Michelle Visser

Michelle Visser is a homesteader and a popular presenter at homesteading summits. She lives in New Hampshire’s lakes region.

Joseph Heywood

Joseph Heywood is the author of The Snowfly, Covered Waters, The Berkut, Taxi Dancer, The Domino Conspiracy, the ten previous Woods Cop Mysteries, Hard Ground: Woods Cop Stories, Harder Ground, and the Lute Bapcat Mysteries Red Jacket and Mountains of the Misbegotten. Featuring Grady Service, a contemporary detective in the Upper Peninsula for Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, and Lute Bapcat, a Rough Rider turned Michigan game warden in the 1910s, Heywood’s mystery series have earned the author cult status among lovers of the outdoors, law enforcement officials, and mystery devotees. Heywood lives in Portage, Michigan.

Laurence J. Yadon

Col. Robert Barr Smith (Ret) has a BA in History and Doctor of Laws from Stanford University. He entered the United States Army as a private and retired as a colonel, serving in Vietnam, twice in Germany and with troop units and on posts throughout the United States. He was a senior Parachutist with 65 jumps, and his decorations include the Legion of Merit (two awards) and the Bronze Star.

Laurence J. Yadon is an attorney, mediator and arbitrator and speaker on legal subjects and the American West. He is general counsel of a federal power administration which markets federally generated hydropower in a six-state area. Mr. Yadon is a graduate of the University of Tulsa and University of Oklahoma College of Law.

Joe Cox

Joe Cox is the author of Almost Perfect: The Heartbreaking Pursuit of Pitching’s Holy Grail and The Immaculate Inning: . A member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), Cox is a coauthor of several other sports books. He lives with his family near Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Alan Axelrod

Alan Axelrod is the author of many books on leadership, management, history, military history, corporate history, career, general business, and more. After receiving his Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1979, Axelrod taught early American literature and culture at Lake Forest College (Lake Forest, Illinois) and at Furman University (Greenville, South Carolina). He then entered scholarly publishing in 1982 as associate editor and scholar with the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (Winterthur, Delaware), an institution specializing in the history and material culture of America prior to 1832. Axelrod was a featured speaker at the 2004 Conference on Excellence in Government (Washington, D.C.), at the Leadership Institute of Columbia College (Columbia, South Carolina), and at the 2005 Annual Conference of the Goizueta School of Business, Emory University (Atlanta), and the 2014 annual conference of Ecopetrol (Bogota, Colombia).

Michael Connelly

Daniel J. Boyne

Daniel J. Boyne is the author of Kelly: A Father, A Son, An American Quest (Mystic Seaport/Lyons); The Red Rose Crew: A True Story of Women, Winning, and the Water (Hyperion/Lyons); and Essential Sculling (Lyons). In 2008, he was awarded first prize in the category of biography in the Premier Book Awards (Kelly), and The Red Rose Crew earned a starred Kirkus Review and became a Boston Globe bestseller in 2001. His essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including The Atlantic, Harvard Magazine, and Gray’s Sporting Journal. He is a frequent contributor to the internationally acclaimed rowing website, row2k.com. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Gerard Helferich

Martin Gitlin

MARTIN GITLIN is a veteran author and sportswriter. He has had about 150 books published since 2006, including A Celebration of Animation: The 100 Greatest Cartoon Characters in Television History (Lyons Press, 2018) with Joe Wos. His Great American Cereal Book (Harry Abrams, 2012) soared to No. 1 in both the Americana and Breakfast Book categories on Amazon.com immediately upon release and remained there for several months while his Powerful Moments in Sports: The Most Significant Sporting Events in American History earned critical acclaim. Gitlin won more than 45 awards as a sports journalist from 1991 to 2002, including first place for general excellence from The Associated Press for his coverage of the Indians-Braves World Series in 1995. AP also selected him as one of the top four feature writers in Ohio. Gitlin lives in North Olmsted, Ohio.

Jill Tietjen

Jill S. Tietjen, P.E. is an author, speaker, and electrical engineer. She is the co-author of Her Story:A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America, which received the Daughters of the American Revolution History Award Medal. Jill has conducted research into historical women around the world for the past thirty years and speaks around the country about women’s contributions to history. One of the top historians on women across all fields of endeavor in the U.S., she works to bring more visibility to women through her continual nominations of historical and living women for national, state and local awards. Her nominees have been successfully inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, and a number of state women’s halls of fame. Jill is often profiled and quoted in the media, and her articles have been printed in a wide variety of publications. She has received numerous awards and has been inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.

Barbara Bridges has spent much of her life as an entrepreneur and businesswoman. In 2006, she founded Women+Film, a program in partnership with the Denver Film Society, where she has been bringing audiences together with films, by and about women, that ignite discussions around global issues facing women today. With the annual Women+Film Festival, a section of movies in the Denver Film Festival and movie screenings throughout the year, it is a popular film program that not only entertains but educates and inspires as well. Barbara speaks to various groups about the role of women in the movies and has been involved with various film festivals. The Denver Post named her one of Colorado’s Top Thinkers in Arts and Culture. Barbara has served on the boards of several women’s organizations, both locally and nationally, and has received numerous awards as a result.

Barbara Bridges

Jill S. Tietjen, P.E. is an author, speaker, and electrical engineer. She is the co-author of Her Story:A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America, which received the Daughters of the American Revolution History Award Medal. Jill has conducted research into historical women around the world for the past thirty years and speaks around the country about women’s contributions to history. One of the top historians on women across all fields of endeavor in the U.S., she works to bring more visibility to women through her continual nominations of historical and living women for national, state and local awards. Her nominees have been successfully inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, and a number of state women’s halls of fame. Jill is often profiled and quoted in the media, and her articles have been printed in a wide variety of publications. She has received numerous awards and has been inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.

Barbara Bridges has spent much of her life as an entrepreneur and businesswoman. In 2006, she founded Women+Film, a program in partnership with the Denver Film Society, where she has been bringing audiences together with films, by and about women, that ignite discussions around global issues facing women today. With the annual Women+Film Festival, a section of movies in the Denver Film Festival and movie screenings throughout the year, it is a popular film program that not only entertains but educates and inspires as well. Barbara speaks to various groups about the role of women in the movies and has been involved with various film festivals. The Denver Post named her one of Colorado’s Top Thinkers in Arts and Culture. Barbara has served on the boards of several women’s organizations, both locally and nationally, and has received numerous awards as a result.

Howard Gutner

Howard Gutner first became interested in the Hollywood studio system and its traditional blend of business and art while attending the film studies program at Northwestern University. In 2001 he published Gowns by Adrian: The MGM Years 1928-1941. (Harry N. Abrams). This book was the first comprehensive review of Adrian’s career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and was lauded by the New York Times as “a definitive look at Hollywood’s legendary designer.” Gutner lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ellis Amburn

A 1954 graduate of Texas Christian University, Ellis Amburn worked as a reporter for Newsweek before going into the book publishing industry where, he rose to the position of editor, working for such well-known publishers as Delacorte Press, Coward-McCann, and William Morrow. During his career, Amburn was an editor for such authors as John le Carré, Belva Plain, Muriel Spark, Joshua Logan and Jack Kerouac, who would be the subject of Amburn's 1998 book Subterranean Kerouac.
Amburn served as editorial director for G. P. Putnam's Sons and in addition worked as a ghostwriter for Priscilla Presley, Shelley Winters, Peggy Lee and Zsa Zsa Gabor. In 1990, he produced his first biography on fellow Texan Roy Orbison.
Amburn lives in High Springs, Florida, outside of Gainesville and in Tifton, Georgia.

Will McGough

Will McGough has been a working journalist/writer since 2010. He has a Masters in Journalism from Temple University and is currently the publisher and editor of a travel magazine in Hawaii, Wake andWander Hawaii. He’s been to more than 70 countries on assignment, and his work has been published in the following publications: Conde Nast Traveler, AFAR, Travel Channel, Outside Magazine, Forbes Travel Guide, Men’s Journal, AAA, TravelAge West, Travel Weekly, Paste Magazine, Alaska Airlines Magazine, Alaska Magazine, the Brewer's Association, and Sherman’s Travel, among others. He lives on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.

Cynthia Barrett

Cynthia Barrett is a senior editor at Metro Books, an imprint of Sterling Publishing Company. She is an avid sailor and has a long family history near the sea. Her great grandfather, George Washington Barrett was a whaler out of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island and as such he sailed around Cape Horn three times. In the Civil War he served as Commanding Officer of the USS Whitehead during the Battle of Albemarle Sound. Her father was a Lieutenant in the Navy and was in the D-Day invasion of France. She lives in New York City.

Sam McManis

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Sam McManis has worked as a staff writer and columnist for California’s leading newspapers (the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee) for more than three decades. Until May, 2016, he was a lifestyle columnist and feature writer for the Sacramento Bee. His stories have been published in The New York Times and Wall StreetJournal. He has received numerous national journalism awards and has covered two Olympic Games, World Series, NBA Championship series and Super Bowls. In 2016, he received a “Best in the West” award for arts and entertainment writing and was named California’s “in-state” journalist of the year. He also teaches English and composition at Central Washington University. McManis has run 17 marathons -- including the prestigious Boston Marathon twice -- and also completed 7 ultramarathons and countless races of shorter distances. He knows running and, as a journalist with more than three decades of experience, he knows what makes a good story.

Railey Jane Savage

Railey Jane Savage is an editor and artist and television enthusiast. She has a strong background in lm studies and an expensive English degree from Smith College, which has proven 100% worth the time, money, and agony that comes with a liberal arts degree. Savage loves her family, expects her sisters to take over the world, and lives happily with two ill-behaved cats in Ithaca, New York.