Ben Cooper is a husband, father, author, speaker, educator, and beekeeper. He grew up on a family farm in western Pennsylvania and went on to get an Agricultural Science degree from Penn State University. Ben retired after working as an Agricultural Specialist for the state of Maryland. He teaches Beekeeping courses at Allegany College of Maryland and mentors new beekeepers.
Irene Cooper is the author of Found, a crime thriller noir set in Colorado, Committal, a poet-friendly spy-fy about family, and Spare Change, a finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award for poetry. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, and elsewhere. Irene supports AIC-directed creative writing at a regional prison and lives with her people in Oregon.
In Irene Cooper’s Found, what compels me is the compassion among characters, their empathy for one another, and their insights into what it means to lose a child. The suspense may take me on a ride, but it’s the other passengers that keep me in the car.” ~ Beth Alvarado, Jillian in the Borderlands
Ten years after the drowning of her daughter in the Colorado River, Eleanor Clay subsists finding corpses for Bristlecone Springs PD, until the day she finds three-year-old Lizzie—living, but left-for-dead in a culvert under the railroad tracks.
The crime unspools to a series of brutal kidnappings implicating a local megachurch, a craft beer company, and a cannabis consortium. With the help of Althea Giordano, effervescent forensic botanist for CorpsPursuit—a volunteer organization that recovers cold-case bodies—and Elan DePeña, bike cop for BSPD, Eleanor must climb out of the dark hell of her grief to end the violence before it hits too close to home.
In FOUND by Irene Cooper, characters encroach upon one another’s territories and disturb the ground. Eleanor is pushed out of her dark apartment to face the violence others read about, and sometimes, even unwittingly, perpetrate. Like Eleanor, we look for a villain, quietly suspecting trouble is closer than imagined—maybe, if we admit it, within ourselves.
Memory is a tricky thing. Reality is fragile. And the past never stays buried.
From bike rides through the suburbs of 1980s Hampshire to the claustrophobic grind of adulthood, Billy Cooper’s life is shaped by loss, fractured family ties, and the creeping onset of a degenerative disease. As his body betrays him and grief corrodes what remains, Billy turns inward—into recollections that blur, narratives that contradict, and personas that may never have existed.
Jackdaw Affliction is a descent into memory’s labyrinth, where trauma, illness, and longing distort the line between truth and invention. Told with brutal honesty, warped humour and hallucinatory edge, S. G. Hyde’s novel explores what it means to live when the ground of reality keeps shifting beneath your feet.
At once harrowing and tender, it is a story of survival through imagination, self-deception, and the desperate human need to stitch meaning out of chaos. A haunting meditation on identity, illness, and loss, sprinkled with dark comedy, this is fiction at its most unsettling and raw.
L’Travia Crawford is an author, currently living in NC, who writes from the raw edges of the heart, exploring the beauty and ache of love, the quiet devastation of heartbreak, and the strength found in healing. When not writing, L’Travia finds comfort in baking delicious baked goods, or spending time with her pet Simba, always seeking the small moments of softness that make life worth savoring.
D.K. Silver is the author of The Weight of Flowers, and Forcing Shoots, a four-book genre-bending saga. The series explores themes of sexual exploitation and dalliance, greed in its many guises, and the quest for self-worth.
Hi, my name is Marie Angel, and I love to write romantic suspense and romantasy. My passions include romance and the mystical. I live in Collegeville, PA, with my three cats, and I am an avid reader and fan of Nora Roberts and JR Ward, among many others.
My name is Stephanie Fidis. By day, I work as an inside sales rep for Dover Publications, but by night I’m a writer, a cozy girl-gamer, an amateur cook, a runner, and a cat mom. I have my bachelor’s in creative writing as well as an MFA in writing from Albertus Magnus College. I reside on Long Island with my fiancé and our cat, Cooper.
J Lee Amey was born and raised in Essex, England, but now resides on the beautiful south coast of Dorset, England. In her spare time she can usually be found strolling through sand, fields or forest with her husband and dog. Although Amey has produced many scribblings over the years, The Glastonbury Tales is her first novella.
Eco-fiction is literature that places the environment at the heart of storytelling—not just as a backdrop, but as an essential force. These are novels and short stories that engage directly with ecological themes: climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, and the fraught, fascinating relationship between humans and the natural world.
Susan Scheid is the author of After Enchantment, which was inspired by beloved fairy tale characters. Scheid’s poetry has appeared in The Southern Quill, Blue Heron Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Burgeon Press, Gargoyle, About Place Journal, Truth to Power, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Little Patuxent Review, The Sligo Journal, Silver Birch Press, Tidal Basin Review, and other journals. Her work is also included in the anthologies Poetic Art, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic. Scheid served for a number of years as the Board co-chair for Split This Rock. She lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, DC.
There’s something about true crime that grips the imagination. Maybe it’s the high-stakes mystery, the dark window into human behavior, or the relentless pursuit of justice… Whatever the draw, learning how to write true crime is not for the faint of heart! It demands accuracy, empathy, persistence, and, above all, a deep respect for the real lives behind every story.
My publications include numerous short stories and articles in various Russian media abroad. The novel What’s Hecuba to Him (in Russian) was published in 1991 by Boston Clio & Co Publishing House. Slavic Gospel Press, Chicago, published my Russian translations of Dan Richardson’s Eternity in Their Hearts and Francis A. Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live?
Jastrow Hill is a retired attorney who spent thirty-four years in law enforcement and law. He has had an ongoing love affair with books since first grade. He currently buys and sells books, collects books, and writes books.
Imagine a time when Major League Baseball has imploded under the weight of its own making—a scandal over hall of fame elections—and has been forced to restructure on a new model. Teams are now owned and run by the cities in which they play, and in addition to playing baseball, players must work as city employees. In New York, the team’s first baseman also works as a NYPD plainclothes detective.
When the mayor recruits local businesswoman, Veronica Silvers, aka Nica, to become the new Yankees general manager, it’s seen as a new era for women and for baseball. And Nica meets the challenge when she signs a young talented left-handed hurler to the big club. Ellie Ford is the granddaughter of legendary Yankee players Whitey Ford and Elston Howard.
Despite Ellie’s talent, not everyone is rooting for her. The city’s male management secretly wants the team to fail for financial reasons. When they demand that Ellie is benched, Nica must stand up to them. With the help of rookie sports writer Beth Cooper, Nica allows Ellie to prove that women are strong and talented enough to excel in the male-dominated world of professional baseball.
In Pinstripes, Rutkoff, author of Shadow Ball, imagines the New New York Yankees and the opportunities that MLB 2.0 will offer to women for the first time.
William Finger grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from Duke University in 1969, he went to India in the Peace Corps. In midlife, he completed a Masters in Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first memoir, The Crane Dance: Taking Flight in Midlife (2016), was a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. He has been a freelance writer, an editor of a public policy quarterly, a consultant at the N.C. Legislature, and for the last twenty-four years before retiring in 2013, a writer and communications manager at an international public health organization.
British writer Elisabeth Conway has lived and worked in Southeast Asia for many years in an area that she now considers to be her spiritual home and from which she takes her inspiration. Elisabeth has written a historical trilogy set in and around Singapore between 1822 and 1831. She now lives in the UK but continues to visit Singapore/Malaysia whenever she can.
My journey into writing goes way back—back before I graduated high school in a small town in northwestern Oregon in 2004. I don’t remember exactly when my passion for creating began, but as it blossomed somewhere around middle school, it started in the form of writing. Words were something I had a way with, and so they became my tool for creating the worlds I dreamt of in my mind.
Born in Chester, UK, Linnhe spent her home-ed childhood between North Wales and the Lake District. She worked as an animator and as a sailing instructor prior to moving into graphic design and marketing. Having previously enjoyed dabbling in shorter forms of creative writing, she started working on the dystopian world of Edwin Cooper in the summer of 2023. The Incredible Machines of Thinkery: Outpost 9 is her first novel.
Denise is a book lover with the childhood goal of reading every book in the library. A former book-seller, operating out of her home, she delivered books decades before Amazon. The highlight of her bookselling career was packing her car full of books for black men and peddling them to guys on their way to the Million Man March. She sold every last book.