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Elaine Isaak
was born in California in the same year that
Tolkein died (which she
didn't find out until much later). She has lived in Illinois,
Massachusetts, and now New Hampshire, with some wonderful summers in
Colorado, and a few visits to Seattle, Washington thrown in the mix.
After feeling like a misfit through middle school, and finding a group
of peers as geeky as herself in high school, she went off to Rhode
Island School of Design with some vague notion of working for Jim Henson
or Hollywood, making creatures. Finding the program there to be too
limiting for her needs, she withdrew and went home to seek her fortune
(read: to
crash at her folks' house until she figured out what to do with
herself). She wound up sewing animal mascot costumes for a rental shop,
and free-lance sewing quilt squares and dance outfits. From that, she
developed her own business, Curious Characters, creating original design
stuffed animals and
small-scale metal sculptures.
She finished her first book and promptly had it rejected by Del Rey. She
started her second book, which remains unfinished to this day. She was
primarily a poet, and self-published a couple of chapbooks, DOUBLES OR
METAPHORS and THE INTIMATE TOES OF ROME. Won a couple of poetry slams,
met her husband at a poetry reading and founded a local poetry group,
Poets Unbound, which is still thriving to this day.
She sold her first short story for the same amount of money as her first
paid poem ($10, a much better rate for poetry than for fiction). She
attended the Odyssey Speculative Fiction Workshop, which she highly
recommends. She took about four years to write her third book, in fits
and starts. She has just finished her tenth novel.
She had her daughter in 2001 and feared she would never have time to
write again. In response, she wrote faster. At this point, her
productivity, like the rate of technological change, appears to be
unbounded.
Suspense author
Jennie Spallone wrote over one-hundred profiles and feature stories
for local and national publications, as well as two special education
texts, before putting pen to her first suspense novel. Deadly Choices
won Third Place for Mystery Fiction at the Police Writers Conference
(Name changed to Public Safety Writers) in Las Vegas, 2006.
Jennie, an active member of
Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, speaks at local
bookstores and libraries, in addition to Mystery Conferences throughout
the Country, including Scene of the Crime, Bouchercon, Printer's Row,
Sleuthfest, Malice Domestic, Magna Cum Murder, Midwest Literary Fest,
Love is Murder, Public Safety Writers of America, and the University of
Wisconsin Writer's Institute. She can be contacted for bookings or just
to share comments at spalloneauthor@aol.com .
www.jenniespallone.com,
www.jenniespallone.blogspot.com
Steven Formanwas born in the Boston area in 1942, graduated the University of
Massachusetts in 1963 and started his own seafood marketing company in
1970. He has always had a passion for writing but did not publish his
first book until 2009.He devoted most of his adult life to building a
one-man company into an international, multi million-dollar enterprise
from the ground floors of Boston's Haymarket square to the grounds of
the emperor's
palace in Tokyo. He has seen small ideas grow into gigantic successes
and he has played a part in creating entirely new industries that remain
viable and vibrant today.
In 1992, he and his wife, Barbara, traded the cold New England
winters for the warmth of Boca Raton, Florida and have been enjoying the
best of both worlds since. The unique, contrasting life styles of Boston
and Boca inspired him to write "Boca Knights", the book he promised
himself to write many years ago. The sequel, "Boca Mournings" is
releasing on Feb 2. He and his wife became Florida residents recently
but still divide their time between their two favorite cities. His
daughter, Jana, settled in Boca with her husband and two beautiful
children. His son David
lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son, and their three rescued
cats and one rescued dog.
Steve has learned that the business and literary worlds have much in
common; create a good product, market it to the public and hope
consumers buy it repeatedly. The main difference he has experienced
between his two careers is the public's perception. Over the years he
has sold millions and millions of pounds of seafood but no one has ever
asked him to sign a piece of fish. Write a good book, however and
suddenly a lot of people want his signature on something besides a
check.
A former partner in a top-10 global management
consulting firm, Joe Buff is
a seasoned risk analyst and professional writer on national security and
defense preparedness, with an emphasis on undersea warfare. Three of his
10+ non-fiction articles in THE SUBMARINE REVIEW received annual
literary awards from the Naval Submarine League. He has also been
published in SEA TECHNOLOGY, USNI PROCEEDINGS, AMERICAN SUBMARINER, THE
DAY of New London, and his work is often reproduced in COMSUBFOR’s
e-bullet UNDERSEA ENTERPRISE NEWS DAILY. He is a contributing
commentator/blogger for Military.com’s Defense Tech.
Joe is also a national best-selling author of tales of near-future
warfare featuring nuclear submariners, special ops forces, and Seabees
in action at their bravest and best. His latest novel, his sixth, SEAS
OF CRISIS (Morrow/Harper), won the 2006 Admiral Nimitz Award for
Outstanding Naval Fiction from the Military Writers Society of America.
He is currently working full time as a co-screenwriter and a producer on
a possible major motion picture based on his second novel THUNDER IN THE
DEEP (Bantam), which is now well into development.
Joe is an Associate Life Member of the United
States Submarine Veterans, Inc. (USSVI), belonging to their
Albany-Saratoga Base, and has been a speaker at two of the USSVI’s
annual national conventions. He is an Honorary Life Member of the Navy
Seabee Veterans of America, Inc. (NSVA), and is a founding member of
“Operation Seabees Knowledge,” a volunteer grassroots public education
campaign on behalf of Seabees of all eras. Joe is a major benefactor of
the Dolphin Scholarship Foundation and of the Naval War College
Foundation.
Joe holds a master's degree in math from MIT,
earned under a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He worked as an
intern at the Argonne National Laboratory. Previously a qualified
actuary for twenty years, with extensive experience at interpreting
policy implications of dire "what if" scenarios, he is now a member of
the Society for Risk Analysis, a non-partisan international scholarly
body headquartered in McLean, VA. Joe also recently became a member of
the Submarine Industrial Base Council (SIBC), an industry trade and
advocacy group headquartered in Washington, DC.
Sherrill Bodine
is sure growing up in her grandmother's house, taking care of her
developmentally disabled mother, forged who she is, but she doesn't
believe any one thing defines
her. Her philosophy of life is that we are all in this together-and we
need to embrace one another with as much grace, humor and compassion as
we can muster. She sees life as big, bigger, biggest, and she wants to
take everyone along with her on the journey.
She not only attends
black-tie affairs and works on charity board projects, but she is also
just as likely to be taking a grandchild to lunch and a movie. She's
happily married to John, with whom she eloped when she was an
18-year-old freshman in college. It was quite the scandal. They have
four
beautiful children and 11 grandchildren.
She won her first writing award in the seventh grade in a statewide
essay contest about a television broadcast of Hans Brinker and the
Silver Skates. Instead of silver skates, they sent real skates, which
she enjoyed immensely. She's only sorry she doesn't still have them so
they could hang in her office.
While moving 22 times across the country and rearing her children, she
sold stories to Fate Magazine, Home Life Magazine and True Confessions.
In 1988, she sold her first novel and a week later received a two-book
contract from Fawcett. Sixteen novels later, she's seen The Other Amanda
win the Wisconsin Romance Writers of America Write Touch Readers' Award
and Talk of the Town chosen by Cosmopolitan magazine as its "Red Hot
Read" for February 2009.
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