Honey Lea Gaydos is a writer, visual artist, and professional nurse specializing in mental health. Combining all these interests, she developed an innovative research approach using visual art to explore self-defining memories earning a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies. In her career as a professor of nursing, she promoted the use of the arts in healthcare environments and advocated a holistic approach to care. Her emotionally evocative artwork has been sold for many years through galleries and exhibitions. Her writing includes scholarly publications, essays and poetry, and a spiritual memoir, Patterns: The Mystical Journey of an Ordinary Life.
Atmosphere Press is proud to bring readers the Atmosphere Press Presents author interview series. We’re happy to have this archive of excellent interviews and author success stories for you to enjoy. Learn about writers and their books, from book title origin stories to music playlists that relate to their writing to what it was like seeing the cover for the first time.
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A lifelong devoté of Jane Austen and all her works, James Wollak is a retired financial data analyst and lives in San Francisco, California, a third-generation San Franciscan. He is an avid reader, numismatist, and music lover, enjoying all kinds of music such as classical and opera, Motown and soul, ABBA, Celtic, blues, bluegrass, and zydeco. He also loves silent and classic Hollywood films, and the “Poldark,” “Downton Abbey,” and “Sanditon” series. He is a confirmed Anglophile, and Pride and Prejudice is his favorite novel of all time.
Sofia Pires Baquedano is a Brazilian-Spanish writer and filmmaker. She currently is a film student in university in Brazil, and holds a certificate from the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles. She is passionate about the importance of imagery and beauty in a scene, both on-screen and on-paper. She grew up between Brazil and Spain. this is my worst nightmare please be nice to me is her first novel.
Ever since childhood, I have written stories. My mother read stories to me every evening at bedtime, and when I didn't like the ending of the story, I changed it. When my children were little, I made up stories at bedtime. Throughout my teaching career, I published short stories in literary magazines and wrote several plays. I have won eleven prizes from my writing. Writing and storytelling are in my DNA.
Mark Katlic, M.D., is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington & Jefferson College and an Alpha Omega Alpha graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed residencies in Surgery and Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, then practiced Thoracic Surgery for forty years, first in Northeastern Pennsylvania and then in Baltimore. He was Chair of Surgery for Lifebridge Health System in Baltimore until his retirement in 2024.
I'm seventy-one years old, and was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1982. At that point in my life, all I wanted to do was write. I started writing sonnets and haiku about Parkinson's disease, and fiction that went in wildly different directions. Suddenly, I had enough material to make a book!
John W. Long is a retired Federal agent with more than thirty-six years of law enforcement experience. He has been a homicide detective, a military intelligence officer and was the Special Agent-In-Charge (SAC) for the Department of Transportation, Office of Inspector General's Atlanta Region for many years. He attended the University of Georgia and Nova Southeastern University and has a BA in Criminal Justice, an MA in Criminal Justice and an MBA.
W. A. Polf is a retired Senior Vice President from New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, who now lives in North Carolina. His stories have appeared in various publications and have been finalists or semi-finalists in a number of contests. He won second prize in the North Carolina Writers Network’s Doris Betts Short Fiction competition. The story was published in the North Carolina Literary Review Online and was nominated for a Pushcart and for The Best Stories Online.
Erik Schneider was born in Austin, Texas, and frequently visits the state, but he has called Northwest Arkansas home since early childhood. It's not the most bustling location in the country, but the dense forests and somewhat secluded feel to the area inspired the setting and character of this novel.
My brother and co-author James Schmitt is a videographer providing the video feed to local, college and professional sporting and civic events. As a paralegal, I worked mostly in real estate law, through which I eventually became the president of a multi-million-dollar non-profit corporation. We both spent our downtime at work imagining or writing stories.
