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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.
A graduate of Smith College,
Katrina Kenisonspent
most of
her adult life working in publishing; first as an in-house editor at
Houghton Mifflin Company in New Haven, New York, and Boston.
Katrina
is the author of MITTEN STRINGS FOR GOD:
REFLECTIONS FOR MOTHERS IN A HURRY (Warner Books, 2000).
She has appeared on Oprah and other shows. Her writing has appeared in
O, Real Simple, Family Circle, Redbook, Better Homes and Gardens,
Health, and other publications. From 1990 until
2006, Katrina was the series editor, working from
home, of THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, published annually by Houghton
Mifflin.
She co-edited, with John Updike, THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE
CENTURY (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). She wrote, with her yoga teacher, Rolf
Gates, MEDITATIONS FROM
THE MAT: DAILY REFLECTIONS ON THE PATH OF YOGA (Random House, 2002). And
with Kathleen Hirsch, she co-edited an anthology of short stories about
motherhood, MOTHERS: TWENTY
STORIES OF CONTEMPORARY MOTHEROOD (1996).
Her newest release, THE GIFT OF AN ORDINARY DAY: A MOTHER'S MEMOIR,
released in September 2009 from Springboard Press. She has posted a
touching 7.5 minute of her reading from this newest book on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olSyCLJU3O0
Katrina
lives in New Hampshire with her husband, sons, and their faithful border
collie, Gracie.
Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein
is the originator of The Enchanted Self (R) a positive psychology method
for increasing happiness. She has been a positive psychologist in
private practice and licensed in the states of New Jersey and
Massachusetts since 1981. She is currently in private practice in Long
Branch, New Jersey with her husband, Dr. Russell M. Holstein.
The magic of the human spirit, with its capacity for survival, growth,
and joy, has always intrigued Dr. Barbara. As years went by and her
practice grew, she longed to explore adult development even further -
specifically how to overcome obstacles and bring pleasure into one's
life while living a life of meaning and purpose. She began to document
certain steps necessary to rekindle our talents, strengths, and lost
potential which she teaches and has labeled
The Enchanted Self.
She discovered that her clients thrived when she helped them glean from
their memories what was positive in their past, rather than focusing on
the negative elements. She also discovered that affirming her clients'
talents, coping skills, interests, longings, wishes, and even dormant
potential, ultimately led to each client flowering, regardless of real
problems and issues. She has helped many, many clients and the public
overcome adversity and discover that life is worth living. Her
methods help people have more positive emotions while understanding how
to cope with daily living, so that it is indeed a good life. Mental
wellness combined with a true understanding of how to retrieve and
recreate positive states of mind again and again are top goals for Dr.
Holstein.
Her book The Enchanted Self, A Positive Therapy was published in 1997 by
Harwood Academic Publishers and is now in its second printing through
Brunner-Routledge. This book is Dr. Holstein's pathfinder book in which
she outlines the best in Positive Psychology treatment techniques, two
years before the term was coined! Her second book Recipes for
Enchantment, The Secret Ingredient is YOU! has received rave reviews as
a wonderful inspirational story book with space to journal.
There Comes A Time In Every Woman's Life for DELIGHT is Dr. Holstein's
third book. This book takes the reader on a spiritual adventure with Dr.
Holstein. Readers get to experience first hand celebrations and
adventures that rekindle their own spirit of adventure. Dr. Barbara
speaks regularly on radio programs around the country, and appears on
television in New York and New Jersey. Her inspiring audio shows and
podcasts can be found on the web. Her articles and stories appear on the
web on hundreds of sites. She also gives lectures, seminars, and tele-classes
on happiness. Listen to her archived e-radio show, Happiness for Women
Only! on
http://www.internetvoicesradio.com/ and her weekly radio program,
Kids, Tweens and Teens, A Positive Psychologist Looks at all Three!,
also on
http://www.internetvoicesradio.com/
The Truth, I'm Ten, I'm Smart and I Know Everything!
is another first in
positive psychology, perhaps the first positive psychology fiction book.
Written by a ten-year-old girl as a diary, Dr. Barbara has imbedded lots
of positive truths that we all need to remember and live by, regardless
of our age.
The girl's edition, titled: The Truth, (I'm a girl, I'm smart and I know
everything) debuted February 2008 in bookstores nationwide. Edited for
girls and moms, with a special introduction, and questions just for
kids, the book is a great read for kids and their moms.
Robin
Burcell, an FBI-trained forensic artist, has worked in law
enforcement for over two decades as a police officer, detective, and
hostage negotiator. Prior to being a criminal investigator in Sacramento
County, California, she was a police officer and detective for the city
of Lodi for eighteen years and
was the first female officer hired, which meant breaking through the
barriers and prejudices that went with that title.
She has testified as an expert in the fields of forensic art,
fingerprints, and child abuse. An FBI academy-trained forensic artist,
her drawings have been used to solve a number of crimes, including
homicides, bank
robberies, and hate crimes, and she was called upon by various law
enforcement entities, including the FBI, for this skill. She has worked
with live witnesses, and the dead, sometimes having to set up shop in a
morgue to draw the corpses for identification purposes after they have
been found
in a state beyond recognition (hence the term forensic artist). Her past
undercover assignments have been as a hooker, a housewife, and a high
school student (and although this was years ago, she still retains her
youthful looks).
She worked patrol and was a hostage negotiator for a number of years.
She has also served as a detective investigating
sexual assault, child abuse, crimes against persons, and crimes against
property (burglaries, thefts, embezzlements).
She is the author of the Anthony Award winning SFPD Homicide
Inspector Kate Gillespie novels;
Every Move She Makes, Fatal Truth, Deadly Legacy, and Cold Case. Her
second series, about a forensic artist for the FBI, Sydney Fitzpatrick,
debuted in Nov 2008 with Face of a Killer. The newest in the series, The
Bone Chamber, released in Dec 2009.
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