Guest Authors
The Books in Bloom authors will present
free readings, talks, and panels.
Please click on author's name for further information.
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William Bernhardt
www.williambernhardt.com
William Bernhardt is the author or editor of twenty-one books with more than ten million copies in print worldwide, including his internationally bestselling series of novels which inspired Library Journal to name Bernhardt the “master of the courtroom drama.” His most recent novel is Capitol Murder (2006), which takes attorney Ben Kincaid to Washington, D.C. for a controversial, high-profile case involving a national sex scandal, political skullduggery, and murder. His previous novel, Dark Eye, was a psychological thriller “that will chill you while its two unique and endearing protagonists steal your heart.” On the publication of his New York Times bestselling novel, Murder One, The Vancouver Sun dubbed him “the American equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer.” Bernhardt's novels are renowned for their unexpected twists, legal realism, breathless pace, humor, and insightful consideration of trends and issues in contemporary American society.
Bernhardt obtained his law degree at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, where he was a member of the 1985 National Championship Moot Court team and was personally named Best Speaker at the national finals in New York. He worked as a trial lawyer at a large law firm for ten years and was repeatedly recognized for handling pro bono cases for the underprivileged and for his work with teenagers interested in law. The Oklahoma Bar Association presented him with a special award for Outstanding Service to the Public, and in 1994 he was named one of the top twenty young lawyers in the nation by the American Bar Association's Barrister magazine.
Bernhardt's many activities within and beyond the world of literature led OSU to dub him “Oklahoma's Renaissance Man.” Other recent Bernhardt projects have include writing the music, lyrics, and script for a musical (he is an accomplished pianist and songwriter), creating a board game, producing two music CDs, constructing crossword puzzles published in The New York Times, jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet, and kissing a dolphin.
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Lawrence Block
www.lawrenceblock.com
Lawrence Block's novels range from the urban noir of Matthew Scudder ( All the Flowers are Dying) to the urbane effervescence of Bernie Rhodenbarr (The Burglar on the Prowl), while other characters include the globe-trotting insomniac Evan Tanner ( Tanner On Ice) and the introspective assassin Keller ( Hit List). He has published articles and short fiction in American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and The New York Times, and 84 of his short stories have been collected in Enough Rope. In 2004, he became executive story editor for the TV series TILT. Several of his novels have been filmed. His newest bestsellers are All the Flowers are Dying (February 2005 in hardcover), the sixteenth Matthew Scudder novel, and The Burglar on the Prowl, his tenth Bernie Rhodenbarr novel now available in paperback.
Block is a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America, and a past president of both MWA and the Private Eye Writers of America. He has won the Edgar and Shamus awards four times each and the Japanese Maltese Falcon award twice, as well as the Nero Wolfe and Philip Marlowe awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and, most recently, the Cartier Diamond Dagger for Life Achievement from the Crime Writers Association (UK). In France, he has been proclaimed a Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice been awarded the Societe 813 trophy. He has been a guest of honor at Bouchercon and at book fairs and mystery festivals in France, Germany, Australia, Italy, New Zealand and Spain, and, as if that were not enough, was presented with the key to the city of Muncie, Indiana. He and his wife, Lynne, are enthusiastic New Yorkers and relentless world travelers.
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Jack Butler
Jack Butler was born in Alligator, Mississippi earning a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. During the 1980’s, Butler wrote his first four books: West of Hollywood, Hawk Gumbo and Other Stories, Jujutsu for Christ, and Nightshade. In 1993 Living in Little Rock With Miss Little Rock was published, and was later nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Since then, Butler has written two more books: Jack’s Skillet: Plain Talk and Some Recipes From a Guy in the Kitchen and Dreamers.
Butler currently holds the position of co-director of the Creative Writing Program and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.
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Elizabeth Biller Chapman
Elizabeth Biller Chapman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and following her graduation from Smith College, did graduate work at the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham, U.K., and Columbia University, from which she received her M.A. and Ph.D. respectively. Formerly a teacher of Renaissance literature—and for twenty years a psychotherapist in private practice—her chapbook Creekwalker was published by (M)other Tongue Press (Salt Spring Island, B.C.) as the winner of their 1995 international chapbook competition. In 1999, Bellowing Ark Press (Shoreline, Washington) published her first full-length collection, First Orchard. Individual poems have appeared in Yankee, Poetry, The Texas Observer, Blueline, and many other periodicals. Recently, one of her poems was selected by Robert Creeley for inclusion in the forthcoming The Best American Poetry 2002. Her most recent publication, Candlefish, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2004 and it was chosen to inaugurate the University of Arkansas Poetry Series.
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Marian Clark
www.route66cookbook.homestead.com
Marian Clark has assisted with a Route 66 Seminar at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including NPR's "Michael Feldman Show" and was a featured guest at the 1999 California State Fair. Marion was recently filmed for Discovery Channel UK's multi-part Route 66 series. She is a regular contributor to Route 66 Federation's national newsletter and past author for the Route 66 Magazine. Clark is also the author of The Route 66 Cookbook, the Main Street of America Cookbook and her new book, released Fall 2000, The Route 66 Cookbook, Deluxe 75th Anniversary Edition.
A passion for food and a love affair with Route 66 led Clark on her first journey of discovery along the historic highway between Chicago and Santa Monica almost 15 years ago. On the way she rediscovered many of the famous and not-so-famous eateries along America’s Main Street. She has interviewed hard working entrepreneurs, chefs, waitresses, and fellow travelers from around the world. Her many trips have resulted in a masterful collection of stories and recipes hidden behind the neon signs and gravel parking lots in over 150 American communities.
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Deborah Crombie
www.deborahcrombie.com
Deborah Crombie was born and educated in Texas. After living in both England and Scotland, she wrote her first Duncan Kincaid / Gemma James novel. A Share in Death (1993), was subsequently given Agatha and Macavity nominations for Best First Novel of 1993. Her fifth novel, Dreaming of the Bones (1997) was given an Edgar award nomination by Mystery Writers of America for Best Novel in 1998. It was a New York Times Book of the Year, and was chosen by the Independent Mystery Booksellers of American as one of the 100 Best Crime Novels of the Century. Her latest Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novel, Water Like a Stone, is due out June, 2006.
Her novels have been published in Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, France, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom. Crombie travels to England several times a year, and has been a featured speaker at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford.
She lives in a small North Texas town, sharing a turn-of-the-century house with her husband, three cats and two German shepherd dogs.
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Molly Griffis
www.mollygriffis.com
Born in Apache, Oklahoma, the setting for four of her seven award-winning books, Molly Levite Griffis spent the winters of her childhood listening to the stories told around the potbellied stove in Levite’s Handy Corner, her parents’ general store. Sweetened by jellybeans from the store’s rolled glass candy case, Griffis’ summers were whiled away on the banks of Cache Creek, where she fished for crawdads with her daddy’s handkerchiefs and honed her skills as a storyteller by inventing excuses for the fishy smell in the family’s laundry hamper. Her older sister, Georgann, who didn’t fish for crawdads with their father’s handkerchiefs or ever do anything else naughty, was (and continues to be) her inspiration if not her role model.
Griffis is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma and lives in Norman, Oklahoma. She has two grown children, a red-haired daughter, who was the inspiration for Rachel, and a writer son who lives in the Czech Republic.
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Donald Harington
www.donaldharington.com
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers.
His academic career was in art and art history because, although determined to become a novelist (he wrote his first one at six), he felt that his ultimate teaching vocation should not interfere with his writing. He has taught art history at a variety of colleges in New York, New England, South Dakota and finally at his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for fifteen years in the same room where he first took courses in art history. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Kim.
His first novel, The Cherry Pit, about Little Rock, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published thirteen other novels, most all of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. These include Lighting Bug, Some Other Place. The Right Place., The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, The Choiring of the Trees, Thirteen Albatrosses, With, and, most recently, Pitcher Shower. He has also written books about artists.
He won the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of Arkansas Library Association. John Guilds in his anthology, Arkansas, Arkansas, wrote, "if Miller Williams ranks as the greatest poet born, bred, nurtured, and still living in Arkansas, Donald Harington is by the same standards Arkansas's greatest novelist."
The Winter 2002 Southern Quarterly is a "Donald Harington Special Issue" with tributes from fellow novelists, scholarly essays, interviews, and a selection of his forty-year correspondence with William Styron.
-From the Arkansas Literary Forum
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Joan Hess
www.maggody.com
Joan Hess is a fifth-generation resident of Fayetteville, Arkansas (think bicycles, Girl Scouts, touch football with the guys, walking to and from school, tennis in the park, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates in junior high – all that stuff). She received a B.A. in art from the University of Arkansas and a M.A. in education from Long Island University. She began writing in 1984 (although, technically, she began in 1982 and wrote ten unpublished romance novels). Her first mystery, Strangled Prose, came out in 1986, and since then she has written twenty-one more mystery novels.
She has also written three young adult mysteries, short stories for many anthologies, and articles for professional magazines including Fiction Writer and Clues: A Journal of Detection.
Strangled Prose was chosen as best first novel in the 1986 Drood Review Readers Poll. Her subsequent works have been honored with many nominations and awards.
Hess is a former president of the American Crime Writers League and President-For-Life of the Arkansas Mystery Writers Alliance (since she organized it and recruited all three other members), as well as a member of Sisters in Crime, Authors Guild, and a columnist for Mystery Scene Magazine. She serves as the Executive Vice-President of the Whimsey Foundation, an organization that honors significant achievement in comedic mystery fiction..
She is a full-time writer and the mother of two. She has no discernible Southern accent. Her hair is not natural.
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Suzann Ledbetter
www.suzannledbetter.com
When you walk in author Suzann Ledbetter's Nixa, Missouri home that she shares with her husband, Dave Ellingsworth, the first thing you notice are their two Greyhounds, Fred and Bob. The second thing you notice is the wall of books in the living room. Floor to ceiling, corner to corner. (Together with bookshelves in Suzann and Dave's offices, their home houses about 3,000 books.)
Suzann has been a writer since she was 10 years old. Her first article was published in Highlights Magazine. Born in Joplin, Suzann has lived in Missouri her whole life, the past 20 years in Nixa. And even though some would consider her famous, she says she is definitely not a local superstar. "I'm not a celebrity anywhere," she says. She keeps to herself, her mind always writing, even when she is not.
Suzann writes both historical and contemporary fiction, non-fiction, humor and biographies. She was inducted into the Missouri Writer's Hall of Fame in 1997, received the Spur Award for non-fiction and is being considered for the Edgar Award for her historical mystery, A Lady Never Trifles With Thieves. Her most recent work, Once a Thief, is her seventeenth published book.
Suzann doesn't have a favorite of her novels. She says whatever novel is in progress is always the one she is most proud of. And not to disappoint any of you aspiring writers, but Suzann says none of her books were "easy" to write, and it doesn't get any easier along the way. "The more you know, the fatter that editor on your shoulders gets," Suzann says. "Writing really is more who you are than what you do. I think you either love to write, and it's almost as natural as breathing, or you don't. If you do, you don't care about how much you make or how much work you have to do."
Does she think she'll ever stop writing? Nope. "I hope they have to pry my cold, dead fingers off the keyboard," she says.
-Jobet Wade – 417 Magazine
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Cait London
www.caitlondon.com
USAToday's best-selling Cait London is published in 28 countries and enjoying her 21st year as a mass market and hardback published author, either as Cait London or as Cait Logan (both pseudonyms). In her national award-winning and longterm best-selling career (60 or so books), she's written historicals, category, paranormal, several series, and now suspense.
Best known for vividly written characters and plot twists, her work reflect her small town upbringing. Her novels are sometimes labeled as romantic “thrillers,” but Hidden Secrets has the publisher’s “chiller” tag. The story is set in Snoqualmie Pass region of Washington State Cascade Mountains, where London lived and hiked during her summer college vacations. She revisited the site during her summer trip last year. Her latest book, Flashback, was published October 2005.
In her former creative life, she was a wildlife/scenery artist and now enjoys “shooting” (photographing) the sites of her books. She also loves to drive and has researched on location all of her novels, including the Oregon Trail and Northwest Indian/fur trader/gold trails into Canada. Most recently, she has researched vineyards and lighthouses in the Lake Michigan area. This trip resulted in two more suspense novels, including With Her Last Breath and What Memories Remain. A summer drive up the West coast from San Francisco to Washington State and back resulted in an upcoming October 2005 suspense, Flashback.
In addition to writing her novels, London presents seminars on writing and speaking on other topics, maintains her extensive website, two reader enewsletters, one for booksellers/librarians/readers groups, an enewsletter for regional writers/librarians/booksellers, a web log (blog), produces her own graphic designs for 4-color promotions, maintains a vast contact with booksellers and readers, and writes articles. She is a member of several national professionals-only novelist organizations.
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Kevin McKelvey
Kevin McKelvey was born and raised in Lebanon, Indiana. After attending DePauw University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, he again lives there and teaches Freshman Composition and Professional Writing at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Recent awards include a Moondancer Fellowship (for Nature and Outdoor Writing) at The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs. Recent work appears in Plainsongs and Poems and Plays. The Indiana Arts Commission awarded McKelvey a 2005-06 Individual Artist Grant.
He currently serves as Managing Editor of "Words on the Go", a community arts project that places poems in the buses of CityBus, the public transportation corporation of greater Lafayette, Indiana. Kevin McKelvey is appearing at Books in Bloom courtesy of The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow.
Kevin McKelvey is appearing at Books in Bloom courtesy of The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow.
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Christine Mathews
As a short story writer, Christine Matthews’ works have appeared in many collections including Deadly Allies II, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Lethal Ladies, For Crime Out Loud I and II, and Till Death Do Us Part.
Her novels include Murder is the Deal of the Day, The Masks of Auntie Laveau – which the Los Angeles Times called “a blueprint for how to write a thriller -, and Same Time, Next Murder. All three were co-authored with her husband, Robert J. Randisi. Recently she served as editor of and contributor to Deadly Housewives, published by Avon/Morrow in April 2006.
Under her real name, Marthayn Pelegrimas, she has written over forty short stories in the dark fantasy, science fiction, and horror genres, appearing in such anthologies as Borderlands 3, Best of the Midwest, Hot Blood IX, and Hot Blood X. Her story, “The Living Donor” was nominated by the Horror Writers of America for Best Short Story of the Year.
Her western short stories have appeared in the anthologies Tin Star, Guns of the West, The Funeral of Tanner Moody, and Texas Rangers. Her historical novel, On the Strength of Wings was published in 2001.
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M.G. Miller
mgmiller.cavernreal.com
A native Arkansan, M.G. Miller attended the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he majored in English and Literature.
Bayou Jesus, his novel about racism and religion in the Deep South, has received numerous awards, including First Place Mainstream Novel from the Oklahoma Writers Federation, a Deep South Prize from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and an Arkansas Governor’s Award. He is also a First Place Novel recipient of the Arkansas State Writers competition.
Miller is the fiction editor for Surreal Magazine, a quarterly horror anthology. He lives in Arkansas.
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Radine Trees Nehring
www.radinesbooks.com
Radine Trees Nehring has called Arkansas home since 1988. She began writing for publication in 1986, has many magazines and newspaper credits, and was a broadcast journalist with her own program about the Ozarks for ten years. Her writing has won numerous awards. Nehring's non-fiction book, Dear Earth: A Love Letter from Spring Hollow, published in 1995, won the Arkansas Governor's Award for best writing about the state. She is author of short stories and a mystery novel series set in Arkansas. Her first novel, A Valley To Die For, earned a Macavity nomination. Music To Die For, (set at the Ozark Folk Center, Mountain View, AR), appeared in 2003. Her third novel, A Treasure To Die For, takes place in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has just completed the fourth series novel, A Wedding To Die For, set at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs.
Nehring is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Readers, International. She represents the State of Arkansas on the Board of Mystery Writers of America - Southwest.
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Nancy Pickard
nancypickardmysteries.com
Nancy Pickard is the author of seventeen popular and critically acclaimed novels, including the Jenny Cain and Marie Lightfoot mystery series. She is the author of dozens of short stories and of three novels in the Eugenia Potter series created by Virginia Rich.
She is the co-author, with psychologist Lynn Lott, of the beloved non-fiction book about writing, Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path, of which the best-selling writer Sue Grafton says, "I can give you seven reasons to buy this book for every writer you know. It's fresh, insightful, candid, funny, supportive, encouraging, and wise." She is a writer whose work covers an amazing span of the mystery world, from the classic cozy to private eye stories, and from humorous mysteries to psychological suspense.
Pickard has won the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Shamus awards for her short stories and the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards for her novels. The Los Angeles Times says, “Pickard pushes at the presumed limits of (crime fiction).” The San Diego Union says, “Nancy Pickard is acclaimed as one of today's best mystery writers. Mounting evidence suggests that this description is too limited. . .Pickard (is) one of today's best writers, period.” She is a three-time Edgar Allen Poe award nominee, a Mary Higgins Clark award finalist, and a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement award for suspense fiction, from Romantic Times.
She is a founding member and former president of Sisters In Crime, the international organization dedicated to the advancement of women mystery writers, and she is a former national board member of the Mystery Writers of America.
Her latest novel, The Virgin of Small Plains, will be published in April 2006 by Ballantine.
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Robert J. Randisi
Robert J. Randisi has been published in the western, mystery, horror, science fiction, and men’s adventure genres. His is the author of over 400 novels, 50 short stories, and the editor of 30 anthologies. He founded the Private Eye Writers of America and created the Shamus Award. In 1993 he was awarded a Life Achievement Award at the Southwest Mystery Convention. In the Western genre he is the creator and author of The Gunsmith series.
The Picasso Flop, written with Vince Van Patton of the World Poker Tour, will be published by Mysterious Press in 2007. The book combines the worlds of mystery and Texas Hold’Em Poker.
Co-authoring the “Gil and Claire Hunt” mysteries with Christine Matthews, the third in series, Same Time, Same Murder, was published last year by St. Martin’s Press.
Randisi has written under 15 different pseudonyms since he began writing in 1982. As “J.R. Roberts” he created and writes the long-running western series, The Gunsmith. Book One appeared in 1982 and the series has appeared at the rate of a book a month since then. Currently there are 294 books in the series. He has created seven other western series under different names, including Tracker (as Tom Cutter), Angel Eyes (as W.B. Longley), The Bounty Hunter (as Joshua Randall), and Mountain Jack Pike (as Joseph Meek).
He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and from 1973 through 1981 he was a civilian employee of the New York Police Department. Currently he resides in Clarksville, Missouri, with his wife, writer Marthayn Pelegrimas, on the second floor of a converted Masonic Temple.
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red hawk
red hawk was the Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University in 1991-1992 and has taught at The University of Arkansas Monticello since 1997. He has published five books of poetry, the last four of which are still in print:
Journey of the Medicine Man (August House,1983) finalist, Walt Whitman Award; The Sioux Dog Dance (Cleveland State,1991) runner-up, Patterson Poetry Prize; The Way of Power (Hohm Press, 1996) nominee: National Book Award; The Art of Dying (Hohm Press, 1999) nominee: Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Prize, and Wreckage With A Beating Heart (Hohm Press, 2005).
He has had poems in The Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Atlanta Review and many others. He has given public readings with Alan Ginsberg, Miller Williams, Gary Snyder, Rita Dove, Coleman Barks, and Tess Gallagher, among others. He has two terrific daughters who live in California, and he lives in Monticello, Arkansas with his sweetheart Chandrika.
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