| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
|---|---|---|
Alison Swan | Alison Swan’s fifth book, A Fine Canopy, was released by Wayne State University Press in 2020 and recommended by Orion magazine, LitHub, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. Ann Arbor-based Alice Greene & Company published her poetry chapbooks Before the Snow Moon—a fine-art collaboration with artists Jean Buescher Bartlett (of Ann Arbor) and Melanie Boyle (formerly of Ann Arbor)—and Dog Heart (Alice Greene), also a collaboration with Bartlett and Boyle. Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes (Michigan State University Press), Alison Swan’s brain child and labor of love, is a 2007 Library of Michigan Notable Book. She is co-author of The Saugatuck Dunes: Artists Respond to a Freshwater Landscape. Her poem Porch Swing (Bloodroot Press, 1997), an early collaboration with Bartlett, has been acquired by the New York Public Library and other rare book collections. Among her awards are a Mesa Refuge Residency and the Michigan Environmental Council’s Petoskey Prize for Environmental Leadership. Swan founded Eco Book Club at Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore in 2015 and has hosted it ever since. In the 1990s she directed promotions and events at Ann Arbor’s late Shaman Drum Bookshop (“Academic, scholarly, and independent, since 1983,” a tagline she penned). Also in the 1990s, she wrote a book column for Current magazine and author interviews and reviews for a weekly independent newspaper based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and earned her B.A. in English literature at Michigan State University. After stints on the east and west coasts of North America, she settled back in Michigan’s lower peninsula where, for many years, she taught literature and writing at Western Michigan University’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. She has been active in efforts to protect and preserve the Saugatuck Dunes on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan since 2001. | |
Gregory A. Fournier | Literary Classics gold medal award-winning author Gregory A. Fournier received his bachelor and master’s degrees in Language Arts from Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. A writer of creative nonfiction, his books include The Elusive Purple Gang, Zug Island, Terror In Ypsilanti, The Richard Streicher Jr. Murder and Detroit Time Capsule. Fournier writes short history posts for his Fornology.com blog, and he has appeared on the Investigation Discovery Channel as a guest expert on serial killer John Norman Collins for the series A Crime to Remember in an episode entitled “A New Kind of Monster.” Terror In Ypsilanti is currently in development for a movie or miniseries. | |
Kathryn Orwig | Kathryn Orwig started out writing 400-page novels in her small hometown in Northern Michigan, and now divides her time between novels, short stories, poems, and screenplays. Her work was published in Confined Connections by Z Publishing House (2017) and in the anthology she founded with nine talented writer friends titled Bring Your Words: A Writer’s Community Anthology by Fifth Avenue Press (July 2021). Kathryn has won or placed highly in multiple screenwriting competitions including The Nicholl’s Fellowship, Page Awards, Roadmap Writer’s Shorts Grand Prize Winner, Roadmap’s Diversity Initiative July 2021 Winner, Austin Film Festival Second Rounder, The International Screenwriters Association Fast Track Fellowship Genre Winner, among others. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a Summer Hopwood Award. Besides writing, she enjoys spending hours researching ancestors and learning their languages such as Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Italian, and Swedish, among many more. |  |
Charles Taylor | Cleveland native Charles Taylor and his wife, university administrator and award- winning children's book author Debbie Taylor, have lived and worked in Ann Arbor, Michigan for more than thirty years. An avid golfer, music collector and film buff, Charles is a longtime lecturer in English at the University of Michigan. He is author of the San Francisco-based thriller Dark Rhythm and the detective novel Watching, which is set in Southeast Michigan. | |
Tracy Gallup | Tracy Gallup’s paintings and figures come to life in stories and poetry. Her most recent books are My First Book of Haiku Poems published by Tuttle Press and Paint the Night published by Fifth Avenue Press. In March 2023 Anna's Kokeshi Dolls will be released by Tuttle Publishing. Other picture books include A Roomful of Questions, Stone Crazy, Shell Crazy, Tree Crazy, Snow Crazy and King Cat published by Mackinac Island Press, a division of Charlesbridge, and Beastly Banquet published by Dial Books for Young Readers. | |
Christine Hume | Born into a military family and constitutionally restless, Christine Hume lived in over 25 places in the U.S. and Europe before landing in Ypsilanti. Her latest collection of essays on sex offenders and women’s bodies, Everything I Never Wanted to Know, will be available from Ohio State University Press (21st Century Essays Series). She is also the author of a lyric portrait of girlhood, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2021), which The New York Times says, “arrives…with the force of a hurricane,” as well as several books of poetry. She has guest edited two issues of the American Book Review, on #MeToo and Girlhood, and is currently guest editing a folio for The Hopkins Review on walking. Since 2001, she has been a faculty member in the Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University. | |
Merrie Haskell | Merrie Haskell's first three books are The Princess Curse, Handbook for Dragon Slayers, and The Castle Behind Thorns. She won the Schneider Family Book Award (Middle Grades) and the DetCon1 Middle Grade Speculative Fiction award, and she was twice a finalist for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. Two of her books have been Junior Library Guild selections. Her short fiction has appeared in Nature, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons. | |
Natalie Bakopoulos | Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of two novels: Scorpionfish (Tin House, 2020), which was a finalist for The Bridge/Il Ponte prize (2021), and The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Her work has appeared in Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, MQR, The Mississippi Review, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and in 2015 she was a Fulbright scholar in Athens. She’s an associate professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and a faculty member of the summer program Writing Workshops in Greece. | |
Jacinda Townsend | Jacinda Townsend is the author of the novels Mother Country and Saint Monkey, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. | |
Avik Basu | Avik Basu is a researcher and lecturer at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. His research has included understanding the differences between experts and laypeople in environmental decision-making, designing sustainable developments to be more acceptable to rural residents, promoting the adoption of sustainable transportation, and designing environments that simultaneously enhance individual and communal well-being. Along with Rachel Kaplan, he is co-editor of Fostering Reasonableness: Supportive Environments for Bringing out our Best which describes Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE), a human needs framework that is the foundational theory of reDirect. |  |
| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
