Ace Atkins
Ace Atkins, who Michael Connelly calls "one of the best crime writers at work today," brings back his hero Quinn Colson, an Iraqi war veteran and Mississippi sheriff, in the 2012 Edgar Award-nominated The Lost Ones. Tapped by Robert B. Parker's estate to continue the iconic Spenser novels, Atkins wrote Robert B. Parker's Lullaby, a New York Times bestseller. The follow-up, Robert B. Parker's Wonderland, will be released in May 2013. A former Tampa Tribune crime reporter, he earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his investigation into a 1950s murder, which inspired his 2006 novel White Shadow.
aceatkins.com

Peter Benjaminson
Peter Benjaminson explores the world of 1960's Motown music and one of its biggest stars in Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown's First Superstar. His book is the first biography of the late great diva who recorded the chart-topping My Guy. Kirkus Review calls the book “a moving tribute to an artist who should not be forgotten.” Benjaminson has written about Motown and its music twice before in The Story of Motown, and The Last Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard. A former reporter for the Detroit Free Press and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he also wrote the book Investigative Reporting with Dave Anderson, the first how-to book in that field.
peterbenjaminson.com

Jennie Fields
Jennie Fields' fourth novel, The Age of Desire, is based on the life of Edith Wharton and centers on Wharton's affair with journalist William Morton Fullerton and her close friendship with her literary secretary Anna Bahlmann. After earning a BFA in creative writing and painting from the University of Illinois and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Fields had a successful career in advertising at several international advertising agencies in Chicago and New York. Her previous novels are Lily Beach, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and The Middle Ages.
jenniefields.com

Randy Friedman and Linda Webb
In The Athletic Mindset: Three Tools for Success, co-authors Randy Friedman and Linda Webb have used their knowledge and experiences to lay the foundation for what they believe are the tools necessary to become successful in life. Webb is President of Contego Services Group, LLC, a nationwide fraud investigation company. Frequently referred to as "The Fraud Dog" due to her global fraud expertise of 30 years, Webb is also a former police officer and boxer. Friedman is the president of Six Points Media Group, and a 10-year LPGA golf professional and international athlete. Professional track and field athlete Kellie Wells says that The Athletic Mindset will "enable you to think and make decisions as an athlete would."
theathleticmindset.com

Meg Gardiner
Meg Gardiner, a three-time Jeopardy! champion, practiced law in Los Angeles and taught writing at the University of California Santa Barbara before writing The Nightmare Thief, which won the 2012 Audie Award for Thriller/Suspense audiobook of the year, The Liar's Lullaby, The Memory Collector, The Dirty Secrets Club and five novels in the best-selling Evan Delaney series including China Lake, which won the Edgar Award for best paperback original. In Ransom River, her tenth novel, Gardiner takes the ordinary experience of jury duty and transforms it into a heart-stopping event when masked men storm the courtroom and take everyone hostage. BookPage called Ransom River one of 2012's "10 must-read thrillers."
meggardiner.com

Tess Gerritsen
Bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career: while on maternity leave from her work as a physician, she began to write fiction. Last to Die is the tenth in her crime series featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles, which inspired the Rizzoli & Isles television series. Gerritsen's The Surgeon received a RITA award in 2002 for Best Romantic Suspense Novel and in 2006, Vanish received the Nero Award for best mystery novel, and was nominated for both an Edgar Award and a Macavity Award.
tessgerritsen.com

Irene Goldman-Price
In My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann, Irene Goldman-Price has combined a treasure trove of 135 letters, written over a 42-year period, from Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlman, Wharton's governess, literary secretary, and confidante. Goldman-Price serves on the editorial board of the Edith Wharton Review and has consulted and taught at The Mount, Wharton's house museum in Massachusetts. In 2010-2011, she was a visiting fellow at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the Wharton letters are held.

Michael Grunwald
In The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, Michael Grunwald has written a riveting account of the story behind President Obama's $800 billion stimulus bill. According to The Economist, "The New New Deal is the most interesting book that has been published about the Obama administration. Even Republicans should read it." Grunwald, senior national correspondent for TIME Magazine, has won the Society of Environmental Journalists award for in-depth reporting and many other honors. His first book, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise, was praised as "brilliant" (The Washington Post) and "terrific" (The New York Times).
michaelgrunwald.com

Lowell Hawthorne
Lowell Hawthorne grew up in rural Jamaica one of 11 children, all of whom helped their parents run a very successful bakery. He immigrated to the US in 1981 and, joined by several of his siblings, established the largest Caribbean business in the U.S. The Baker's Son is the memoir of this entrepreneur and founder of Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery & Grill, which made history by becoming the first Caribbean-owned business in the U.S to be granted a franchise license. Library Journal calls his story "a Horatio Alger tale with a Caribbean flavor."
akashicbooks.com/bakersson.htm

Tania James
Tania James' Aerogrammes and Other Stories is a collection of short stories set in locales as varied as London, Sierra Leone and the American Midwest that captures the yearning and dislocation of young men and women around the world. Author Karen Russell says this book is "proof that the short story is joyfully…thrillingly alive." James' book was chosen for Oprah's 2012 Summer Reading List. The Indian-American author's s debut novel, Atlas of Unknowns, was a New York Times Editor's Choice book. From 2011-2012, she was a Fulbright fellow living in New Delhi, India. James teaches creative writing at George Washington University.
taniajames.com/

Nathanael Johnson
Why, even as medicine improves, are we becoming less healthy? That's one of the questions award-winning journalist Nathanael Johnson wrestles with in his new book, All Natural*: *A Skeptic's Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing, and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier. According to Bill McKibben, author of 20 books on the environment, Johnson "can really help you understand why some of the things you believe don't make as much sense as you might imagine." A University of California Berkeley student of famed food and environmental expert Michael Pollan, Johnson has produced stories for National Public Radio's This American Life.
nathanaeljohnson.org/all-natural/

Jeanne Marie Laskas
Jeanne Marie Laskas, who author Rebecca Skloot describes as a "reporting and writing powerhouse," is the common-sense voice behind "Ask Laskas" in Reader's Digest, and the "My Life as a Mom" column in Ladies' Home Journal, and is a regular contributor to GQ magazine. In her latest book, Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work, Laskas dives deep into her subjects and emerges with character-driven narratives that are gripping, funny and revelatory. She is the director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.
jeannemarielaskas.com

Patrick Mascola
In Hell on East Rock, his first novel, Patrick Mascola has constructed an immensely satisfying work of love, suspense, and redemption. Siblings Jennifer and Tommy Kendal share complicity in a secret enterprise that will end one of their lives and haunt the other forever. What happens atop East Rock sets into motion a series of events that spans two continents and several decades. With a background in the entertainment, publicity, promotion and publishing fields for over 52 years in Florida, Mascola has published Around Town since 1969.
helloneastrock.com

Francesca Segal
The Innocents, Francesca Segal's debut novel, is a contemporary recasting of Edith Wharton's classic novel The Age of Innocence. The book portrays modern-day Jewish life with both wit and empathy, in a smart and funny tale of love, temptation, confusion, and commitment. Segal, the daughter of Erich Segal, author of Love Story, was brought up in England and America, and has been a freelance contributor to many of the UK's most prestigious publications.
francescasegal.com

Bob Spitz
Bob Spitz's Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child, is a portrait of one of the most fascinating Americans of our time. LA Weekly says of Dearie: "The most engaging celebrity biography we've read in years . . . Spitz manages to convey the vigor, curiosity, confidence and booming voice of a truly remarkable woman as if she is sitting at the kitchen table with you." Spitz is the award-winning author of The Beatles, a New York Times best seller, as well as seven other nonfiction books.
bobspitz.com/

Richard Guy Wilson
In his novel Edith Wharton at Home: Life on the Mount, Richard Guy Wilson reveals how intertwined Wharton's writing was with her sense of place. According to Vogue, the book "illuminates Wharton's life at her country house in the Berkshires-'my first real home,' as Wharton called it, having built it to fit her design ideals." Wilson, the author of more than twenty books, is Commonwealth Professor of Architectural History at the University of Virginia and a foremost authority on the architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
arch.virginia.edu/people/directory/richard-guy-wilson

Lee Woodruff
As co-author of 2007's best-selling In an Instant, Lee Woodruff is well-known for the compelling and often-humorous chronicle of her family's journey to recovery following the roadside bomb injury in Iran of her husband, TV newsman Bob Woodruff. Since then, she and her husband have founded a foundation to assist wounded service members and their families. Woodruff, now a freelance writer and contributing editor for CBS This Morning, has also written the nonfiction Perfectly Imperfect – A Life in Progress and her first novel, Those We Love Most. Best-selling novelist Harlan Coben's review: "When I turned the last page, I found myself missing the characters already."
leewoodruff.com

Dwight Jon Zimmerman
In the graphic biography, The Hammer and the Anvil: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the End of Slavery in America, award-winning author Dwight Jon Zimmerman and artist Wayne Vansant vividly depict the tumultuous time through the lives of the two men who defined it. Zimmerman is the coauthor with political commentator Bill O'Reilly of The New York Times bestseller Lincoln's Last Days. A radio host and member of the Military Writers Society of America, Zimmerman is the author of The Vietnam War: A Graphic History. His Civil War Quiz Book (500 questions) will be published in the summer of 2013.
us.macmillan.com/thehammerandtheanvil/DwightZimmerman

Melanie Benjamin
Melanie Benjamin's first love was the theatre, and she performed in many community theater productions before getting married and raising a family. But writing was always beckoning and she began submitting to local magazines and newspapers before venturing into fiction. As Melanie Hauser, she published two contemporary novels. By incorporating her passion for history and biography, Melanie, now writing as Melanie Benjamin, found her niche writing historical fiction, the "stories behind the stories." Alice I Have Been, a national bestseller, was her first historical novel and The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, her second. Her third, The Aviator's Wife, a novel about the marriage of one of America's most extraordinary couples, Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is currently on the New York Times Best Sellers fiction list.
melaniebenjamin.com