| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
|---|---|---|
Marianne K. Martin | Marianne K. Martin is one of the best-selling lesbian romance authors in the history of the genre, and her books have gained a wide international readership. She is the author of eleven novels. Her highly successful novels include the Lambda Literary Award finalists Tangled Roots, Under the Witness Tree, Mirrors, and For Now, For Always. In 2012, she was honored with the Trailblazer Award from the Golden Crown Literary Society and in 2013 she was inducted into the Saints & Sinners Hall of Fame. Marianne is also one of the founding partners of Bywater Books. Her responsibilities include managing general operations, as well as the Bywater Prize for Fiction, and working with Bywater’s new writers. | |
Sara Fitzgerald | Sara Fitzgerald is a former editor and new-media developer for the Washington Post and was the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of The Michigan Daily. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1973 with a degree in history and journalism. She is also the author of Elly Peterson: “Mother” of the Moderates (University of Michigan Press, 2012) and The Poet’s Girl (Thought Catalog Books, 2020). Her current writing project is a biography of Emily Hale, the little-known muse of the poet T. S. Eliot. |  |
Stephanie D. Preston | Stephanie D. Preston is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. She has a master’s degree and a PhD in behavioral neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied the neurobiology and behavior of decisions in food-storing animals. Subsequently, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine to study how the brain supports emotion-based decisions in humans. Stephanie’s research is interdisciplinary in focus and methods to address how the brain evolved to support complex behavior at the intersection of emotion and decision making. One focus is on empathy and altruism, particularly how others' states impact our own and motivate helping. Another focus is on decisions about resources, such as food, money, material goods, and charitable gifts, to address issues surrounding consumerism, hoarding, and pro-environmental behavior. She is currently fusing her lines of research to determine how best to promote altruism and charitable giving across racial and political divides and for other species and the natural environment, including collaborations with corporations and non-profit organizations. |  |
Jasmin An | Jasmine An comes from the Midwest. Her poetry and non-fiction can be found in Black Warrior Review’s Boyfriend Village, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nat. Brut, Waxwing and Best New Poets 2020. She is author of two chapbooks of poetry, Naming the No-Name Woman (Two Sylvias Press, 2016) and Monkey Was Here (Porkbelly Press, 2020), and Poetry Editor at Agape Editions. Her PhD dissertation in English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan focuses on 21st century poets who co-opt bureaucratic paperwork as a response to the impact of U.S. empire in Southeast Asia. Her academic work of writing about poems and poets she admires is one way of honoring and caring for the community through which she’s learned to encounter and understand the world. Jasmine is a member of the Digital Inequality Lab, an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring questions of power and our digital reality through humanities and culture centered methods. They published a co-authored "Lag Manifesto" meditating on the intersections between the twinned pandemics of COVID-19 and anti-Black racism with the journal Afterimage. Jasmine presented at the 2020 Council of Thai Studies Annual Gathering, where her paper, “a handful of syllables tossed back across the water:” negotiating diasporic Thai American gender identity through poetic practice, won the Graduate Student Paper Prize. | |
Sarah Nisbett | Sarah Nisbett is an artist, author and founder of Drawn On The Way. A former professional opera singer, she learned to draw by sketching strangers during her daily commute on the New York City subway. A totally self-taught artist, she has drawn over 5,000 strangers and turned her hobby of drawing “on the way” into a successful illustration career, Instagram account, blog and book. Sarah uses illustration to connect people to their self worth and sense of wonder and her Drawn On The Way project is dedicated to helping people find the extraordinary in the everyday and to see themselves and those around them as works of art. She is passionate about empowering people to discover and enjoy their own creativity. Her work has been shown internationally and she’s a sought after creative collaborator and live-event illustrator. “Drawn On The Way: A Guide to capturing the moment through live sketching” is her first book. Look for @drawnontheway on Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok. | |
Keith Taylor | Keith Taylor was born in British Columbia in 1952. He spent his childhood in Alberta and his adolescence in Indiana. After several years of traveling, he moved to Michigan, where he earned his M.A. in English at Central Michigan University. He has worked as a camp-boy for a hunting outfitter in the Yukon, as a dishwasher in southern France, a housepainter in Indiana and Ireland, a freight handler, a teacher, a freelance writer, the co-host of a radio talk show, and as the night attendant at a pinball arcade in California. For more than twenty years he worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then he taught in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Michigan, and directed the Bear River Writers Conference. From 2010–2018 he worked as the Poetry Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. He retired from the University of Michigan in 2018. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor; they have one daughter. | |
Paul Leighton | Paul Leighton is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology at Eastern Michigan University. His interest is in how inequalities in society impact criminal justice, and how biases in criminal justice recreate social inequalities. He is a co-author of the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. Leighton is also a co-author of Class, Race, Gender & Crime. He co-authored one of the first books about private prisons, Punishment for Sale: Private Prisons, Big Business and the Incarceration Binge (Rowman & Littlefield 2010). Leighton has been an editor of Critical Criminology: An International Journal, and has delivered many invited keynote addresses in the U.S., Canada and Norway. He regularly teaches classes on white collar crime, domestic violence, crime and technology, and marijuana decriminalization. Leighton is a past President of the Board of the local domestic violence shelter and currently heads the advisory board of the food pantry serving the university. | |
Barbara Stark-Nemon | Barbara Stark-Nemon, has written the award-winning novels Even in Darkness and Hard Cider. Her current work in progress is a 17h century European coming of age refugee story. Barbara has degrees from the University of Michigan in English, Art History and Communication Disorders. She writes novels, essays and short stories, and speaks at conferences, literary events, libraries and book clubs. She lives, writes, swims, cycles, gardens and does fiber art in Ann Arbor and Northport, MI. | |
Amy Clarice | Amy Clarice (formerly Shrodes) (pronouns: She/Her/Hers) is the co-author of the children’s book Lost and Found Cat: The True Story of Kunkush's Incredible Journey. Amy traveled to Lesbos, Greece in 2015 on sabbatical where she discovered Kunkush, shunned by the island cats. While serving in the front lines of the refugee crisis, she cared for Kunkush for more than a month, devising a social media campaign to find his family with a team of volunteers. Shortly after Valentine’s Day, 2016, Kunkush was reunited with his family in Norway. Amy lives in Ypsilanti with her dog Zola on her urban farm, which includes two ferrets, two rabbits, and a flock of hens. She is working on a series of young adult books with a family from Afghanistan that is now living in Germany. |  |
Vicki Brett-Gach | Vicki Brett-Gach is the creator of the Ann Arbor Vegan Kitchen blog, and the author of "The Plant-Based for Life Cookbook: Deliciously Simple Recipes to Nourish, Comfort, Energize and Renew” – published by Brooklyn Writers Press. Vicki is a Whole-Food Plant-Based Culinary Instructor, Certified Personal Chef, and Master-Certified Vegan Lifestyle Coach, and has been trained in Nutrition for a Healthy Heart, and in Dietary Therapy for Reversing Common Diseases. Vicki is Forks Over Knives Plant-Based Certified, and a graduate of Dr. McDougall’s Starch Solution Certification program, with certificates in Culinary Coaching (through Harvard Medical School and The Institute of Lifestyle Medicine), in Plant-Based Nutrition (through the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies), and in Wellness Counseling (through Cornell University). |  |
| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
