Guest Authors
The Books in Bloom authors will read from their work, make presentations, and sign books. Check the Author Events Schedule for times and locations for each author's presentation. When not reading either in the Conservatory or Author's Tent, authors will be in the Crescent Gardens.
Please click on author's name for further information.
|
|
Velda Brotherton
Velda Brotherton is a native of Arkansas, and for the past twenty years has been writing historical articles and books. Her historical articles appeared in The Washington County Observer for many years and are now published in The White River Valley News. Her non-fiction books include Wandering In The Shadows of Time: An Ozarks Odyssey; Washington County, Arkansas Images of America Series; Springdale, The Courage of Shiloh Making of America Series, both published by Arcadia Publishing. Her biography of Maud Duncan of Winslow, Arkansas, appeared in Arkansas Biographies from the University of Arkansas Press. A similar biography on Duncan is included in the online Arkansas Encyclopedia along with an entry covering the history of Springdale.
In 2004 she was honored with a 30-minute documentary featuring her work to preserve Arkansas history. It appeared on PBS and was shown at several film festivals. Last year five of her short stories appeared in various anthologies. Her latest book is Fly With The Mourning Dove, the true story of a young girl who grows up on a homestead in New Mexico.
|
Pat Carr
Pat Carr, whose stories Leonard Michaels has described as "finely controlled and significantly moving," has written twelve books of fiction, including If We Must Die (Texas Christian University Press), a finalist in the PEN book awards. Her most recent books are Border Ransom (Texas Christian University Press) and The Death of a Confederate Colonel, a collection of Civil War stories, which will be published by the University of Arkansas Press in Spring 2007.
Her more than one hundred short stories have been published in Southern Review, Yale Review, and Best American Short Stories, among many other publications.
Carr has a B.A. and a M.A. from Rice and a Ph.D. from Tulane. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Texas Institute of Letters Short Fiction Award, a Library of Congress Marc IV, and a writing fellowship from the Foundation Ledig-Rowohit in Lausanne, Switzerland. She lives in Elkins, Arkansas.
|
Laura Parker Castoro
www.laurawrites.com
Award winning author Laura Castoro loves to travel. Her spirit for adventure may have been born when she was. At only six weeks, she made her first trip from Texas where she was born to Arkansas where she grew up. She’s lived in Washington D.C., Connecticut, New Jersey, with long stretches in between under the big sky of Texas. Married with three children, Laura began her writing career while taking time off from a degree in microbiology to take care her of personal biology experiments at home, two wearing diapers, and one in kindergarten. Two years later, she sold her first book, a historical romance, Silks and Sabers. Always adaptable, she decided to see how far this enterprise would take her. Twenty-seven years later with more than (36) thirty-six published books in print is such genres as contemporary romance, westerns, sagas, and romantic suspense; Laura is now writing about the modern woman’s life as she sees it. Her latest book, Icing on the Cake (Mira), was just published this year.
|
Andrei Codrescu
codrescu.com
Here is what reviewers have to say about Andrei Codrescu: "Codrescu is a wordsmith par excellence...a modern day DeTocqueville... a wry and whimsical, pungently idiosyncratic documentary." Joe Leydon, The Los Angeles Times;
"Codrescu manages to be brilliant and insightful,tough and seductive about American culture..." The New York Times Book Review.
Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, memoirist, and frequent commentator on National Public Radio, where his distinctively Romanian accent and wry wit are immediately recognizable. He was born in Sibiu, Romania, and emigrated to the US at age 20.Currently he is MacCurdy Distiguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University, and also edits Exquisite Corpse ( www.corpse.org), an online literary journal.
Along with his regular commentary on NPR's All Things Considered, Codrescu writes weekly for Gambit (New Orleans). He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes for his work as a poet and writer, including a Peabody Award (for the film "Road Scholar") and an ACLU Freedom of Speech Award.
His novels include: Wakefield (Algonquin Press, 2004), Casanova in Bohemia, a novel, (The Free Press, 2002), A Bar in Brooklyn: Novellas & Stories, 1970-1978 (Black Sparrow Press, 1999). His most recent book of poetry is It Was Today - New Poems (Coffee House Press, 2003). In 2006 he published New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City (Algonquin Press).
|
Catherine Coulter
www.catherinecoulter.com
Catherine Coulter is the author of fifty novels, thirty-eight of which have been New York Times bestsellers. She earned her reputation writing historical romances, but in recent years turned her hand to penning-with great success-contemporary suspense novels. The Cove (Putnam) spent nine weeks on The New York Times paperback bestseller list and sold more than one million copies. The Maze (Putnam) was Coulter's first book to land on The New York Times hardcover bestseller list. A review of The Maze in Publisher's Weekly stated that it "was gripping enough to establish Coulter firmly in this genre." Coulter continues to live up to that promise with her subsequent bestselling FBI thrillers The Target, The Edge, Riptide, and Hemlock Bay, and FBI thriller, Eleventh Hour. Her newest FBI thriller, Double Take (Putnam), will be released this June.
Catherine Coulter's first novels were Regency romances. In 1982, she published her first long historical, Devil’s Embrace (Signet), and has continued to write long historials interspersing them with hardcover contemporary novels, beginning with False Pretenses (Signet) in 1988.
Catherine grew up on a horse ranch in Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas and received her masters at Boston College. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, she worked on Wall Street as a speechwriter for a company president. She loves to travel and ski, reads voraciously, and has a reputation for telling jokes—believing the publishing business is too crazy not to laugh. Catherine lives in Marin County, California with her physician husband. She loves to travel, sacrifices her body on the ski slopes and reads voraciously while recuperating. Because she's over forty, she's at the gym three times a week.
|
Jeffery Deaver
www.jefferydeaver.com
Jeffery Deaver was born outside of Chicago in 1950. His father was an advertising copywriter and his mother was a homemaker. He has one younger sister who writes novels for teenagers, Julie Reece Deaver. Deaver wrote his first book — which consisted of two entire chapters — when he was eleven, and he's been writing ever since. An award-winning poet and journalist, he has also written and performed his own songs around the country. After receiving a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri, Deaver worked as a magazine writer, then, to gain the background needed to become a legal correspondent for The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, he enrolled at Fordham Law School. After graduation he decided to practice law for a time and worked for several years as an attorney for a large Wall Street firm. It was during his long commute to and from the office that he began writing the type of fiction he enjoyed reading: suspense novels. In 1990 he started to write full time.
The author of twenty-two novels, Deaver has been nominated for six Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, an Anthony award, a Gumshoe Award, and is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story of the Year. In 2001, he won the W.H. Smith Thumping Good Read Award for his Lincoln Rhyme novel The Empty Chair (Simon & Schuster). In 2004, he was awarded the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Garden of Beasts (Simon & Schuster) and the Short Story Dagger for "The Weekender." Translated into 35 languages, his novels have appeared on a number of bestseller lists around the world, including the New York Times, the London Times and the Los Angeles Times. The Bone Collector (Viking) was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington as Lincoln Rhyme. A Maiden's Grave (Viking) was made into an HBO film retitled Dead Silence, starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin.
Jeff has also released two collections of his short stories, called Twisted (Simon & Schuster) and, in December 2006, More Twisted (Simon & Schuster).
|
Randy Denmon
Randy Denmon is a writer, engineer, and lifelong resident of Monroe, Louisiana. His first book, The Lawless Frontier, purchased and published by Kensington Publishing in New York is now available in book stores nationwide, as well as Wal-Mart. Prior to publication, The Lawless Frontier was a finalist in National Writers Association’s annual novel contest.
Randy has recently signed a contract for a second book with Kensington to be released in the fall of 2007, and he is currently at work on a third novel.
|
Suzette Hadin Elgin
www.sfwa.org/members/elgin
Suzette Haden Elgin was born in Missouri in 1936. All sorts of things happened, and in the late 60s she found herself widowed, re-married, mother of five, and a graduate student in the Linguistics Department of the University of California San Diego. Since everyone knew in those days that mothers-of-five hadn't a prayer of making it to the Ph.D., money for school was scarce; even teaching high school at night didn't cover the bills. Suzette therefore began writing science fiction novels to pay her tuition. She did survive grad school, with the distinction of being the only student ever to have to write two dissertations (one on English, one on Navajo) for that purpose; she went on to teach linguistics at San Diego State University, and then retired in 1980 to the Arkansas Ozarks, where she can still be found. She has grandchildren (twelve of them) worldwide.
Her first novel, The Communipaths, was published as half of an "ACE double" in 1970, starting her Coyote Jones series. (That's "Coyote" with three syllables.) Her second Coyote Jones book, Furthest, was published as an Ace Science Fiction Special in 1971; the third in the series -- Star-Anchored, Star-Angered -- was published by DAW Books. Next came The Ozarks Trilogy - Twelve Fair Kingdoms, The Grand Jubilee, And Then There'll Be Fireworks -- in 1981; it was a Science Fiction Book Club Alternate. (Coyote Jones appeared in another book set in the Planet Ozark universe, called Yonder Comes the Other End of Time.)
|
Katie Estill
Katie Estill is a graduate of Kenyon College and has an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her second novel, Dahlia's Gone was published by St. Martin’s Press, January, 2007. She lives in the Ozarks with her husband, novelist Daniel Woodrell, and looks forward to visiting Eureka Springs, where they once lived on Nut Street near Soldier’s Spring.
|
David Harrison
mowrites4kids.drury.edu/authors/harrison/
Christopher Medal winner David Harrison’s poems and stories have been widely recognized, anthologized, and translated into a dozen languages. Total sales of his seventy books exceed fifteen million copies. David’s poems have been set to music and performed. Somebody Catch My Homework, (Sandy Asher’s play inspired by his poetry), has been produced in the United States and abroad. David’s work has been presented on television and radio and released on cassette and CD-ROM. His poem, “My Book”, is sandblasted into the Children’s Garden sidewalk at Phoenix’s Burton Barr Central Library. He wrote and co-produced a 90-minute television documentary that was placed in the Library of Congress’s collection for works of distinction. David has been a musician, scientist, editor, and businessman. He holds degrees from Drury and Emory universities and an honorary doctorate of letters from Missouri State University. He lives with his wife Sandy in Springfield, Missouri. David is poet laureate of Drury University.
|
Mohja Kahf
Mohja Kahf is associate professor of comparative literature in the Middle East & Islamic Studies Program at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and author of Western Representations of the Muslim Woman and a book of poetry, Emails from Scheherazad. Her novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006, Carroll & Graf), is the coming-of-age story of a Muslim American woman at the intersection of Islamic dress and bad 1970s polyester. Her article, “Braiding the Stories: Women’s Eloquence in the Early Islamic Era” appears in Gisela Webb, Windows of Faith: Muslim Women’s Scholarship and Activism, and essays in Living Islam Out Loud, Arab American Feminisms, and Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out. Photo credit: Lorraine Chittock,
PADIA, and Saudi ARAMCO
|
Will LaPage
Will LaPage is an international consultant for park system administration, funding, and partnership building. He has worked with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, providing assistance to national park systems in Eastern Europe, Central America, and the Caribbean and has worked with outdoor recreation planners in South Africa.
Former director of New Hampshire’s state parks and the first recipient of the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Award for Excellence in Park Research, Dr. LaPage challenges us with his new book, Parks for Life (Venture, 2007), to reconsider the role of our public parklands in the 21 st century. He asks, “Can our parks do far more than we have traditionally expected of them? Can they help build respect for life, expand our appreciation of our vital interconnections, contribute to peace and justice, improve the health of our bodies and communities, and assist in reducing problems of homelessness, crime, and poverty?”
Dr. LaPage is the 2006-2007 Reynold Carlson Distinguished Lecturer in Parks at Indiana University and he and his wife reside in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
|
Dale McCurry
Dale McCurry is an Ozarks' born and bred guy with an unusually fluid pen whose dubious business skills ensured him a cell in federal prison from 1999-2004.
Dale spent his childhood in southwest Missouri, growing up in the family business washing dishes, checking oil and kicking tires at a truck stop on US 65. He spent his free time creating stories about the characters who stopped for a hamburger and gas; he wrote reaction reports for a high school psychology class about being son of a well-known local family whose writing heart was yanked by the "nearly silent voices from the valley where the sun sleeps."
The Buffalo, Missouri Reflex printed Dale's column, "Thoughts from Cedar Ridge" in the late 1980s, and Missouri Life Magazine selected him to interview William Least Heat-Moon, author of Blue Highways: A Journey into America, during the book's height of popularity.
After a stint as a U.S. Navy Seabee, Dale vowed to provide his wife and two children with a good life, providing the requisite personally designed rural home with a view of the valley. He held obligatory real jobs common to an artist, but eventually creative generation of venture capital for an environmental company earned him a five-year stay behind razor wire and iron bars.
Writing was fundamental for his mental survival during incarceration, and he sent a flawless, thoughtful column documenting his life in prison to a young, hotshot weekly newspaper in northwest Arkansas, the Lovely County Citizen , which gained him a following of readers who weren't sure if he was really a prisoner or really a writer. How could he be both?
Dale's custody by the federal government was concluded in 2005, though restitution will take many more years. Following work release from a halfway house in Springfield, Missouri, the Citizen hired Dale as a reporter, and the next year he was appointed editor. After six months of that he threw up his hands in anguish, claiming he wanted to write, not judge others' writing.
Dale lives in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with his dog, Daisy, and his dream of describing the universal good life that's gone bad, gone good, and is getting better.
|
Alison Moore
www.alisonmoorebooks.com
Alison Moore is a former assistant professor of English/Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona and a current Humanities Scholar in Arkansas. She received her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers in 1990. Currently, she lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Terlingua, Texas, and is completing a novel on the Orphan Trains. She has developed public outreach programs for the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America, Inc., and for ArtsReach, a Native American literacy project in southern Arizona. She is the author of three books, a collection of short stories entitled Small Spaces between Emergencies (Mercury House, 1992) one of the Notable Books of 1993 chosen by the American Library Association, a novel, Synonym for Love (Mercury House, 1995) and her newest, The Middle of Elsewhere. She has received several national awards as well as state arts council awards and was the winner of the Katherine Ann Porter Prize for Fiction in 2004.
Alison and her husband, musician Phil Lancaster, have been touring Arkansas, Texas, and Arizona performing a multimedia program about the Orphan Trains with funding from state Humanities Councils.
|
Daina Sargent
Daina has authored dozens of children's books. Writing with her incredibly prolific father and mother, Dave and Pat Sargent, and her equally as talented brother, Dave Sargent, Jr., the family have produced 13 series of over 250 books for all children of all age groups and various vocabulary levels. Coming soon are new series including, Little Stinker Series, Young Cowboy Series and the Best Friends Series. Also soon to be released are additions to Double Trouble Series, Doggie Tale Series and Barney the Bear Killer Series. Daina has three daughters: Amber, April and Ashley, of whom she is very proud. In her free time, she enjoys sewing, photography, and scrap booking.
|
Dana Stabenow
www.stabenow.com
Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage, Alaska on March 27, 1952, and raised on a 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She graduated from Seldovia High School in 1969 and put herself through college working as an egg grader, bookkeeper and expediter for Whitney-Fidalgo Seafoods in Anchorage. Dana received a B.A. in journalism from the University of Alaska in 1973.
After graduation and a four-month backpacking trip to Europe, Dana worked for Alyeska Pipeline at Galbraith Lake and later for British Petroleum at Prudhoe Bay. At the age of 30, Dana enrolled in UAA's MFA program; her goal was "to sell a book before I went broke and I just barely made it": Second Star was bought by Ace Science Fiction in 1990. She wrote two other science fiction books, A Handful of Stars and Red Planet Run, but is best known for her Kate Shugak mystery series. Her first Shugak book, A Cold Day for Murder, won the Edgar award for Best Original Paperback in 1993. She also writes a series about Alaska state trooper Liam Campbell; the most recent Campbell book, Better to Rest (NAL Hardcover), was published in 2002. Her newest book. A Deeper Sleep: a Kate Shugak Novel (St. Martin's Minotaur) came out in January 2007. She has also added another series featuring Star Svensdottir.
Along with her busy writing life, Stabenow is active in a program she started called "Authors in the Schools", which recruits other authors willing to travel to remote bush areas of Alaska to speak to school children about writing and the importance of reading. Last year they send fifty authors out to encourage kids to take an interest in exploring books.
|
Doug Stowe
www.dougstowe.com
Doug Stowe, has been a self-employed craftsman in Eureka Springs since 1975. Starting as a studio potter, he quickly transitioned to woodworking where he became widely known for his intricately inlaid wooden boxes and his hand crafted furniture. He is the author of five woodworking books, Creating Beautiful Boxes With Inlay Techniques, Simply Beautiful Boxes, Making Elegant Custom Tables, Taunton¹s Complete Illustrated Guide to Box Making, and Basic Box Making. He is also contributing editor of Woodwork-A Magazine for all Woodworkers and also writes for Woodcraft Magazine and Fine Woodworking. He is a two-time Golden Hammer Award winner for best how-to writing from the National Association of Home Workshop Writers. He continues to produce small boxes and custom furniture for customers while teaching in a program called "The Wisdom of the Hands" at The Clear Spring School. The innovative program is designed to integrate woodworking activities with other areas of curriculum to increase interest, and excitement in learning.
|
Daniel Woodrell
Daniel Woodrell is a graduate of The University of Kansas and has an M.F.A from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is the author of eight novels, five of which have been listed on the New York Times Best Books of the Year. He received the PEN Center West Award for the novel for Tomato Red, and the Edgar Wolf Award. His second novel, Woe to Live On, set in Missouri during the Civil War, was made into the film, Ride with the Devil, by director Ang Lee. His latest novel is Winter's Bone, Little Brown & Co, 2006. Winter's Bone will receive the upcoming 2007 Ozark Writer’s Award and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for novel of the year.
|
|
