Lesley retired from her life as a professor of psychology and reclaimed her country roots by moving to a small cottage in the Butternut River Valley in upstate New York. In the winter she migrates to old Florida—cowboys, scrub palmetto, and open fields of grazing cattle, a place where spurs still jingle in the post office, and gators make golf a contact sport. Back north, the shy ghost inhabiting the cottage serves as her writing muse. When not writing, she gardens, cooks and renovates the 1874 cottage with the help of her husband, two cats, and, of course, Fred the ghost, who gives artistic direction to their work.

She is author of several mystery series, all featuring country gals with attitude: the microbrewing mystery series set in the Butternut Valley of upstate New York—A Deadly Draught and Poisoned Pairings; the Big Lake Murder Mystery series—Dumpster Dying and Grilled, Chilled and Killed; and the Eve Appel Mysteries Series,A Secondhand Murder and Dead in the Water. Untreedreads publishes her short stories as well as a novel length mystery, Angel Sleuth. Her most recent mystery is Murder is Academic.

To learn more about Lesley and her books and stories go to her website http://www.lesleyadiehl.com. and blog www.lesleyadiehl.com/blog

MARY MACKEY'S "THE JAGUARS THAT PROWL OUR DREAMS" WINS THE 2019 ERIC HOFFER AWARD FOR BEST BOOK PUBLISHED BY A SMALL PRESS

Mary Mackey is The New York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels and eight collections of poetry. Her novels have appeared on The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller Lists and been translated into twelve foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and Finnish. Her poetry collections have won The PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, the CIIS Women's Spirituality Book Award, the 2019 Eric Hoffer Small Press Award and have been finalists for the Northern California Book Review Awards. Mary's manuscripts and first editions of her novels and poetry collections are archived in the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library at Smith College.

Since she learned everything she knows about reading and writing the hard way, she has decided to save herself and everyone else a lot of time by creating People Who Make Books Happen, a series of interviews on the Blog Page of her website at http://marymackey.com/the-writers-journey/ Here she persuades agents, book cover designers, social media consultants, website designers, digital convertors, bookstore owners, famous authors, and anyone else she can lure into conversation to tell her everything they know. Mary is always open to suggestions from her readers about new people to interview.

Mary admires women who are willing to fight for what they believe in. Almost without exception, her heroines plunge passionately into life, searching for love and happiness, defending the earth, and seeking a moral center in difficult times. As she has often observed: "I believe it's better to regret what you did than what you didn't do."

Mary's poems have been widely praised by poets Wendell Berry, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jane Hirshfield, Dennis Nurkse, Al Young, Dennis Schmitz, and Marge Piercy for their power, lyricism, and originality. A new collection of her poetry entitled "The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974 to 2018, published by Marsh Hawk Press in September 2018, won the California Institute of Integral Studies Women's Spirituality Award and the 2019 Erich Hoffer Small Press Award. A previous poetry collection, "Sugar Zone," won the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Garrison Keillor frequently featured Mackey's poems on The Writer's Almanac. Besides being a novelist and poet, Mackey is also a screenwriter and has sold feature-length screenplays to Warner Brothers as well as to independent film companies. John Korty directed the filming of her original, award-winning screenplay "Silence."

Related through her father's family to Mark Twain, Mackey graduated from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. Because of her interest in different cultures, her novels deal with a wide range of subjects. Her four bestselling novels about the Goddess-worshiping cultures of Old Europe show her interest in ecology, nature-worship, and the preservation of the planet ("The Village of Bones: Sabalah's Tale," "The Year The Horses Came," "The Horses At The Gate," and "The Fires of Spring).

She loves theater and dance and has written novels about three generations of women involved in ballet ("A Grand Passion") and three generations of women involved in the German theater during the rise of Hitler ("The Kindness of Strangers,"). Two of her novels have dealt with women who fought in the American Civil War ("The Notorious Mrs. Winston" and "The Widow's War").

She has also written about political unrest in the United States in the 1960's ( "Season of Shadows"); the last Goddess-worshiping cultures of ancient Sumer ("The Last Warrior Queen"); a comic romp through the 50's written in what she calls "the first person insane" ("McCarthy's List"); a movie star and a community college teacher who change places ("The Stand In); and a woman who starts a Revenge Consulting Service ("Sweet Revenge"). Her first novel "Immersion", set in the rain forests of Costa Rica before many of the trees were cut down, was published by the legendary and wonderfully-named Shameless Hussy Press. She also occasionally writes comic novels under the pen name "Kate Clemens."

During her twenties, Mackey lived in the Costa Rican jungle, bunking down with vampire bats, army ants, and poisonous snakes. For over two decades, she has been traveling to Brazil with her husband, incorporating her adventures into her fiction and poetry. In 2005 she took a boat up a tributary of the Amazon, traveling over two thousand miles through flooded jungle. Recently, she made another trip to one of the headwaters of the Amazon on the Rio Tocantins. At present, she lives in northern California with her husband Angus Wright, and is Professor Emeritus of English at California State University.

Mary Mackey invites you to join her in conversation on her website at http://www.marymackey.com where she is always happy to answer your questions about the craft of writing, Goddesses, the rainforest, the tendency of Brazilian buses to run red lights, and a host of other things including why she dislikes the month of November. You are also warmly invited to join her mailing list at http://eepurl.com/CrLHT; "Like" her Fan Page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/marymackeywriter?sk=info, and follow her on Twitter at @MMackeyAuthor

You can hear Mary Mackey read poems from "The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams" at https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=5&poet=890

For information about her comic "Kate Clemens" novels see https://www.amazon.com/author/kateclemens

Warren Bull is the award-winning author of the novels ABRAHAM LINCOLN FOR THE DEFENSE, HEARTLAND, and ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN COURT & CAMPAIGN and the short story collections MURDER MANHATTAN STYLE, KILLER EULOGY AND OTHER STORIES, and NO HAPPY ENDINGS. He has also written a history book ABRAHAM LINCOLN: SELDOM TOLD STORIES. He is a lifetime professional member of Sisters in Crime (with no hope of parole) and an active member of Mystery Writers of America, He has published in STRANGE MYSTERIES anthologies (1 through 7) from Whorlteberry Press, BLACK COFFEE, DESTINATION MURDER, SHHH..MURDER, and WE'VE BEEN TRUMPED anthologies for Dark House Books, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Great Mystery and Suspense magazine, Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine, Crimeandsuspence.com, Mouth Full of Bullets, The Back Alley, Sniplits.com Untreed Reads, Mysterical-E. He was a psychologist in his "day job" for thirty years. Warren is a fierce competitor at trivia games. He claims he comes from a functional family.

His author website is: https://warrenbull.com/index.html

Rhett Shepard, aka Maggie Adams, believes she was born to be a writer—but it took awhile to figure that out. She grew up in North Carolina, then went “up north” to college (to Virginia, then to upstate New York). Unable to decide what interested her most, she majored in anthropology, Spanish and English, and studied voice. It wasn’t until she married and her husband entered graduate school that Rhett/Maggie figured out what she wanted to do with her own life. She and her husband have lived in southern California, the Caribbean island of Trinidad, and now New York City—thankfully, writing is a career that travels well. She writes mystery stories as Rhett Shepard, and “sweet” secular and Christian fiction as Maggie Adams; she also writes poetry and literary fiction as Margaret Adams Birth and short nonfiction as Margaret Birth. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/MaggieAdamsRhettShepard/.

Barb Goffman is well known for her crime short stories. She's won the Agatha, Macavity, and Silver Falchion Awards, as well as the Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine Readers Award. She's been a finalist for major crime-writing awards 36 times, including the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, Macavity, and Silver Falchion. Her book Don't Get Mad, Get Even won the Silver Falchion Award for best crime short-story collection published in 2013. She earns her living as a freelance crime-fiction editor, specializing in cozy and traditional mysteries. You can sample her work by listening to her story "Dear Emily Etiquette," which won the 2020 EQMM Readers Award: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/eqmm/episodes/2020-10-01T11_56_38-07_00. Enjoy!

Elizabeth is a Computer Engineer who has branched out into writing fiction. She has been published in a number of mystery and science fiction anthologies, and has been short-listed for the Arthur Ellis award for Short Stories. Her interests include poisons, art fraud, and convincing her mini schnauzer that squirrels in the yard do not constitute an emergency. A fan of a well-told story in any genre, she especially enjoys mystery, urban fantasy and science fiction. She continues to hone her craft, enjoying the freedom to use adjectives, adverbs and pronouns, unlike when writing code, but still needs to practice not writing run-on sentences.