Author Interviews

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.

Connecticut-born Robin D’Amato moved to New York City to attend New York University, fell in love with the city, and never left. In 1984, she was introduced to the Macintosh computer and has worked in the publishing industry as a pre-press specialist ever since. She also spent several decades pursuing dance and choreography. Her first novel, Somebody’s Watching You, won a 2021 second-quarter Firebird Book Award for fiction. She currently lives in Manhattan’s East Village with her 3,000-LP music room and two cats.

Sandra Fox Murphy is originally from Glasgow, Delaware, but grew up an “Air Force brat.” Ms. Murphy was inspired to write verse and stories while studying the beatnik poets at Indian Valley College in California and she is a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin. After retiring from the U.S. Geological Survey, she wrote her novel A Thousand Stars, the story of Ann Hill, who came to Rhode Island in 1649. Her second novel, That Beautiful Season, is a tale of the Civil War and its aftermath; a story rich in the love of family and the land near the Chesapeake Bay.

Mireille Parker is an Indian Australian author from Fremantle, West Australia, who has devoted herself to writing for the past fifteen years. Journaling since age eleven, Mireille wanted to be a writer since discovering Anais Nin in the film Henry & June on daytime TV while at university. She graduated from The University of West Australia, majoring in English Literature and Psychology, with a history minor (the Vikings and Ancient Greeks), but it was during a stay in Mumbai in 2003, while recording Hindi vinyl in a sound studio, that a book just started coming out of her.

Marian Birch was born and raised in New York City but spent most of her adult life on the West Coast, the past thirty years on the Olympic Peninsula. She was a clinical psychologist specializing in work with mothers and babies until her retirement in 2012. Marian has been writing since she was seven years old but The Age of Reason is her first novel.

Justine Gladden has always thought about putting a lot of things on the wall as far as accomplishments and certificates. After quitting school at an early age, she went back and got her GED. She became a licensed foster parent, then she became a therapeutic foster parent. She has run a home care business for the past eight years. She is a certified notary and is also certified in CPR. Justine is a co-guardian to three special needs children, and has adopted three children. She raised two grown daughters and five beautiful grandchildren. She likes to say that she is “Just working to see how many things I can accomplish before it’s all over. I believe the world doesn’t owe me anything and I believe when I leave, I will have enjoyed all that life had to offer me.”

Kendall Roberts lives in California. In his spare time, he enjoys writing, biking, and board games. Gunslingers is his first novel.

Karin Rathert grew up in North Dakota, close to where Mondak once flourished. She lives in Colorado and is a writer, editor, and mother of three amazing kids. When not writing, she loves yoga, music, travel, and photographing abandoned buildings. Invitation to a Hanging is her first novel.

Elmo Shade is the author of four poetry collections, his latest being The Dark Side of White Bread: Surviving Our Fathers – A Poetry Chapbook, 2023. His work has been published in The SubjectivJournal, Nine Cloud Journal, and The Pointed Circle, a literary magazine of Portland Community College. Elmo is the Founder of the Camas (WA) Poetry Open Mic and is a certified Mindfulness Teacher Professional recognized by the International Mindfulness Teacher Association. He is an unabashed fan of Double IPAs, Opus-X Cigars, and Rush.

Tabitha Sprunger is an art educator, illustrator, and writer. Her debut novel, Hart Street and Main has been a #1 Amazon New Release in YA Magical Realism Fiction, along with receiving 5-Star Readers’ Favorite ratings and being IndieReader approved. The series was recently featured in the August, September, and October editions of LibraryBub. Readers’ Favorite said of her novel, “Hart Street and Main is imaginative and creative,” filled with “vibrant characters.” Book two of the series, Hart Street and Main Metamorphosis was recently released in August 2022 with book three rumored to be in the works. Her writing contains spectacular characters, especially strong female personalities whom young girls can look up to. Sprunger began writing the trilogy while still a student in high school.

Patti Isaacs is a cartographer and writer who lives in Stillwater, Minnesota. She grew up in a family that loved to travel. She became the unofficial curator of the family subscription to National Geographic, which fueled her interest in maps and the wider world. In college, Patti met Gauss, an Italian who was majoring in Chinese. Ideal partners in travel and life, in 1981 they lived for a year in the city of Xian, China, where they witnessed the last days of communism and the very beginning of China’s conversion to capitalism. In 2005, Patti returned to document the change that the country, her old city, and her old friends had undergone in the intervening years.

Daniel Varona has been a fan of video games from a very early age and was heavily inspired by some recognizable classics. What piqued his interest in writing was the attention to detail those passionate developers pulled off at the time, no matter the technical limitations. Catching these small details impacted and elevated the storytelling experience for any consumer keen enough, making them understand and think on concepts themselves rather than being told everything point blank. This hobby, along with other creative outlets, brought to fruition Daniel’s desire to write his own story.