Author Interviews

Retired among the beaches of Florida, Dawn Bragg is an avid reader-turned-author who holds a deep passion for the literary arts. Author of numerous poems and short stories, she is a lifelong advocate for literacy. Dawn devotes her time to creating children’s books that celebrate differences, champion the underdog, and encourage children to find acceptance in others and in oneself. When not writing, Dawn can be found traveling and enjoying the Florida beaches with family and friends.

Diane holds an Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, as well as a M.S. and B.S. from the University of Houston. A sagacious facilitator of student experiences, she has woven firsthand experiences into dissertation vignettes and into peer-reviewed articles: “Blue Dragonflies are ‘Dandleflies’. . .” for the Affective Reading Journal and “A Challenged Third Grader Connects with Meaningful Books” for the Indiana Reading Journal.

Dr. Emily Colwell is a licensed and board-certified naturopathic doctor and therapist whose extensive career spans three decades. She earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Social Work and a doctorate in naturopathic medicine from Bastyr University. Emily’s personal encounters with anxiety, childhood trauma, family addiction, chronic illness, shifting sexual orientation, and cancer have been her teachers, showing her the capacity for healing, regardless of the circumstances.

I have had the good fortune of working as a psychotherapist in New York City. for over twenty-five years. I was a mental health first responder post-9/11, which solidified my expertise in trauma and loss. I’ve spoken to Fortune 100 companies, and to smaller companies and groups on trauma. When the pandemic started I was listening to clients and found a gap in how to handle the stress without accessing traditional supports. I started the blog, “In the Time of Coronavirus” which included self-care tips, along with mindfulness, creativity, humor, and empathy. I was encouraged by others to create a book, and that is how I came to write this book following Atmosphere Press’s acceptance.

Matthew J. McKee’s micro-fiction and short stories have been featured in Meat For Tea and two of his novels have been published by Atmosphere Press. He graduated from the University of Montana with a Bachelor’s in Archaeology and currently teaches English in Japan.

Eda lives in the Midwest, where the weather is unpredictable, with her husband, son, and daughter. During the day, Eda is a bookkeeper at a local consulting firm. Her evenings (and weekends) are filled with children’s activities and spending time with her family. At night when the children go to bed her passion comes to life. Unless there is a concert, then you will find her there.

My book began with an idea of two riders, a man and a woman, entering a tiny village in the rain and fog. Though I believed I could never write fantasy due to my having Aphantasia, I couldn’t get the story out of my head and the story kept growing around that idea. I soon knew that the man was someone who was called ‘the Traveler.’ I soon knew that twins related to the woman had been abducted and the story would begin with the man and woman setting out to free the twins. So the title, The Traveler: Quest for the Twins, was actually quite easy to come up with.

Erin is the author of Kapuna: How Love Transformed a Culture, which received the North American Book Award 2015 for Best Travel Non-Fiction and the 2015 Idaho Author Awards First Place in Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs. She studied Art, Photography, and Journalism at Hillsdale College in Michigan, USA. Her passions include teaching inductive Bible studies, urban gardening, good coffee, wombats, family-based care, and, of course, books.

Writer and photographer Ethan Hirsh served four years as an air traffic control officer in the United States Air Force, then worked as a wordsmith and communications strategist in Houston and Kansas City for more than thirty years. His corporate specialties included annual shareholder reports and branding. He has degrees in English and business. Now starting a third decade of “retirement,” he spends much of his time with his wife, JoEl, tending their nature preserve in the Missouri Ozarks. An amateur naturalist, Ethan publishes a photo blog several times a year.

Katherine Williams was born on the Wirral Peninsula in England. She now lives in rural Connecticut, USA, where she likes to write, work in her vegetable garden, and hike in the surrounding countryside with her new puppy Maus.

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.

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.