Author Interviews

Little did I know where enrolling in a Spanish course back in high school would lead. Years later, I went on to raise my children between central Mexico and California. I still divide my time between the two countries. Now retired, I taught college English and co-authored a series of textbooks, Reading Faster and Understanding More. I’ve also published a family saga, The Jews, and magazine and newspaper advice articles for teenagers (before I had any!). More recently, I’ve been writing short plays and have had a number of them produced.

I’ve been an actor for over fifty years and have appeared in over seventy-five motion pictures and television series. I spent thirteen years on All My Children and received two Emmy Nominations for the role of Chuck Tyler. I’m a Marine Corps veteran, have taught acting, and directed over twenty-four plays at Central Arizona College. I wrote, directed, and played one of the lead roles in Judge Me Not, a movie for ABC’s Monday Night at the Movies, which was not aired because ABC dropped the series. The film won a best picture award, and Amazon Prime picked it up and it was offered for rent. I have currently finished two other novels, Honeycomb and Payback. Dark Traffic is the second novel in the series which contains the same leading character. I’m also an artist and sculptor, as is my youngest daughter.

AnneMarie was born and raised in California. She has a vivid imagination and loves writing magical adventure stories that take place in strange lands. She is passionate about reading, art, and family; the youngest of seven children, a mother of four children, and a grandmother. She’s traveled through Europe and has lived in Germany, Washington, and Kansas. A former high-tech executive with a Bachelor of Science Information Technology degree, she is a geek at heart who enjoys mentoring others and trips to Disneyland. AnneMarie lives in Northern California with her husband and two mischievous cats. Drifters Realm: Book 1 is her first book.

Every day, a new book author comes to light. There are many book authors, but none like Tiera. In 2019, Tiera took a step out on her dream to write her first book, Trieshay’s Silver Spoon. As she wrote the book, she dated online to help create a better narrative to the story. Sounds crazy but is true. The man she “fell in love with” was indeed impersonating someone else, but Tiera was loving the sweet words he offered her. His words were so loving, so kind. The author loved expressing how love can bring two people together.

Alexandra and her husband have always said they live on the Island of Misfit Toys, and if you don’t have a place of your own come on over and misfit right in. Over the years that has included dogs, horses, children, and young adults—often not their own, and a collection of amazing characters. When she isn’t writing Alexandra is chasing after Klaus von Beagle, their beloved but stubborn and quite opinionated Envigo beagle. She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where she spends her days between Staunton and Charlottesville. Prior to launching her writing career, she designed exhibits for museums, spending her days amongst some of the most beautiful works in the world. This experience along with a lifetime filled with travel convinced her to start her own world of art through storytelling.

Gabi Coatsworth was born in Britain and work brought her to America. She’s an award-winning writer and lives in Connecticut in a cottage that’s American on the outside and English on the inside. If she’s not writing or traveling, she’ll be in her flower garden, wondering whether to weed or read and holding a cup of her preferred beverage, strong English breakfast tea. A Beginner’s Guide to Starting Over (Atmosphere Press 2023) is her first novel, and she’d love to connect with readers through her website and social media. She loves to read reviews from readers who like her books, and she’s grateful for each one.

I’m actually the stand-in for the real author of Covenant, Catherine E. Carter. Kate and I lived together for over twenty-five years. She died of Covid in 2020. Covenant was written over thirty years ago, most of it on Cape Cod. When she died, getting her manuscript published became a mission to fulfill a promise I made a long time ago.

I am an author, scholar, researcher, and budding Egyptologist living in New York’s Hudson’s Valley. Diamond City, my most recent novel, is published by Atmosphere Press. My two popular non-fiction books, Gone Missing in New York and The Spooky Hudson Valley, are published by Schiffer Books. My YA novel Ajar is published by Mélange Books. My poems have been published in a variety of journals and my poem Bittersweet won the 2021 Stephen DiBiase prize for poetry. I also am a playwright and two of my plays have been featured in the Hudson Valley Short Play Festival. Needless to say, I love to write. I have more degrees than necessary which makes me generally too educated to be employable, but I have been subversively teaching high school English for more years that my current students have been alive. I read and write Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs. I live with my partner Dave.

Susanne Dunlap is the author more than a dozen historical novels for adults and teens. Her work has won and been nominated for many awards, including the Bank Street Books Children’s Book of the Year, the Utah Book Award, and the Missouri Gateway Readers’ Prize. Most recently, her novel The Portraitist won its category in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and The Paris Affair won first place in the CIBA Dante Rossetti awards for young adult fiction. Susanne earned her PhD in music history from Yale, and her BA and MA in musicology from Smith College. She lives and writes in Biddeford, Maine.

Caroline Scott Keener is a wife, mother, and shamelessly doting grandmother. With her husband, John, she divides her time between their mountain home in Linville, NC, and the family farm on the North Carolina/Virginia border where she grew up. She is once again appreciating life on the farm with its vistas of lush green pastures, woodlands, Carolina blue skies, and unobstructed sunrises and sunsets.

A native of Manchester, UK, and a holder of a Master’s degree in English Literature from the city’s university, Louisa Kamal has spent over half of her life living and working in Asia—Thailand, Japan, and now Nepal. Often referred to by friends as the builder of “cultural bridges,” Louisa is passionate about both preserving and promoting understanding of traditions and rituals, especially those associated with Tibet, which she first visited in 2012. A winner of various awards for haiku and short stories, A Rainbow of Chaos is her first full-length book. Louisa currently lives in Kathmandu with Arjun and their dog, Maya, enjoying trekking, badminton, and photography in her free time.

Esther’s Diary was the first book I ever wrote and published thanks to Atmosphere Press! I work part-time for my dad’s business selling skin care products, I also have a one-year-old son, so life gets pretty busy and hectic! I am writing blogs and poems for my next book, Esther’s Diary 2. I enjoy walking, exercising, writing poems, journaling, and listening to music.

I am currently retired, but I worked about forty-three years, approximately half of which was for companies where I worked my way up into middle management positions and the other half spent consulting for primarily Fortune 100 companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Bloomberg Financial, AT&T, and NBC at 30 Rock. I was fortunate to work for these companies at an executive level providing management consulting services as well as technology solutions as I had a strong background in Information Technology. I traveled all over the country meeting some of the most prominent business leaders of that time. My career ended when I was on a consulting assignment with the State of NJ in Trenton and at the age of sixty-two, when I was wrapping up my consulting assignment, they asked me to work for them permanently and I said to them “Do you know how old I am?” and they said “Yes, but we have no one that does what you do.” I worked in Senior Management for them for four years. Unfortunately, I would have worked longer but I had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and the symptoms were becoming more apparent, so I retired at sixty-six years old.

Born and raised south of the river from the Twin Cities in Minnesota, R. M. Forte took an interest in stories by listening to others reminisce on life and their choices. He holds that every moment compounds into more significant outcomes—be it advantageous or detrimental nothing in life is truly static. Having begun as a lyricist and composer, Forte’s interest and fascination with life and the many stories within propelled him toward refining his voice as an author. Whether crafting fiction, poetry, commentary, biography, or memoir, he seeks these moments, the linchpin of events that leave humanity in wonderment or horror—all the while drawn by the balance of temporal things and the hereafter. In the end, what is writing but a portion of reality isolated onto the page that we may all share in pondering life and values through another’s lens?

Mhlengi Skeelo ‘Melchizedek’ Khumalo has a lot of creative alter egos. He is a proud South African, the soon-to-be husband of his beloved Morgan, the dad of Destiny and Luzel, and the husband of Thandi Julia.

Deniz is an Iranian-American theatre artist based in New York. Her works experiment with form and they focus on memory, grief, immigration and the concept of home. Her plays have been performed in several national and international festivals. She has written and directed experimental music-theatre projects that challenge the status quo and current vernacular of the theatre and modern opera scene. Her opera Salt has been acclaimed as “remarkable on every level” (Ewing Reviewing).

Anne Pinkerton is an essayist, memoirist, and poet. Her work often circles around grief and loss, as well as coping with these painful realities in our lives. Her writing has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Ars Medica, Modern Loss, “Beautiful Things” at River Teeth Journal, Sunlight Press, The Keepthings, and the anthologies The Pandemic Midlife Crisis: Gen X Women on the Brink and Nothing Divine Dies: A Poetry Anthology About Nature, among other publications.

CK Van Dam is a daughter of the Dakota prairies. With degrees in History and Journalism from South Dakota State University, she has embarked on a second career to create stories about the strong women who have built our nation and our world.

Writing was a magic wand to make my life better. I loved mysteries, so Perry Mason, Sherlock Holmes, and Edgar Allen Poe, with a dash of Mark Twain’s humor, inspired my writing. I enjoy keeping readers turning the page, eager for the next surprise or clue. You never know what is going to happen next in Monstrovia.

I have always loved words, not just their meanings but also their sounds and rhythms. Now retired, I have time to play with all those dear friends, the little ones, the long ones, the monosyllabic and the poly. I use them to build short stories, novels, essays, plays, and especially poems. Oh yes, my poetry is especially dear to me. I hope it will be to others.