Author Interviews

In 2009 I started to seriously write as a way to express my inner feelings. Writing is an extremely interior process, allowing access and expression of deep emotions. Writing my book literally saved my life.

Award-winning Seattle-based author Erica Miner balances her reviews and interviews of real-world musical artists with her fanciful plot fabrications that reveal the dark side of the fascinating world of opera. Erica believes that opera theatres are the perfect places for creating fictional mischief!

Ligia de Wit is a quirky bilingual writer residing in Mexico City. An eternal romantic who’s loved fairy tales and swashbuckling stories all her life, she blends both with fun language and a hefty sprinkle of romance while she’s at it. Her stories are full of personality with endearing characters.

Born in Boston, Ricardo is a Chicago-based author who recently released his debut collection, Computer Love, which has been called “a compilation of poetic, earnest, and arresting tales” by Kirkus Reviews. Outside of writing fiction, he splits his time between climate change advocacy, coding, and riding his bike.

I am a forty-six-year-old housewife with a BA (hons.) in History from the OU. I was born in Mansfield, north Nottinghamshire, but now live in Reading, Berkshire, with my husband. I have always been an avid reader since my earliest memories and was devouring books like the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings in Infants School. I read a number of genres which I enjoy for numerous reasons from simple good old escapism to expanding my knowledge. My favourite authors include Raymond E Feist, Matthew Reilly, and Colleen McCollough, amongst many others.

Jasmine is a multiply neurodivergent licensed psychologist working from her psychology practice in Melbourne, Australia. In addition to providing professional supervision to students and other professionals, she works with clients across the neurodiverse spectrum in the context of both psychotherapy and assessment.

Kai Van Dyke is a self-taught poet and artist from Ohio. Kai has always had an eye for the arts and spends the majority of their time writing, reading, and painting. They are passionate about helping people accept and understand themselves. Poetry has been a form of therapy and self-reflection for Kai and they aspire to have their work be just as meaningful to the reader.

Born and raised in upstate New York, Alyssa gets deep and personal in her first published poetry collection. These poems cover a range of personal challenges every young adult has experienced through the course of growing up. Although Alyssa is quite vocal and advocates for herself and others today, she was a very shy and reserved child. Alyssa grew up with a love for writing as early as five years old, despite her struggles with dyslexia. Her mom began buying her journals, which encouraged her to write as she began using writing as an outlet to express herself. She found writing has helped her cope with large obstacles in her life: heartbreak, depression, and her 2018 diagnoses of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Alyssa acquired her degree in Event Management from Niagara University and currently works as a wedding planner at Walden in Chicago, IL. She has always had a desire to grow in knowledge and experience. Traveling is one of her many passions, along with romance and murder mystery novels, action movies, and game nights with friends.

I began my career as a writer when I became a “story gobbler” at an early age. I began reading through the entire children’s section of the library and moved on.

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.