After 29 years of teaching high school English, journalism, and TV production in West Virginia and Georgia, Donna Meredith retired to provide a more convenient door-opening service for her Pomeranians. When she isn’t responding to yaps, she writes.

With advanced degrees in both English and journalism, Donna has also participated in graduate fiction writing workshops at Florida State University and served as newsletter editor for the Florida State Attorney General’s crime prevention division. She resides in Tallahassee with her husband John.

Donna’s novel, The Glass Madonna, won first place for unpublished women’s fiction from the Florida Writers Association and also was a runner-up in the Gulf Coast novel contest. She won first places in the 2007 Seven Hills short story and essay contests. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat, Tallahassee magazine and the Columbia School Press Review. She currently writes a column on the environment for the Chronicles.

She serves as president of the Tallahassee Writers Association and coordinates the Seven Hills Contest for Writers. Learn more about Donna by visiting her website.

Matt Simmons was born and raised in Whiteville, NC.  He lived in Raleigh for eight years, where he went to college at North Carolina State University, roasted coffee for a living, and developed a taste for single-malt Scotch.  Currently a Ph.D. student in English at the University of South Carolina, Matt and his wife live in Columbia, SC, where he tries to garden and regularly rides his bicycle in coat and tie.

Adele Annesi is an award-winning editor and writer. Her articles, columns, and stories appear in newspapers, magazines, blogs and literary journals, including 34^th Parallel, The Fairfield Review, and The Pittsburgh Quarterly.

She has contributed to The Circle and the Italian-American literary journal Pyramid, and her short fiction appeared in an anthology for Fairfield University.  Adele won the editors choice award for Poetic Voices of America, and she presents writing and editing workshops for various venues. 

Learn more about Adele and the novel she is crafting by visiting: Word for Words.

In addition to penning superb works of  journalism  for Los Angeles Times, Salon, LA Weekly, and Sierra Club Magazine, Kerry Madden has written plays, screenplays, and six books including Offsides, a New York Library Pick for 1997, and Writing Smarts: A Girl’s Guide to Writing Great Poetry, Stories, School Reports, and More!, published by the American Girl Company.

In 2005 she turned her hand to children’s literature with Gentle’s Holler, the first installment in what became the award-winning Maggie Valley Trilogy. It earned starred reviews in both Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, was named a “Pick” by both the New York and the Chicago Public Libraries, and was the featured children’s book of North Carolina at the National Book Festival.

The next book in the trilogy, Louisiana’s Song (2007) was equally well received, being named a Bank Street College Book of the Year and a finalist for several other awards. The third book in the series, Jessie’s Mountain, was published in 2008 to strong reviews.

Most recently Madden published a biography of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee, which was named one of the top ten biographies for youth by Booklist and received starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus.

Currently a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, she has also taught at the University of Tennessee, UCLA, Ningbo University in China, and has visited schools across the country as a guest author doing writing workshops for kids of all ages.

Visit www.kerrymadden.com to learn more about Madden and her work.

Sean Ennis is a Philadelphia, PA native now living in Water Valley, MS where he is an instructor for the University of Mississippi and the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.  His fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Greensboro Review, The Mississippi Review, and the Best New American Voices anthology.

Julie Cantrell is the author of two children’s books, God Is with Me Through the Day and God Is with Me through the Night (Zondervan, 2009). Her first two adult novels, Into the Free and When Mountains Move, will be released in 2012 and 2013 by David C. Cook publishers.

Julie has worked as a freelance writer for nearly a decade, serving as contributing editor for MOMSense magazine and publishing articles about parenting, education, health, and faith across a wide variety of magazines, newspapers, newsletters, books, and radio spots.  She is a certified speech-language pathologist and has taught writing classes at the high school and college level.

Learn more at http://juliecantrell.wordpress.com

Allen Mendenhall holds a B.A. in English from Furman University, M.A. in English from West Virginia University, and J.D. from West Virginia University College of Law. He is an LL.M. candidate at Temple University Beasley School of Law and the author of several publications in such journals as the Aroostook Review, The Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, The West Virginia Lawyer, and the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. 

Visit his website at AllenMendenhall.com.