention online with various features and even an endorsement from Ashton Kutcher. Chapman is currently a background artist at Brown Bag Films animation studio in Manchester, but he is still working on freelance and personal projects at the time. His next book, A World of Wisdom, is forthcoming from Andrews McMeel …

Read More

Donya Dickerson is the associate publisher of business books at McGraw Hill Professional. She is an experienced associate publisher with a history of working with authors on developing bestselling content and building brands as thought leaders and experts in their fields. Since 2004, Donya has worked as an executive editor across the other McGraw imprints, including McGraw Hill and McGraw Hill Eduction. She obtained her Master’s in comparative literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. As an editor and publisher, Donya is well-attuned to trends in the industry, willing to brainstorm ideas, a creative thinker, and focused on making her books a success, both within McGraw Hill and to the external world of book buyers.

Read More

Coree Spencer is a comedian based in California who organized the Cinder Block Comedy Festival, which received press coverage in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and the Village Voice for its empowerment of marginalized groups. Her illustrator collaborator Emily Niland is a Brooklyn-based illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, the Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, and Thrillist.

Read More

Otto Penzler is the president and CEO of Mysterious Press. He's also the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and is regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on crime, mystery and suspense fiction. Penzler founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, which he later sold to Warner Books (1989). He reacquired the imprint in 2010 and published literary crime fiction as an imprint at Grove/Atlantic. As of January 2021, The Mysterious Press is independently owned. Penzler also publishes both original works and classic crime fiction through Mysterious Press.

Read More

You may have heard the saying that 90% of painting a house is in the prep work—in the careful taping of edges and windows panes with blue tape; its in the covering of wooden floors and furniture with plastic tarp; in carefully taping over outlets and lighting fixtures; and in removing handles from cupboards. You may not notice a great paint job immediately, but you sure can spot a bad one: from drips of paint running down a window pane… to a mist of old blue paint peeking out from behind the layer of fresh cream paint like the five o'clock shadow of an unkempt beard. You may spot a hardened stream of paint splattered carelessly on your sink basin or tub. Imagine a new buyer wandering through, noticing the rushed paint job. Might they wonder—if you were this careless in painting, what else might be wrong? You’ve immediately lost the confidence of the people who are looking at the fine details. It is the same with writing: a slap dash proposal can give this same bad impression, as opposed to one that is neat, organized, and clearly thought through.

Read More

Jotham Burrello is a writer, English professor, publisher, farmer, and multimedia producer. He is the author of the Writers' e-Handbook and producer of So, Is It Done? Navigating the Revision Process. Other writing has appeared in literary journals, the Christian Science Monitor, and he's a proud winner of the New Yorker Caption Contest. He teaches writing at Central Connecticut State University, directs the Yale Writers' Workshop and the Connecticut Literary Festival, curates the Roar Reading Series, and is the publisher of the award-winning Elephant Rock Books. Burrelo’s debut novel Spindle City was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. He and his wife raise boys and flowers on Muddy Feet Flower Farm in Ashford, Connecticut.

Read More

Sarah Rockett has been working in the children's publishing industry for more than a decade and truly believes that picture books have the power to change the world. She loves traveling, spending time outdoors, and—of course—reading. She lives in Michigan with her husband, young son, and lazy cocker spaniel. She is currently an editor for Sleeping Bear Press as well as for Cherry Lake Publishing and 45th Parallel school and library imprints. Sarah also works as a freelance copywriter, editor and project manager for creative and corporate projects. She has completed projects with ProQuest, Universal McCann, University of Michigan, Hudson Legal Offices and more.

Read More

This article was inspired by the recent news that Jews have been beaten and chased in New York City streets, explosive devices launched in the predominantly-Jewish Diamond District and a mob in Los Angeles attacked restaurants, demanding to know, "Who’s Jewish!" Kristallnacht comes to mind—a tragedy that took place a little over eighty years ago—many of our grandparents were alive to witness it portrayed in the news. It is important to remember that the Holocaust didn’t begin overnight… It started with hate speech and increasingly coordinated attacks on Jews that went ignored by governments and the media. We are seeing unmistakable echoes of that today. Major media outlets are silent on these recent attacks. There are videos of police officers standing by while attacks happen in broad daylight. We cannot let this become normal. We know all too well where that path leads… Never again. Jews and—most importantly—non-Jews must stand together against anti-semtism.

Read More