Kemper Donovan is the host of the All About Agatha podcast. A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, he worked at the literary management company Circle of Confusion for a decade…
Chris Nichols is a longtime preservationist and senior editor at Los Angeles magazine. For many years, he worked with the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee, serving a term as chairman of the…
Charmaine Wilkerson is the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, which was named a Read With Jenna Book Club Pick and adapted as a Hulu streaming series by Oprah Winfrey and Kapital…
Mallory O’Meara is the bestselling author of The Lady from the Black Lagoon, which won the 2019 SCIBA award for Biography and the 2019 Rondo award for Book of the Year, Girly Drinks, which won a 2022…
Hache Pueyo is an Argentine-Brazilian writer and translator. She won an Otherwise Fellowship for her work with gender in speculative fiction, and her work has appeared as H. Pueyo in The Magazine of…
Edward Underhill grew up in the suburbs of Wisconsin, where he could not walk to anything, so he had to make up his own adventures. He studied music in college, spent several years living in very…
Jess Armstrong is the USA Today best selling author of the Ruby Vaughn Mysteries. Her debut novel, The Curse of Penryth Hall, won the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel…
Chuck Tingle is the USA Today bestselling author of Camp Damascus and Straight. He is a mysterious force of energy behind sunglasses and a pink mask. He is also an anonymous author of romance, horror…
A. (Amanda) Rae Dunlap studied film and Victorian literature at Northwestern University and spends her days as a trailer editor at Disney, bringing to life the magic of the world’s most influential…
Season’s Readings, everyone! As is generally true, there have been some marvelous books published in 2024, and I’m thrilled to share my favorites with you. I’ve listed these books in alphabetical…
In 2019, Kim Michele Richardson told the story of Cussy Mary Carter and her work as a Pack Horse Librarian in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Now, in 2022, Richardson returns to tell the next chapter in Cussy Mary’s story, which actually belongs to her daughter, in The Book...
A young woman on her way to her first day of classes at Brooklyn College spills coffee on herself just prior to boarding the subway. Another young woman on the train comes to her rescue with a scarf and a kind word. The next time the student boards the train...
Vodou priestess Mambo Reina Dumond learned the practices and customs of Vodou as a child from her father, while her family was living in Haiti. She is inhabited by the spirit of Erzulie, which makes her a gifted practitioner of water magic. Reina operates a small business behind her home...
The year is 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. is about to hold his Freedom Rally at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles; William H. Parker is Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department; John F. Kennedy is President of the United States; Pat Brown is the Governor of California; Gas is...
Meiko is the Japanese wife of Jamie Briggs, a white US Air Force pilot fighting in World War II. Meiko, and her daughter Aiko, are “residents” of the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. A few days ago, an unscheduled truck came to the camp. The residents are told to stay...
Mickey Barnes NEEDS to get off Midgard, the colony planet on which he has lived his entire life. Because staying on Midgard is not an option, he takes the only avenue open to him: he volunteers to be the “expendable” on Midgard’s first outgoing colony ship, the Drakkar. An “expendable”...
In 1975, the comic book industry is struggling. It has survived, mostly, Frederic Wertham’s criticisms and claims regarding a causal relationship between reading comics and becoming a juvenile delinquent in Seduction of the Innocent. But there have been casualties. Readership is down. Publishers are closing. Writers and artists are left...
N.K. Jemisin is a multiple award-winning, speculative fiction writer. Currently, she resides in Brooklyn, New York and, as evidenced by her novel, The City We Became, she LOVES the “Big Apple”.Every century or so, a city will “manifest”, it becomes a living thing, an entity of its own. This has...
Redwood Phipps is an African-American girl. Aidan Wildfire Cooper is a Seminole Irish young man. The two are brought together by a hateful act of racial violence, which affects both of them for the remainder of their lives. But both are determined to keep the event from defining them. In...
In 1974, author and soon to be screenwriter and director Nicholas Meyer published his first novel: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. It was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that not only covered the foiling of a kidnapping plot, but famously chronicled Holmes’ recovery from addiction, with the help of Sigmund Freud. Over the...