Author Interviews

Judith Clayton Van grew up on a horse ranch in Oregon, granddaughter to a famous U of O coach and cousin to the pioneers of the Pacific Northwest timber industry. She owned nightclubs, managed artists, promoted concerts, and exhibited paintings as a visual artist. She completed a BFA in Studio Arts, an MFA in Creative Writing, was a professor of English at Arizona State University, and a juried literary artist with the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Clayton Van served as fiction editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review and art editor of Superstition Review.

As authors, researchers, and practitioners, Pamela ShockleyZalabak, Ph.D., and Sherwyn Morreale, Ph.D., are ideally positioned to write a book about building and rebuilding trust. Their combined publishing record includes over 23 books and 150 journal articles, many of which have carefully probed the nature of trust. Their research-based trust model, developed with international colleagues and tested in organizations of many types and descriptions, includes five trust drivers—the reasons why trust is present or absent: 1) Competence, 2) Openness and Honesty, 3) Concern for Others, 4) Reliability, and 5) Identification.

Güngör Buzot was born in Turkey in 1953 and received her pharmacy degree in 1975 in Istanbul. She struggled with health problems and prescription drugs for most of her life. At the age of sixty-one, she discovered homeopathy and regained her health. Now she is healthy, strong, and happy.

Nathan Guardian is a lifelong writer. He has written for local newspapers and literary magazines and holds a degree in English. Wicked Women is the first of an original three-book series about New England witches.

Jordan Neben was born, raised, and currently lives in Nebraska in the United States. He graduated from high school in Lexington, Nebraska, right in the middle of the state, and went to college at the University of Nebraska nearby. A Lot of Questions, with No Answers? is his first book, though he hopes to write more books in the future.

Dwight Jesmer grew up an Army brat in a life of perpetual motion. He went to seven schools before finishing high school at Punahou in Honolulu, Hawaii. He graduated from Loyola Marymount and then spent a decade working in the film and television industry in Los Angeles. He left the smog of L.A. for the fog of San Francisco to work on his Masters in Writing from USF. He got into teaching and worked for almost two decades in the trenches of education.

Anastasia Lindsey is a timeless soul and author who participates in interdimensional traveling and building beautiful poems to capture the hearts of souls around the world in the most loving and supportive ways possible. This humble writer was born and raised in a small town in Illinois where she currently resides in a beautiful, cozy house on a patch of land with the love of her life, Dakota.

Being a native Angeleno has given me a unique perspective on life. I feel because I know so many areas and communities, I’m somewhat of an authority on my city. I’ve always been observant and that can be traced back as far as elementary school where my talent was first recognized. From that point on, whether I knew it or not, I was working on my skill set. By the time I reached my twenties, I gave screenwriting a shot. I wrote a couple of scripts for independent films and from there I transitioned to novels.

A storyteller since her first fib, Patti M. Walsh is an award-winning writer whose first novel, Ghost Girl, was published in 2022.

Doug Robinson has been a professor of English and translation studies for four decades—in that capacity he has not only published thirty academic books on literature, translation, rhetoric, and semiotics, but translated several novels from Finnish. The Last Days of Maiju Lassila is his second novel.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, my friendships weren’t as supporting as those I found at Bishop Loughlin H.S. and Fordham University, then Columbia University Grad School. The teaching I did at the City University of New York and later at New York University had me develop communication with a variety of students, some from global countries. Much of these experiences helped me see and develop writing as communicating.

Amy Smiley, LCSW, Ph.D., lives in New York City where she maintains a private psychotherapy practice and has a family. She is a writer of fiction and essays which have appeared in journals in France and the United States. She also creates paperjams—visual poems derived from daily headlines and photographs. A former professor of French literature at the Johns Hopkins University (and author of a full-length study of the poetics of the earth in the writing of Louis Aragon, published by Honore Champion), Amy has also taught classes related to psychoanalysis and social work at New York University.

At various times, Annie Seyler has lived in a train car, studied at an Ivy League university, dumpster dived, traveled with governors’ spouses, hand-milked goats, lost hope, kept secrets, and seen ghosts. Annie grew up in Connecticut, fled to San Francisco in her twenties, and touched down in Washington, D.C., in her thirties before landing in Vermont. Two decades later, she appears to have stopped running. The Wisdom of Winter is her debut novel. Connect with Annie at www.annieseyler.com.

I am a 68-year-old native Texas poet who has lived many different lives. I have resided in Texas most of my adult life, but for some years I made my home in the great states of Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, California, and Arizona. I grew up in a small, conservative community in East Texas in the 1960s and was greatly influenced by the Anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements

Born in Honolulu, Hawai’i, Lorenzo DeStefano is a playwright, screenwriter, producer, director, and photographer. A member of the Directors Guild of America, he has produced and directed network series, documentaries, and narrative films, worked in U.S. and U.K. theater, and written fiction, non-fiction, original screenplays, and adaptations.

Lizzy grew up in Maryland and is a cat mom (she learned to love cats thanks to Adam). She’d love to hear from you on Instagram: @unconditional_memoir.

William S. King is an independent scholar living in Ocala, Florida. His previous book, To Raise Up a Nation – John Brown, Frederick Douglass and the Making of a Free Country, was selected by CHOICE as the outstanding academic title in its category in 2013; writing, “Well written and thoroughly researched, this book deserves a place as one of the great ‘big’ histories of the Civil War… Essential.” Till the Dark Angel Comes – Abolitionism and the Road to the Second American Revolution, was his subsequent book.

Charles Ota Heller is the author of four memoirs in English and one in Czech. The former are Prague: My Long Journey Home, Close Encounters with the Famous and Near-Famous, Ready, Fire, Aim! An Immigrant’s Tales of Entrepreneurial Terror, and Cowboy from Prague: An Immigrant’s Pursuit of the American Dream.

Elisabeth Conway is a British author who grew up in the Worcestershire countryside, but who spent a considerable part of her life in Southeast Asia, which she first encountered as a student of social anthropology.