| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
|---|---|---|
Shari Maser | Shari Maser Piracha is the author of the non-fiction book Blessingways: A Guide to Mother centered Baby Showers-Celebrating Pregnancy, Birth, and Motherhood. She wrote this “how-they” book for women when she was a childbirth educator who was also pregnant herself. Later as the homeschooling mother of two bookworms, she started writing children's stories. Her fiction story The Memory Tree was published in baby bug magazine, and she hopes to publish a picture book someday too. Now that Shari’s children are grown, she serves as an independent educational consultant and founder of YouQuest College Advising, as well as part of the student services team at Washtenaw Community College. When she is not busy supporting students, she enjoys playing Scrabble and ping pong, reading lots of books, walking with dogs or other humans in all kinds of Michigan weather, and traveling the world. |  |
Jonathan Rowe | Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jonathan Rowe has won two Avery Hopwood writing awards at the University of Michigan, the Marion Kirkwood Best Brief award at Stanford Law School, and the Thomas Cooley Prize for Best Brief in the Michigan Supreme Court. After law school, Jonathan worked five years as a Trial Attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, prosecuting police brutality and racial violence cases; ten years as a Senior Partner at Dykema Gossett PLLC in Michigan, specializing in media defense litigation; and ten years as a Partner in Soble Rowe Krichbaum LLP in Ann Arbor, broadening his practice to include plaintiff-side securities class action and tobacco litigation, and serving as a private mediator and arbitrator. In 2006 Jonathan Rowe retired from law practice to write novels full-time. He is the author of The Writing on the Wall (2003), A Question of Identity (2005), and The River of Strange People (2010). Jonathan and his wife, Susan Kessler, lived in Hawaii for 11 years, but recently returned to Ann Arbor, to be closer to their two children and grandchildren. | |
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. |  |
Bernice Baran | Bernice Baran started her website, Bakery Baran, as a place to document all of the adventures in her everyday life. It was a creative outlet on days off of working as a nurse, and a place to come and look back on 10 years from now and see all her photos and thoughts from this time in her life. That quickly and exclusively turned into her baking and sharing her recipes. Over the last five years, Bernice stopped nursing, had two babies, and took Baran Bakery full-time. She wrote a cookbook, Frosted, and hosts cake decorating workshops. She can't wait to see what the next five years bring, but whatever it is, she knows it'll be sweet. |  |
Michael A. Ferro | Born and bred in the Detroit area, Michael A. Ferro attended Michigan State University and received a degree in Creative Writing. Michael’s novel, TITLE 13, was published by Harvard Square Editions and chosen as a Best Book of 2018 by the Emerging Writers Network. He was named as a finalist by Glimmer Train for their New Writers Award, received the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction, and was nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Michael is also a musician, satirist, and humorist, as well as a book reviewer and critic for numerous literary journals and an editor with the Chicago Writers Association. He is a former sportswriter and a Features Writer for CBS and CBS Detroit, and a national music and sports columnist with AXS. Michael has lived, worked, and written throughout the Midwest; he currently resides in rural Ann Arbor, Michigan. |  |
Margaret A. Leary | I became intensely curious about "Who was William W. Cook?" when I joined the faculty at the University of Michigan Law School in 1973, after growing up in Oberlin, OH, and earning a B.A. (Cornell University), M.A. University of Minnesota), and J.D. (William Mitchell College of Law). My job in the Law Library provided an office in the magnificent Law Quadrangle, five buildings all given to Michigan by Cook. But no one knew who Cook was, where he worked, how he earned a fortune, and why he had given so much to the Michigan Law School. I was able to answer those questions only near the end of my career, when I spent six years researching Cook's life. In addition to being Director of the Law Library, I served on the City Zoning Board of Appeals and then Planning Commission; was elected to three terms on the Ann Arbor District Library Board, and was active in Habitat for Humanity of Huron Valley, as well as professional library associations. https://michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/our-faculty/margaret-leary | |
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. |  |
Colby Halloran | Colby graduated from the Circle-in-the-Square Professional Acting Workshop in New York City in 1978, where she studied with Nikos Psacharopoulos. From 1977-1980 she performed at his theatre, The Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, as well as on Off-Off Broadway. In 1979 she became a company member and subsequently Co-Artistic Director of The Theatre Exchange, a 50-seat loft theatre in Lower Manhattan, founded by Charles Clubb. Mr. Clubb was killed in front of the theatre the following year, at which point Colby closed The Theatre Exchange, left the theatre and has been writing ever since. Colby has published three short stories before she turned to writing novels: “The Plateau” in The Southern Review, “The Pension Plan” in Emrys Journal and “Field and Stream” in American Chordata. In November 2024 her auto-fiction/memoir The Northeast Corner was published by Fifth Avenue Press (AADL). Locum Tenens, Portrait of a Country Doctor in Wales, about a hard-working elderly country doctor in North Wales who goes out on a series of strenuous house calls, and Bicycle Boy, A Death in the Neighborhood, about The Theatre Exchange. A third novel, Ffos-y-Rhiew, is about her friendship with an elderly farmer in Shropshire. “Bird of Passage,” her full-length play, premiered at the Bagaduce Theatre in September 2019. (birdofpassageplay.com) Colby is a Member of the Dramatist’s Guild. She lives in Ann Arbor with her husband. |  |
Kelly Hoppenjans | Singer-songwriter Kelly Hoppenjans creates empowering rock, combining the spirit of riot grrrl tinged with folky introspection. The follow-up to her energetic 2019 full-length debut, OK, I Feel Better Now, her new EP Can’t Get the Dark Out dives deep into relationships, fate, and breaking free of toxic patterns. The EP is inspired in part by Hoppenjans’ journey of finding love during the pandemic: navigating online dating, confinement, and impending life changes to sustain that love. Kelly authored Kelly Hoppenjans Takes Herself Too Seriously, A Collection of Poems, Music, Lyrics and Some Real Arty Shit. "In contrast to what the title says, Hoppenjans brings a playfulness by including drawings, handwritten notes, and QR codes on the pages of the book. Poems and lyrics are distinct but morph into one form or the other when on the page or sung in a recording." —A2Pulp |  |
Stephanie Heit | Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe land in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, a shock/psych system survivor, a mad activist, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her hybrid memoir poem PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022) takes you inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of care. The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017) explores the seams of language, movement, and mental health difference. Her work has appeared in journals such as Orion, Sonora Review, BathHouse, Venti, Rogue Agent, Ecotone, Anomaly, and About Place. | |
| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
