@authorpodcast

Rebecca Hanover is the New York Times bestselling author of THE SIMILARS duology. After graduating from Stanford University with a BA in English and drama, Rebecca joined the writing team of the CBS daytime drama GUIDING LIGHT, where she earned an Emmy Award. Still, she never lost her love of books—particularly YA. She now writes Young Adult as well as adult novels full-time from her home in San Francisco, where she enjoys matcha lattes and a complete lack of seasons. When she isn’t writing, she can be found in a yoga class or reading anything Dav Pilkey with her husband and three kiddos.

Learn more at rebeccahanover.com

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Gareth Russell is a historian and broadcaster, educated at Oxford University and Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of nine books. He is host of the podcast Single Malt History with Gareth Russell.  Russell divides his time between London and Belfast, Northern Ireland. 

In THE PALACE, Russell presents 500 years of the British monarchy, from King Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth II, through a unique lens--their connections to specific rooms at Hampton Court Palace. Architecturally breathtaking and rich in splendid art and décor, Hampton Court Palace has been the stage of some of the most important events in British history, such as the commissioning of King James’s translation of the Bible, the staging of many of Shakespeare’s plays, and Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation ball.

Learn more at: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Gareth-Russell/500660891

Follow Gareth at Instagram: @_garethrussell; Twitter: @garethrussell1.

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Alison Greenberg is an author and screenwriter who lives in Atlanta, but is quick to say she was born in New York City. While attending The University of Southern California, Alison took her first screenwriting class and fell head over heels. A journey from screenwriting led to marketing jobs, before coming full-circle back to her first love. Alison speaks fluent rom-com, lives for 90’s WB dramas, cries to Taylor Swift, and is a proud single mom to her two incredible kids, two cats, and one poorly-trained dog. 

Learn more at: AlisonRoseGreenberg.com

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Virginia Pye’s collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, won the 2019 IPPY Gold Medal for Short Fiction. Her novels, River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix, have also received literary awards. Her short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, (Press 53) won the 2019 Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Short Fiction, and one of its stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, New York Times, The Rumpus, Huffington Postand elsewhere. Virginia graduated from Wesleyan University and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been a Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar, an assistant at the Virginia Quarterly Review Conference, and a repeat fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.She’s taught at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania and most recently at GrubStreet in Boston. Her latest novel is The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann. 

Learn more at https://www.virginiapye.com

Special thanks to NetGalley for a preview of this novel. 
@netgalley

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Leah Redmond Chang writes biography and literary non-fiction, with a focus on women’s history. Trained as a literature scholar, her books draw on her extensive research in the archives and in rare book libraries. A former tenured professor of French Literature and Culture at The George Washington University, she has also been an Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London. She lives with her husband and three children in Washington DC, and spends as much time as possible in London, her favorite city. 

Learn more at leahredmondchang.com

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Kelly J. Ford is the author of the crime novels, Real Bad Things and Cottonmouths, which has “impressive depths of character and setting,” according to the Los Angeles Review, which named it one of its Best Books of 2017. An Arkansas native, Kelly writes crime fiction set in the Ozarks and Arkansas River Valley. She currently lives on Cape Cod.

Learn more about Kelly here: 

Website: https://kellyjford.com/

Instagram: @kellyjfordauthor                    

Twitter: @Kelly_J_Ford

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Alisa Lynn Valdés is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author with more than 1 million books in print in 11 languages. She started her writing career as an award-winning staff writer for The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times.

 Alisa holds a bachelor's degree in music from Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she majored in jazz performance on the tenor saxophone. Her master's in journalism comes from Columbia University in New York City.

For twenty years, Alisa was a fitness professional, an educator for the Aerobics and Fitness Association of America. After 15 years away from her native New Mexico, Alisa returned, to write novels. When she's not writing, Alisa enjoys hiking, camping, fly fishing, kayaking and photography. A deeply spiritual person, Alisa was raised as an atheist but changed her view after a profound near-death experience in which she crossed over for a while.

Alisa once owned her own boutique scone bakery and is now working on her keto and paleo baking skills. She's a volunteer with New Mexico Volunteers for the Outdoors. If she got to start over again, she'd choose to be a game warden instead of a writer. So now she's doing the next best thing, and writing novels about Jodi Luna, a fictional New Mexico game warden. HOLLOW BEASTS is out now!

Learn more at: https://www.alisa-valdes-rodriguez.com/

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Lexie Elliott has been writing for as long as she can remember, but she began to focus on it more seriously after she lost her banking job in 2009 due to the Global Financial Crisis. After some success in short story competitions, she began planning a novel. With two kids and a (new) job, it took some time for that novel to move from her head to the page, but the result was The French Girl, which was published by Berkley in February 2018 - available on Amazon now! This was followed by The Missing Years in 2019 and How To Kill Your Best Friend in 2021. She is now working on her fourth novel.

When she's not writing, Lexie can be found running, swimming or cycling whilst thinking about writing. In 2007 she swam the English Channel solo. She won't be doing that again. In 2015 she ran 100km, raising money for Alzheimer Scotland. She won't be doing that again either. But the odd triathlon or marathon isn't out of the question. Lexie's latest novel is Bright and Deadly Things.

Learn more at: www.lexieelliott.com
www.facebook.com/lexieelliottwrites

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After being born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lauren Thoman eventually moved with her husband to live outside of Nashville, Tennessee. 

Although her degree was in music education, Lauren quickly realized that the life of a band director was not for her. After exploring various other fields for a few years, she started working on her first novel when her second child started preschool. However, those early manuscripts never made it all the way to publication, and after a few years, Lauren decided to try her hand at pop culture writing, combining her passion for writing with her lifetime love of watching and analyzing movies and TV shows. 

It didn’t take long for Lauren to become a frequent contributor to a number of prominent online pop culture outlets, such as Parade, Vulture, POPSUGAR, Looper, and Collider, leaving little time for writing books. For a few years, Lauren took a break from creative writing as she focused more on freelancing, enjoying the opportunity to get her writing in front of a wider community of readers. (Including The Rock. Three. Times.)

Eventually, though, in between article deadlines, she managed to finish another book, one that she’d started years before and then set aside. She called it I'LL STOP THE WORLD. And a few months later, much to her delighted surprise, Mindy Kaling decided to publish it. 

Lauren still lives outside of Nashville with her husband and two children in a chaotic household that also includes an assortment of rescue and foster dogs and an ever-increasing quantity of fish. When she's not writing, she's probably on the hunt for tacos or coffee, or buried underneath a pile of dogs.

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Melissa Payne is the bestselling, award-winning author of The Secrets of Lost Stones and Memories in the Drift. For as long as she can remember, Melissa has been telling stories in one form or another—from high school newspaper articles to a graduate thesis to blogging about marriage and motherhood. But she first learned the real importance of storytelling when she worked for a residential and day treatment center for abused and neglected children. There she wrote speeches and letters to raise funds for the children. The truth in those stories was piercing and painful and written to invoke a call to action in the reader: to give, to help, to make a difference. Melissa’s love of writing and sharing stories in all forms has endured. She lives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with her husband and three children, a friendly mutt, a very loud cat, and the occasional bear.

Learn more at www.melissapayneauthor.com. 

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Burt Weissbourd is a novelist, screenwriter, and producer of feature films. He was born in 1949 and graduated cum laude from Yale University, with honors in psychology. During his student years, he volunteered at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and taught English to college students in Thailand. After he graduated, he wrote, directed, and produced educational films for Gilbert Altschul Productions. He began a finance program at the Northwestern University Graduate School of Business but left in his final semester to start his own film production company in Los Angeles. He managed that company from 1977 until 1986, producing films including Ghost Story starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, John Houseman, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and Raggedy Man starring Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard, which The New York Times called "a movie of sweet, low-keyed charm." In 1987, he founded an investment business, which he still runs. Burt’s novels include the thrillers Danger in Plain Sight, The Corey Logan Trilogy (Inside Passage, Teaser and Minos), and In Velvet, which is set in Yellowstone National Park. Rough Justice, the sequel to Danger in Plain Sight, is out now. 
For more visit, burtweissbourd.com.

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Rebecca Hanover is the New York Times bestselling author of THE SIMILARS duology. After graduating from Stanford University with a BA in English and drama, Rebecca joined the writing team of the CBS daytime drama GUIDING LIGHT, where she earned an Emmy Award. Still, she never lost her love of books—particularly YA. She now writes Young Adult as well as adult novels full-time from her home in San Francisco, where she enjoys matcha lattes and a complete lack of seasons. When she isn’t writing, she can be found in a yoga class or reading anything Dav Pilkey with her husband and three kiddos. Her latest novel is The Last Applicant. 

Learn more at: rebeccahanover.com

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Henriette Lazaridis' novel TERRA NOVA is forthcoming from Pegasus Books in Fall 2022. She is the author of the best-selling novel THE CLOVER HOUSE. Her short work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including ELLE, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, and Pangyrus, and has earned her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. Henriette grew up in the Boston area as the only child of Greek expats, speaking Greek as her first language. Devoted to storytelling since her childhood bedtime stories from the Odyssey, Henriette earned degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston. She founded The Drum Literary Magazine and currently runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece. She writes the Substack newsletter The Entropy Hotel, about athletic and creative challenges at henriettelazaridis.substack.com. F

Learn more at henriettelazaridis.com.

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Kelly J. Ford is the author of Real Bad Things (summer 2022) and the award-winning Cottonmouths, a novel of “impressive depths of character and setting” according to the Los Angeles Review, which named it one of their Best Books of 2017. An Arkansas native, Kelly writes about the power and pitfalls of friendship, the danger of long-held secrets, and the transcendent grittiness of the Ozarks and their surrounds. She lives in Vermont with her wife and cat. Kelly is also a co-host of the Writer’s Bone podcast Happy Hour episodes. Learn more at KELLYJFORD.COM

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As a life-long cowgirl, licensed psychotherapist and teacher, Beth Anstandig has 25 years of experience developing, implementing and training people in Natural Leadership—a model she pioneered. She’s trained thousands of leaders and teams from some of the most renowned corporations, universities, and nonprofits, helping them awaken their innate power and awareness to live, lead and work with more authentic relationships and connection.

Beth owns Take a Chance Ranch in Morgan Hill, California providing leadership, culture and well-being programs through The Circle Up Experience. Together with an ever-growing menagerie of animals, Beth works with human herds onsite and online.

Her fresh perspective and work integrating basic animal practices into everyday human life have been featured in global media including BBC World Service, PBS, and Forbes. Beth has built a life with animals at its center so she can continue listening to the voice of her own animal, reclaiming the mammalian signal system that is alive and well within each of us. Her book is an invitation to you to do the same.

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Barbara Bourland is the author of Fake Like Me, a finalist for the 2020 Edgar Best Novel Award. Fake Like Me was published by Grand Central in North America, and riverrun abroad, and in Japan by Hayakawa. It was written with support from The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY.

Her debut novel, I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, was a Refinery29 Best Book of 2017 and Irish Independent Book of the Year. It was published in North America by Grand Central Publishing; in Ireland, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa by riverrun; and in Hebrew by Matar Press in Israel. 

Her third novel, The Force of Such Beauty, follows a retired Olympic athlete who marries a prince. It will be published by Dutton in 2022. 

Bourland's novels use imaginative escapism to process an emotional condition (in chronological order: I'll Eat When I'm Dead, the compulsion to control our appearance; Fake Like Me, the worry that we aren’t good enough; The Force of Such Beauty, the desire to be special) endemic to contemporary women’s lives. Cast in the mold of universal literary forms—the detective story, the thriller, the fairytale—they weave in and out of their genres, until the plot turns inside out and the narrative, upon reflection, appears to be something else entirely.

She's at work on her fourth novel, Fields and Waves, forthcoming from Dutton in 2024.

She lives in Baltimore.

Learn more at barbarabourland.com.

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Marilyn Simon Rothstein is the author of three novels: Crazy to Leave You (May, 2022), Husbands and Other. Sharp Objects (2018) and Lift and Separate 2016), winner of the Star Award presented by the Women's Fiction. Writers Association for Outstanding Debut. All are published by Lake Union.

Visit: https://www.marilynsimonrothstein.com/

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Eileen Grace Brill is a painter, writer, and Sign Language Interpreter who grew up outside of Philadelphia and graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a B.S. in Economics. She has written professionally for the restaurant, hotel, and commercial real estate industries. A Letter in the Wall is her first novel, though she has been a writer all her life, beginning at age four when she wrote a poem (filled with spelling errors!) for her babysitter. Eileen’s short story “Christmas Angel” appeared in the international literary magazine Beyond Words in 2021. She and her husband Eli raised their sons in her hometown of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, where they still live, along with their two adopted mutts, Athena and Gaia.

Learn more: eileenbrill.com

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Liza Nash Taylor, a Hawthornden Fellow, discusses how her Keswick Farm home has inspired her historical novels. 

Jeanette Escudero discusses The Apology Project and her path to publishing.