Author Interviews

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.

I’m an anthropologist by training and a fiction writer for fun. I’ve been reading fantasy since I was way too young for it. I live in Quintana Roo, Mexico, with my wife and daughter. I’m a cat person; we’ve got one extremely long cat and we feed any strays brave enough to handle petsies from my daughter.

Eva Halus is an author of 17 published books and has 3 other books in manuscripts. She is also a painter, photographer, and illustrator of her own books. Eva debuted with poetry in 2009, publishing 6 other poetry books afterwards. As a journalist for 14 years, permanent collaborator at Accent Montreal and various other newspapers on paper and online, she published together with a well-known Romanian TV and Radio Journalist from Timisoara, Romania, (Veronica Balaj) 3 books of interviews with Romanian-born personalities from Montreal (2016, 2018 and 2019).

Melody is a free spirit born and raised in Vancouver, BC. She is a recognized painter and a poet. Her art has been showcased in local galleries and she published a book of poetry, Life Lyrics, in 2011. She now lives outside Vancouver with her husband Arric, where their backyard, affectionately known as the “Fowler Vineyard,” continues to produce amazing wines and jellies.

Laurie Alberswerth is a writer, photographer, senior community edu-tainer, and mechanical engineer who enjoys confusing both her left- and right-brain hemispheres. A native of St. Louis and an in-law to farm life, she brings Missouri settings to her readers through the Jude and Audie West Mystery series. Where the Wests tackle clients’ genealogy roadblocks (and avoid digging their own graves), Laurie has camped with her hubby in their little blue tent. Her own family tree proves that life is lived in the dash between dates on the tombstone.

Coming from a working-class background, writing is definitely not something that runs in the blood. I didn’t know any published authors growing up, it didn’t even seem like an option for me. However, I English was always my best subject at school, and I was a prolific reader, with strange taste (I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula when I was nine). I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I realized this, but at a certain point it dawned on me that fiction allows truth to be expressed in ways that are not possible in the ordinary world. I was learning much more from the stories I was reading than the teachers at my school.