our authors
Alphabetical (G-L)
GABRIELA GONZALES
Gabriela Gonzales holds a BA in creative writing from Belmont University. A former literary nonprofit program coordinator, her poetry and fiction have been featured in Wigleaf, Lost Balloon, Chestnut Review, The Lumiere Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and multiple times for The Pushcart Prize. She also performed last year at TEDx Nashville.
HOW TO LOVE YOU WHEN YOU’RE GONE (YA Rom-Com) - A funny, touching, deeply personal infusion of first love and first loss that delivers swoony romance in the grip of captivating individual character arcs.
Contact - Chip Rice
ELVIRA GONZALEZ
Elvira Gonzales is plant-based athlete, professional track & field coach, entrepreneur and writer. Elvira was born in Laredo, TX, where she was voted “2009 Female Athlete of the Year” for breaking numerous track and field records. As a college freshman, she set new hurdle records and earned All Lone-Star conference honors. In the past, she has coached at the University of Pennsylvania and privately trained two-time Olympic hurdler Ahmed Hazer. Elvira is currently a coach at The Armory, the premier indoor track & field facility in the US. As an athlete, she qualified for the NCAA National Championship in track & field in 2011 and recently punched a ticket to the 2020 USA Triathlon National Championships. Elvira is a member of the New York Writer’s Workshop, run by Charles Salzberg, and has founded her own writing initiative called NYC Writer’s Voice, a writing community for young and minority writers. For the past five years, she has been an active member of Las Comadres, the largest Latino book club that has partnered with the Association of American Publishers (AAP) to promote reading.
HURDLES IN THE DARK (Debuts Fall 2024 Roaring Brook Press) - In the summer of 2006, Elvira was just 14 years old when she was given 24 hours to save her kidnapped mother from cartels in Mexico. The price for her mother’s life was $40,000. Through sheer grit, and with 2 hours to spare, Elvira managed to raise most of the ransom. Luckily, this proved enough to save her mother’s life. Yet the ordeal changed Elvira’s mother and her relationship with her daughter suffered for it. Two years later, Elvira ended up locked behind bars at a juvenile detention center in Laredo, Texas. Determined to never wind up anywhere like that again, she embarked on a journey in a dark stadium, at the very early hours of the morning, with only her running shoes and a set of hurdles standing in her lane. With rugged perseverance and the will to survive, she harnessed her athletic abilities to win her ticket to freedom.
Contact - Zeynep Sen
REBECCA HARDIN-THRIFT
Rebecca Hardin-Thrift received her MFA from UMass Amherst, where she studied with author John Edgar Wideman. Since her graduation, Rebecca has published various stories in Washington Square Review, Bellevue Literary Review and elsewhere. She also wrote and performed a one-woman show in the New York International Fringe Festival. Rebecca has worked as a creative writing instructor at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where she also ran a book club at a women’s prison. Currently, she lives and teaches writing just outside of Raleigh, NC.
AM I THE UGLIEST PERSON YOU EVER F***ED? (Nonfiction/Memoir) - A comical, fascinating exploration of women’s sexuality from a deeply personal angle.
Contact - Zeynep Sen
RAYMOND PAUL JOHNSON
The author is an LA Magazine “Super Lawyer”, former US Air Force and CIA pilot, Vietnam veteran, and recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross. He is the principal co-author of Defective Product: Evidence to Verdict, Juris Publishing/New York, and author of over 50 law-related magazine articles. The author has served as legal consultant to the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and New York Times, and has been interviewed on CNN, NBC Nightly News, and other programs. A member of the Mystery Writers of America and the American Legion, the author teaches legal courses at the University of Southern California. The Raven Society is his first novel. It has received a 5-star rating in all categories from Readers’ Favorite.
CONSPIRACY IGNITED (Debuts Summer 2024 Blank Slate Press) - When an attorney and former Air Force and CIA pilot becomes entangled in a web of murder and betrayal after exposing an international cabal that exerts whatever force necessary, including murder, to guarantee court decisions for the highest bidder, his battle for justice quickly spirals into a struggle for survival. A high-concept thriller in the vein of Michael Connelly’s The Fifth Witness in the voice along the lines of Lee Child’s The Sentinel.
CONTACT - Dean Krystek
KATHLEEN MARPLE KALB
Kathleen Marple Kalb is an award-winning weekend morning anchor at 1010 WINS radio, New York and author of the popular Ella Shane Mystery series. The author has also published mysteries under her pen name Nikki Knight. In addition to her novels, her short fiction has appeared in such publications as Black Cat Weekly, Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Her short story “Blame it on the Blizzard” was featured in Crime Spell Books’s Deadly Nightshade, a collection of New England’s best crime stories in 2022. To discover more about this talented author, visit her at kathleenmarplekalb.com.
LAST STAR, FIRST MURDER (Mystery) - Susan Sawyer is talking up her tell-all memoir when an aggressively perky entertainment reporter is thrown off the penthouse terrace. Surrounded by her salty best pal Dame Miranda Charles, brilliant (and biracial) granddaughter Mali, manager Derek Dunbar, and Yogi the giant dog, she tracks the killer and works in a little flirtation with retired NYPD Inspector Frank McCoy – finally unraveling everything in a wild on-camera confrontation. It’s a diverse, modern riff on Miss Marple…if Miss Marple were an EGOT with an eye for the fellas and a smart mouth.
(Writing as Nikki Knight) - GRACE “THE HIT MOM” SERIES #1 THE WRONG POISON (Turner Publishing, July 2023).
Contact - Mira Perrizo
LIZ LARSON
Liz Larson is a novelist, physicist, and educator with Pennsylvania roots—and she’s not at all surprised if it's the first time you've heard that combination! Liz is the author of Fireflies and Zeroes, a music-infused mystery set in her current home of Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is pursuing a PhD in physics at the University of Virginia. When not working on her studies, she can be found writing, listening to and making music, and investing far too much emotional energy into Penn State football.
GREENER (YA Fiction) - Greener is an angsty delve into the complexities of living and loving authentically that pulls from the author’s own experience. Larson’s neurodivergent narrator merges the constricting interiority of Aza Holmes (Turtles All the Way Down) with ostracized rebel Izzy Richardson (Little Fires Everywhere), while her narrative invites strong comparison to Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
Sixteen-year-old Delilah wanted nothing more than to keep her head down and her music cranked up. And her plan was working just fine until she threw that stupid punch amid the chaos of September 11th, setting off a spiral of events that exposed her as the synesthete, math-genius freak that she is. Now her parents are shipping her off to a prestigious boarding academy with her effortlessly normal twin sister Fae. Thrust into a world of judgmental roommates, grueling course loads, and the occasional cute boy (or girl?), Delilah and Fae fall in with opposing social circles as their relationship crumbles and skeletons in the academy’s closet are revealed. They’ll need a miracle to find their way back to one another—which might just come in the form of a party gone so horribly wrong they have no choice but to admit they’ve both been keeping secrets and that maybe there’s no such thing as normal after all.
Contact - Chip Rice
EDDIE LAWHORN
Eddie Lawhorn has a Computer Science degree from Tennessee Technological University, and worked on numerous projects, including the Space Shuttle and International Space Station. He has participated in the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships, walked away with $50,000 on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” and won the 1990 Detective and 1991 Children’s Literature categories of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest.
MIKE HARDWARE, PI: THE CASE OF THE VEXATIOUS EXECUTIVE (Crime Series) - Shy, polite, and insecure Mike Hardware decides to become a private detective after being fired from his job. His prosopagnosia, or “face blindness” notwithstanding, Mike, with his new assistant Kay Sparks - who takes copious notes and possesses an uncanny eye for detail, and the enigmatic Mr. Diogi - Mike’s basset hound who has a nose for sniffing out clues - takes on his first case: find the culprit who killed his former boss’s husband. Tough as the case may be, it becomes even more difficult when Mike’s erstwhile boss, Mrs. Perriman, becomes the primary suspect, and she demands he find the culprit or else. Mike and his sleuthing partners vigorously work to find out whodunit and save their client, if for no other reason than to save themselves from the wrath of the vexatious Mrs. Perriman.
Contact - Dean Krystek
CAIT LEVIN
Cait earned a BA in Creative Writing at Barnard College and an MA in English Literature at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. She speaks regularly at conferences for publishers and librarians, drawing upon her variety of experiences in education, as well as her leadership roles in the technology and education industries.
IMPOSTER (Launching May 2025 from Charlesbridge Publishing) - A tech-savvy girl experiencing gender discrimination in her coding elective finds redemption on the school’s RoboSub team, where competing requires collaboration with boys who don’t want her there.
Contact - Chip Rice
CHRISTINE HUME
Christine Hume is the author of the lyric memoir, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2021), as well as three books of poetry. Her prose works have appeared in Conjunctions, Disabilities Studies Quarterly, and The Boston Review. She has published six limited-edition chapbooks, most recently Question Like a Face (Image Text Ithaca), a collaboration with Jeff Clark and a Brooklyn Rail Best Nonfiction Book of 2017, and A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story (PANK Books). Her poetry has been widely published and anthologized in such venues as Best American Poetry (Scribner), Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan), Harper’s, and The New Republic. Since 2001, she has been faculty in the interdisciplinary Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University.
WHAT I NEVER WANTED TO KNOW (Nonfiction/Current Affairs) - What I Never Wanted to Know confronts two hated subjects in America: sex offenders and women’s bodies. It takes on problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence and the ineffective, unjust criminal justice response to that violence. It explores the national sex offender registry via intimate, local, and national perspectives, each drawing on the other to echolocate not solutions but new ways of thinking. The book also focuses to the female body in historic (the post WWI nylon riots and the Victorian era Frozen Charlotte doll for instance) as well as autobiographical contexts. Cumulatively, What I Never Wanted to Know is a soft manifesto on sexuality, gender, whiteness, and violence.
Contact - Zeynep Sen