Garth Stein
Garth Stein is the pen name of Comet, a golden retriever mutt who dictactes his profound and brilliantly plotted novels to his owner, the real Garth Stein, who likes to take credit for Comet's brilliant work and insights into canine minds.
As for Garth, the author of New York Times bestselling literary novel The Art of Racing in the Rain (Harper, 2008), he's been busy touring independent bookstores and writing his next, as yet untitled novel (with Comet's help). Published in 23 languages so far, The Art of Racing in the Rain has received a 2008 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award, and has been made a #1 BookSense selection and a Starbucks book selection. Garth's previous novels include How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets, which also won a PNBA award and was a BookSense pick, and Raven Stole the Moon. So far, Comet (the real genius behind these books) has enjoyed all of the awards and critical acclaim, but wishes they came with dog biscuits.
With an M.F.A. in film from Columbia University (1990), Garth worked as a documentary filmmaker for several years, and directed, produced, or coproduced several award-winning films. Garth also took the time to write a full-length play, Brother Jones.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Seattle, Garth's ancestry is diverse: his mother, a native of Alaska, is of Tlingit Indian and Irish descent; his father, a Brooklyn native, is the child of Jewish emigrants from Austria. After spending his childhood in Seattle and then living in New York City for 18 years, Garth returned to Seattle, where he currently lives with his wife, three sons, and their dog, Comet.
Jennie Shortridge
Jennie Shortridge lives in Seattle, WA with her husband, and juggles her time between writing novels and working in the community to foster literacy.
Kathleen Alcala
No bio available for Kathleen Alcala.
Erica Bauermeister
Erica Bauermeister's love of slow food and slow life was cemented by her two years living in northern Italy with her husband and children. She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Washington and currently lives in Seattle with her family. The School of Essential Ingredients is her first novel.
Deb Caletti
Deb Caletti is the award-winning author of The Queen of Everything; Honey, Baby, Sweetheart; and The Nature of Jade, among others. In addition to being a National Book Award finalist, Deb's work has gained other distinguished recognition, including the PNBA Best Book Award, the Washington State Book Award, and School Library Journal's Best Book award, as well as finalist citations for the California Young Reader Medal and the PEN USA Literary Award. She lives with her family in Seattle. You can visit her at debcaletti.com and become a fan on Facebook.
William Dietrich
William (Bill) Dietrich's historical and action thrillers have been translated into 28 languages. Dietrich is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, nonfiction author, and college professor of environmental journalism. He has won the Washington Governor Writer's Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.
He currently is exciting readers with his Ethan Gage Adventures, a series featuring an imperfect American adventurer who is not only a protege of the late Benjamin Franklin--but also a gambler, sharpshooter, treasure-hunter and romantic, who manages to get into plenty of trouble with women. Ethan's story entwines with Napoleon Bonaparte's, whom he first meets in Napoleon's Pyramids and is later allied to and odds with in The Rosetta Key and The Dakota Cipher. A fourth novel for the series is in the works.
Dietrich also wrote the Roman-era historical novels Hadrian's Wall and The Scourge of God as well as the earlier thrillers Ice Reich, Getting Back, and Dark Winter.
His book-writing began with The Final Forest: The Battle For The Last Great Trees of the Pacific Northwest and Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River. A collection of nature essays that first appeared in The Seattle Times is titled Natural Grace. He wrote the text for the Art Wolfe photo book On Puget Sound and essays for books on Skagit and Whatcom counties and Fidalgo Island, his home stomping grounds in the state of Washington. He writes and speaks frequently on the environment.
Dietrich's love of history and fiction was nurtured when growing up in Tacoma. He caught the journalism bug when studying at Fairhaven College and Western Washington University (WWU), where he married his wife Holly. Journalism jobs followed in the Northwest and Washington, D.C., including covering the eruption of Mount St. Helens for the Vancouver, Washington Columbian and the Exxon Valdez oil spill for The Seattle Times. Bill was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and the recipient of National Science Foundation fellowships that got him to Antarctica and the South Pole, which inspired his first novel.
His first book wasn't started until he was 38, and the first novel--roughed out on an icebreaker--wasn't underway until he was 45. Some men get a sports car in midlife; Bill wrote about Nazis.
In 2006 he began teaching and advising a student magazine called The Planet at his alma mater, WWU. He feels fortunate to have been able to bounce between the fiction and journalism worlds and to be reenergized by his students.
He and Holly live on the edge of Washington's San Juan Islands within eyeball distance of three national parks, but Dietrich loves visiting great cities and crawling around old ruins. He has two grown daughters and can see bald eagles, herons, and raccoons from his office window.
Karen Finneyfrock
No bio available for Karen Finneyfrock.
Stephanie Kallos
Stephanie Kallos spent twenty years in the theatre as an actor and teacher. She is the author of the bestselling, award-winning novel Broken for You, which has been translated into 10 languages. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two sons. Visit her online at http://www.stephaniekallos.com/.
Frances McCue
No bio available for Frances McCue.
Kevin O'Brien
Kevin O'Brien is the youngest of six children. He grew up on Chicago's North Shore, and studied Journalism at Marquette University in Milwaukee. For eighteen years, he worked as a railroad inspector during the day, and wrote at night.
His first novel, Actors (1987) was translated into three languages. His second book, Only Son (1997) was optioned for film rights by M-G-M, thanks to interest from Tom Hanks. Only Son was also chosen by Readers Digest for their Select Editions. His third book, The Next To Die (2001), praised by Publishers Weekly for its "taut psychological suspense," climbed up the USA Today bestseller charts. Another USA Today bestseller followed with Make Them Cry (2002). Watch Them Die (2003) and Left For Dead (2004) were both nominated for The Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award. With the New York Times bestselling The Last Victim (2005), O'Brien won The Spotted Owl for Best Pacific Northwest Mystery. Another New York Times Bestseller followed with Killing Spree (2007). His New York Times Bestselling streak continued with One Last Scream (2008), "an electrifying thriller," according to The Mystery Gazette, who added: "Enthralled audience[s] will read this psychological whodunit in one sitting."
Kevin O'Brien's new thriller, Final Breath, is about Sydney Jordan, a primetime TV news-correspondent, whose marriage to a Chicago cop has abruptly ended. Sydney tries to start a new life in Seattle with her teenage son. But she doesn't know someone needs to settle an old score.
One by one, the subjects of Sydney's human interest stories become human carnage. Only Sydney sees the connection to all the gruesome deaths. Only Sidney realizes she's a pawn in a deadly twisted game--a game that won't be over until she has taken her final breath.
A huge Hitchcock fan, Kevin O'Brien lives in Seattle, and is working like a fiend on his eleventh book.
Sean Beaudoin
Like Stan Smith, Sean Beaudoin spent his childhood in a small town. He now resides in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.
Carol Cassella
Carol Wiley Cassella majored in English Literature at Duke University and graduated from medical school in 1986. She currently practices anesthesiology in Seattle and was a freelance medical writer specializing in global public health advocacy for the developing world. She is the mother of two sets of twins and is working on her next novel. Visit the author at www.carolcassella.com.
Robert Dugoni
Robert Dugoni has practiced as a civil litigator in San Francisco and Seattle for seventeen years. In 1999 he left the full-time practice of law to write, and is a two-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times before obtaining his doctorate of jurisprudence from the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law. He lives with his wife and two children in the Pacific Northwest.
Jamie Ford
Jamie Ford is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from Kaiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the Western name "Ford," thus confusing countless generations. Ford is an award-winning short-story writer, an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and a survivor of Orson Scott Card's Literary Boot Camp. Having grown up near Seattle's Chinatown, he now lives in Montana with his wife and children.
Mary Guterson
Mary Guterson has written for magazines, journals, and public radio. She is the author of the novel, We Are All Fine Here, published in 2005. A former public school speech pathologist, she now works at a bookstore on Bainbridge Island, Washington
Jarret Middleton
No bio available for Jarret Middleton.
Greg Stump
No bio available for Greg Stump.
Julia Quinn
Perennial bestseller Julia Quinn loves to dispel the myth that smart women don't read (or write) romance, and in 2001 she did so in grand style, competing on the game show The Weakest Link and walking away with the $79,000 jackpot. She displayed a decided lack of knowledge about baseball, country music, and plush toys, but she is proud to say that she aced all things British and literary, answered all of her history and geography questions correctly, and knew that there was a da Vinci long before there was a code.
Her most recent novel, The Lost Duke of Wyndham, reached #2 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Susan Wiggs
Susan Wiggs has won many awards for her work, including a RITA from Romance Writers of America. She has also published with a number of houses, including Avon, HarperCollins, Warner and MIRA Books.
In addition to being a militant romance writer, a feminist, a guilt-ridden mother and a perfect wife, Susan Wiggs grows mutant tomatoes, speaks French, and plays the cello. Her hobbies are reading, traveling the world and Fair Isle knitting. She lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, her daughter, and the world's most ill-mannered Airedale. Although she has convinced her family that toiling away at a writing career makes her a candidate for martyrdom, she secretly believes it's the second-most fun to be had.
Wiggs, a Harvard graduate, confesses that a book once saved her sanity. Trapped at Barcelona Airport during an airline strike, she vividly remembers savoring every lush, escapist word of a romance novel. Ever since, it has been her quest to write the sort of books people cling to in crowded airports, or whenever life gets too crazy.
Kit Bakke
No bio available for Kit Bakke.
Maria Dahvana Headley
No bio available for Maria Dahvana Headley.
Kevin Emerson
Kevin Emerson is the author of the Oliver Nocturne series and Carlos Is Gonna Get It. He is also a musician and has most recently released two albums with his band the Board of Education. A former science teacher in Boston, Kevin now lives in Seattle and teaches writing to teens through Writers in the Schools, Richard Hugo House, and 826 Seattle. The world of the Atlanteans was inspired by his college studies in biology and ecology and a continued interest in environmental issues as well as his experiences at summer camp.
Clyde W. Ford
Clyde W. Ford is a mythologist, trained psychotherapist, and sought-after public speaker. He's also a critically acclaimed author of nonfiction and fiction. He writes the Charlie Noble Mysteries, suspense thrillers set in the Pacific Northwest. He's been a guest on the "Oprah Winfrey Show," NPR, and other radio and television programs around the country. Clyde lives in Bellingham, Washington. He writes aboard his 30-foot Willard trawler, and cruises the waters of the Inside Passage.
Teri Hein
No bio available for Teri Hein.
Nancy Rawles
NANCY RAWLES is a novelist and playwright who grew up in Los Angeles and began her career as a professional writer in Chicago. Her first novel, Love Like Gumbo, was awarded the 1998 American Book Award and Washington State's Governor's Writers Award, and her plays have been produced in Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Seattle. She lives and teaches creative writing in Seattle, Washington
Ed Skoog
Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1971, and is a high school teacher in Seattle, Washington, after living for many years in New Orleans. He earned degrees from Kansas State and the University of Montana. His poems have been published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and Ploughshares.
Indu Sundaresan
Indu Sundaresan was born and raised in India. She came to the U.S. for graduate studies and started writing fiction seriously in 1993. Her work has appeared in "The Vincent Brothers Review" and "iVillage.com. She has worked with local theatre building and painting sets, and writing program notes and teachers packets. She lives in Bellevue, Washington.
Elizabeth George
Elizabeth George, whose books have sold more than 6.5 million copies, is the author of A Woman After God's Own Heart(r) (more than 1 million copies sold) and Breaking the Worry Habit Forever! She's also a popular speaker at Christian women's events. Elizabeth and her husband, Jim, are parents and grandparents, and have been active in ministry for more than 30 years.
My Awards
Winner of the Retailer's Choice Award for A Young Woman's Walk with God in 2007 and A Young Woman's Guide to Making Right Choices in 2010
Recipient of the ECPA Gold Book Award for A Woman After God's Own Heart(r) in 2003
Recipient of the ECPA Platinum Book Award for A Woman After God's Own Heart(r) in 2010
Recipient of the Harvest House Gold Award in 2002
Recipient of the Harvest House Platinum Award in 2004
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