| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
|---|---|---|
Thomas Zimmerman | Thomas Zimmerman is a poet, teacher, and editor. Tom teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Huron River Review, The Big Windows Review, and the WCC Poetry Club at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, MI. | |
Doc Fletcher | Doc Fletcher was born 1954 in Detroit, Michigan near the main branch of the Rouge River. He is a 1976 graduate of Eastern Michigan University. He took his first canoe trip in 1978 on the Pere Marquette River and since has been getting in a canoe or kayak whenever possible. For Michigan-Out-Of-Doors segments, Doc joined co-host Jim Gretzinger in paddling the length of the Sturgeon River and the Pere Marquette headwaters. Doc has 6 books published about the joy of paddling rivers in Michigan and across the Midwest Michigan’s rivers. Doc has been invited to share stories from his books, primarily at Michigan libraries, on over 300 occasions since his first book was published in 2008. The Michigan Library Association honored Doc with their 2017 Author Award. A life-long Michigan resident, Doc promotes his home state on his website. | |
Leah Rose Kessler | Leah Rose Kessler spent much of her childhood up a tree with a stack of books. These days, when she’s not reading or writing, she’s an on-again, off-again elementary school teacher and a lifelong biologist. She lives in Michigan with two humans and two cats, and has a soft spot for scurrying creatures of all shapes and sizes. |  |
Steven Harper Piziks | Steven Harper Piziks was born with a name that no one can reliably spell or pronounce, so he often writes under the pen name Steven Harper. He lives in Michigan with his family. When not at the keyboard, he plays the folk harp, fiddles with video games, and pretends he doesn’t talk to the household cats. In the past, he’s held jobs as a reporter, theater producer, secretary, and substitute teacher. He maintains that the most interesting thing about him is that he writes books. Steven is the creator of The Silent Empire series, the Clockwork Empire steampunk series, and the Books of Blood and Iron series for Roc Books. All four Silent Empire novels were finalists for the Spectrum Award, a first! Fortunately, his story “Eight Mile and the City” in the anthology When Worlds Collide won the 2022 Washington Science Fiction Association Award for small press. You can find him elsewhere on-line by searching for his social media. | |
John U. Bacon | New York Times bestselling author John U. Bacon has written thirteen books on sports, business, and history, seven of them national bestsellers. His previous book, Let Them Lead: Unexpected Lessons in Leadership from America’s Worst High School Hockey Team, was featured in the New York Times, and on Good Morning America, which called him “the REAL Ted Lasso”. He freelances for The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, and others, appears often on TV, including HBO, ESPN, and the Big Ten Network, and delivers weekly essays for Michigan Radio and occasionally NPR, where he won the prize for the nation’s best commentary in 2014. Bacon is a popular corporate speaker and leadership consultant, who occasionally teaches at the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award, given to one instructor annually for “Excellence in Teaching”. In 2019 he was appointed trustee of Michigan Technological University, where he delivered the commencement speech in 2022. John is a decent Spanish speaker, an average hockey player, and a poor piano player, but he still enjoys all three. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and son. | |
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. | |
John F. Buckley | John F. Buckley (he/him) came from Michigan, went to California for a couple of decades, and then returned to Ann Arbor, where he attended the Helen Zell Writers' Program before becoming a lecturer in the English department at the University of Michigan. His publications include several hundred poems, two chapbooks, the collection Sky Sandwiches, and with Martin Ott, Poets’ Guide to America and Yankee Broadcast Network. He needs to update his personal website. He’s the fiction editor for the journal Third Wednesday. Once he regains his gumption, he'd like to return to attending (and sometimes performing at) local literary events. | |
Nancy Shaw | Ann Arbor author Nancy Shaw got the idea for her best-selling picture book Sheep in a Jeep while stuck in the back seat on a family car trip. Seven more sheep books have followed. She also wrote Raccoon Tune (a Michigan Reads! book) and Elena's Story. She's received School Library Journal and Parents magazine Best Books of the Year citations, and the Reading Magic Award, among other honors. A Hopwood Award winner, she holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard University. | |
Gregg Barak | Gregg Barak is an Emeritus Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Eastern Michigan University. Barak is an award-winning author and editor of books on crime, justice, media, violence, criminal law, homeless- ness, and human rights. He is also the co-founder and North American Editor of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime. | |
David Calonne | David Stephen Calonne is senior lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. He is author of several works, including R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self, published by University Press of Mississippi; William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being; The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats; Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions; and biographies of Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller. Calonne is also editor of five volumes of uncollected Bukowski stories and essays as well as Conversations with Gary Snyder and Conversations with Allen Ginsberg, both published by University Press of Mississippi. He previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago. | |
| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
