Karen DeBonis
Hello reader!
I’m glad you clicked here so I can give you some background to my story. I started writing my memoir in 1999, two years after my son Matthew was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Fast forward over 20 years, and in May 2023, Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain tumor They Survived will become real. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, only better.
I write about motherhood, people-pleasing, and personal growth, and my work has appeared in the New York Times, HuffPost, Newsweek.com, Today.com, AARP, and numerous literary journals. Whether I’m writing or pursuing other creative outlets, I relish my hard-won empty nest in upstate New York with Michael, my husband of forty years. Growth is my debut memoir. You can read more here: www.karendebon
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Casey Mulligan Walsh is a former speech-language pathologist who writes about life at the intersection of grief and joy, embracing uncertainty, and the nature of true belonging. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, Next Avenue, Modern Loss, WebMD, and Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine, as well as in Split Lip, Hippocampus, Barren Magazine, and numerous other literary journals. She is also a contributor to Daring to Breathe, an anthology about living with the foreverness of grief. Casey is passionate about supporting those who grieve all manner of losses, including those that are spoken of and those too often shrouded in silence.
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J.A. Cox
J. A. Cox is a husband, father, disabled veteran and award winning author. He is passionate about Jesus Christ and has a desire to allow God to use his writing to bring glory to his name and reach others for him. His other passions lie in: 1) Empowering people by teaching about things that he is knowledgeable in in a simple and fun as well as interesting manner. 2)Inspiring others that they may realize how the true potential to overcome their perceived dilemma lies right between their ears and how they allow it to manipulate what their eyes behold. 3) Helping people to realize that being healthy truly begins with realizing how important it is for them to be intimately acquainted with their own body in order for others to help them resolve i
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Mike Weedall
Available now, "Escape To The Maroons."
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My newest book tells the little-known story of the courageous people who chose a life in one of the most inhospitable North American environments in their determination to escape slavery. Written as historical fiction, the true story of over 2,000 freedom seekers who established homes and communities deep in The Great Dismal Swamp is presented. While each day was a struggle to survive in the swamp, the formerly enslaved established vibrant communities and developed an economy that supported multi-generational families. As one swamp resident said, "The worst day in this terrible swamp is much better than the best day I ever experienced as a slave."
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C.K. Phillips
Note: All my books now are available as audiobooks on Amazon or Audible. C. K. Phillips is a retired educator who is an avid reader, author, and editor. After a career of teaching and grading composition, he finally determined to make time to fulfill his creative impulses, beginning his first series featuring Phil and Cyndi Kent, along with retired special forces operative Bill Lander. Comes the Awakening was his first novel, followed by the second book in the Kent/Lander series: Echoes of Skeletons Past The third book in the series is The Survival Initiative, followed by P.O.W.E.R., and the last book, The Superstitions. Phillips has now released the first book in his next series featuring Bronco Slade and Abby Malone, private investigators
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Sarah Connell
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An allotment. A bench. A grieving man. An asylum seeker on the run. An intimate, sharply relevant story that unfolds in the stillness between two people who should never have met, and yet desperately need each other.
Walter and Osama aren’t just characters, they’re reflections of two worlds colliding in quiet resistance. There’s heartbreak here, but also defiant kindness. The emotional stillness, the subtle tensions, the questions of belonging, grief, and trust, readers say this is the kind of novel that lingers in the soul long after the final page.
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Jayme Phelps
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She lives in Albuquerque New Mexico where the best time of year is the first week of October when the sky is filled with hundreds of hot air balloons, and the best food is smothered in Green chile. -
Lia Russ
Lia Russ was born high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado in a town so small that only three other children were born that year. Perhaps because of the sparseness of human population and the vastness of the natural world, Lia learned to open her senses to connect with the energies of everything around her.
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It wasn't until she moved to Westchester County, New York, (at age nine) that she began to realize she was different from other children. Between her sensitivities to energy and a discovery that she was dyslexic, Lia feared that she would never fit in. She grew to dislike her differences, and because there was no support, she began to feel like she was irrevocably stupid and despaired about what life would be like for her as an adult.
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Rona D. Drinkard
Rona D. Drinkard is an international award-winning author of her debut novel, Friendship Matters. She has crafted the sequel, "The Matters of Friendship" thus making this friendship journey into "The Friendship Matters Series." Author Rona D. has won the February 2022 BREW Readers' Choice Award, won 1st Place in the 2021 Firebird Book Awards for Women's Fiction and selected as one of the Finalist for the 2021 Indies Today Award Contest. Rona hails from Buffalo, New York and currently resides in Maryland.
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Anna Kenna
Anna Kenna is a former radio and television reporter, turned children’s author. She has written extensively for school publications, and her stories and books are used in classrooms around the world. She has written several picture books, including The Essential Fairy, based on former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern responding to the concerns of kids by declaring the tooth fairy an 'essential worker' in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Other titles include Bo, the heartwarming story of a retired greyhound who finds a new life as a pet, and the award-winning Viola Vincent Reporting junior fiction series. The novels, featuring teen reporter, Caitlin Nove, tackle real world problems through Caitlin's investigations into shoddy consu
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Mike Weedall
Available now, "Escape To The Maroons."
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My newest book tells the little-known story of the courageous people who chose a life in one of the most inhospitable North American environments in their determination to escape slavery. Written as historical fiction, the true story of over 2,000 freedom seekers who established homes and communities deep in The Great Dismal Swamp is presented. While each day was a struggle to survive in the swamp, the formerly enslaved established vibrant communities and developed an economy that supported multi-generational families. As one swamp resident said, "The worst day in this terrible swamp is much better than the best day I ever experienced as a slave."
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Leta Serafim
The daughter of an itinerant scientist, I was born in Wisconsin, spent the first years of my life in San Diego, before moving to Washington, D.C. when NASA was created and my father went to work for that agency. A genuine rocket scientist, he served there for twenty-five years in many capacities— Director of Unmanned Space, Director of Astronomy, Associate Administrator and Chief Scientist, and supervised the American missions to Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. Our house was always littered with models of space ships and missiles and our guests at Thanksgiving spoke about ‘thrust and payload’ in a multitude of tongues, it being my father’s firm belief that the language of American science was ‘broken English.’
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I attended Wells College in up -
C.K. Phillips
Note: All my books now are available as audiobooks on Amazon or Audible. C. K. Phillips is a retired educator who is an avid reader, author, and editor. After a career of teaching and grading composition, he finally determined to make time to fulfill his creative impulses, beginning his first series featuring Phil and Cyndi Kent, along with retired special forces operative Bill Lander. Comes the Awakening was his first novel, followed by the second book in the Kent/Lander series: Echoes of Skeletons Past The third book in the series is The Survival Initiative, followed by P.O.W.E.R., and the last book, The Superstitions. Phillips has now released the first book in his next series featuring Bronco Slade and Abby Malone, private investigators
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Sarah Connell
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An allotment. A bench. A grieving man. An asylum seeker on the run. An intimate, sharply relevant story that unfolds in the stillness between two people who should never have met, and yet desperately need each other.
Walter and Osama aren’t just characters, they’re reflections of two worlds colliding in quiet resistance. There’s heartbreak here, but also defiant kindness. The emotional stillness, the subtle tensions, the questions of belonging, grief, and trust, readers say this is the kind of novel that lingers in the soul long after the final page.
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Jayme Phelps
Jayme Phelps is a wife and a mother of three boys who works as a full time Educational Sign Language Interpreter. In her spare time she enjoys baking (specifically cupcakes), painting, and of course writing books!
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She lives in Albuquerque New Mexico where the best time of year is the first week of October when the sky is filled with hundreds of hot air balloons, and the best food is smothered in Green chile. -
Karen McSpade
Raised in the Arkansas River Valley, Karen McSpade grew up with a fishing pole in one hand and her trusty .410 shotgun in the other. Exploring the creeks and woods around her hometown while hunting with her father kept her “entertained and out of jail,” as her mom likes to say.
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As a child, her most prized possessions were her books and her Michael Jackson album collection. These led her to a brief venture into breakdancing and poetry slamming before discovering her true passion, bringing stories and characters to life. Today, she focuses on the two things that still inspire her creativity—her love for food and dishing up mysteries with a dash of humor.
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Lia Russ
Lia Russ was born high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado in a town so small that only three other children were born that year. Perhaps because of the sparseness of human population and the vastness of the natural world, Lia learned to open her senses to connect with the energies of everything around her.
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It wasn't until she moved to Westchester County, New York, (at age nine) that she began to realize she was different from other children. Between her sensitivities to energy and a discovery that she was dyslexic, Lia feared that she would never fit in. She grew to dislike her differences, and because there was no support, she began to feel like she was irrevocably stupid and despaired about what life would be like for her as an adult.
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Rona D. Drinkard
Rona D. Drinkard is an international award-winning author of her debut novel, Friendship Matters. She has crafted the sequel, "The Matters of Friendship" thus making this friendship journey into "The Friendship Matters Series." Author Rona D. has won the February 2022 BREW Readers' Choice Award, won 1st Place in the 2021 Firebird Book Awards for Women's Fiction and selected as one of the Finalist for the 2021 Indies Today Award Contest. Rona hails from Buffalo, New York and currently resides in Maryland.
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To learn more, feel free to check out her website. -
J.A. Cox
J. A. Cox is a husband, father, disabled veteran and award winning author. He is passionate about Jesus Christ and has a desire to allow God to use his writing to bring glory to his name and reach others for him. His other passions lie in: 1) Empowering people by teaching about things that he is knowledgeable in in a simple and fun as well as interesting manner. 2)Inspiring others that they may realize how the true potential to overcome their perceived dilemma lies right between their ears and how they allow it to manipulate what their eyes behold. 3) Helping people to realize that being healthy truly begins with realizing how important it is for them to be intimately acquainted with their own body in order for others to help them resolve i
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Elizabeth Ruth
Elizabeth Ruth is a Utah native, self-published author. From a young age, she always had an active mind, which was constantly making up stories. Years passed without being able to express that creative side until she read a book that sparked the fire inside her. She read book after book after book and fell in love with the adventures she went on. The work of other authors encouraged her to share her own. Most of her time is spent raising her four young children with her husband of twelve years in Salt Lake City, Utah. But you can often find her avoiding responsibilities, with her nose stuck in a book, or daydreaming about the plot of her next creation.
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Elizabeth Ruth
Elizabeth Ruth is a Utah native, self-published author. From a young age, she always had an active mind, which was constantly making up stories. Years passed without being able to express that creative side until she read a book that sparked the fire inside her. She read book after book after book and fell in love with the adventures she went on. The work of other authors encouraged her to share her own. Most of her time is spent raising her four young children with her husband of twelve years in Salt Lake City, Utah. But you can often find her avoiding responsibilities, with her nose stuck in a book, or daydreaming about the plot of her next creation.
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Leta Serafim
The daughter of an itinerant scientist, I was born in Wisconsin, spent the first years of my life in San Diego, before moving to Washington, D.C. when NASA was created and my father went to work for that agency. A genuine rocket scientist, he served there for twenty-five years in many capacities— Director of Unmanned Space, Director of Astronomy, Associate Administrator and Chief Scientist, and supervised the American missions to Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. Our house was always littered with models of space ships and missiles and our guests at Thanksgiving spoke about ‘thrust and payload’ in a multitude of tongues, it being my father’s firm belief that the language of American science was ‘broken English.’
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I attended Wells College in up -
Jocelyn Jane Cox
Jocelyn Jane Cox holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in English Literature with a focus on Creative Writing. She competed in the United States Figure Skating Championships with her older brother, Brad, four times (twice in pair skating and twice in ice dance). She has been coaching kids, teenagers, and adults in both skating and writing for over 25 years. Her creative nonfiction was included in the anthology Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness, edited by Diane Gottlieb (ELJ Editions, 2023). Among other publications, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Newsweek, Good Men Project, WIRED, Belladonna Comedy, The Offing, HAD, Cleaver, Litro Magazine, Li
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Ronit Plank
Ronit Plank is author of WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation and HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a collection of short fiction which won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award.
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A Seattle-based writer, teacher, and editor, her work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.
She is nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and her stories and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net, and the Best Microfiction Anthology. Her short fiction has won prizes and/or special mention in The Iowa Review, American -
Jennifer Lang
American-French-Israeli hybrid; obsessed with identity, language, home, belonging
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1995-today: stories in Parenting, Woman’s Day, Baltimore Review, Under the Sun, Barren Magazine, Citron Review, Coachella Review, Consequence Forum, NPR
MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts; former Assistant Editor at Brevity Journal
Yogini, practicing since 1995, teaching since 2003, leads YogaProse
https://www.instagram.com/jenlangwrites
https://www.facebook.com/jenlangwrites
AWARDS for Landed:
*Winner of Best Middle-or-Late-in-Life Coming-of-Age, Zibby Awards 2025
*Gold Book Award Winner, Literary Titan 2024
*Finalist for Adult Nonfiction, Wishing Shelf Book Awards 2024
AWARDS for Places We Left Behind:
*Finalist for Autobiography/Memoir, Foreword Review -
Joelle Tamraz
Joelle Tamraz is the author of The Secret Practice: Eighteen Years on the Dark Side of Yoga, an intimate portrait of psychological and spiritual abuse in a long, controlling relationship.
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She earned an Honors BA degree in social studies from Harvard and an MBA from INSEAD. Before writing and speaking full-time, she held senior roles in technology companies for over two decades and owned a yoga studio for ten of those years. She is also a certified life coach and a youth mentor.
Originally from the Middle East, Joelle has lived in the US, France, and India, and now resides in the UK with her husband and two dogs. She's passionate about sustainability and enjoys spending time outdoors, walking, cycling, or simply being in nature.
Joelle believe -
Anna Kenna
Anna Kenna is a former radio and television reporter, turned children’s author. She has written extensively for school publications, and her stories and books are used in classrooms around the world. She has written several picture books, including The Essential Fairy, based on former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern responding to the concerns of kids by declaring the tooth fairy an 'essential worker' in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Other titles include Bo, the heartwarming story of a retired greyhound who finds a new life as a pet, and the award-winning Viola Vincent Reporting junior fiction series. The novels, featuring teen reporter, Caitlin Nove, tackle real world problems through Caitlin's investigations into shoddy consu
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James Gault
James (Jim) writes from a small coastal town in Australia where he resides with his wife Sally and food-obsessed labrador dog Pippa. Since retiring from a life at sea, and between stints of voluntary work, he has written contemporary crime fiction and a history text amongst others. He has an abiding love of history and thrives on historical fiction, of which this is his fifth work in that genre.
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Janis Harper
Janis Harper is a writer, editor, singer-songwriter, actor, and former adjunct English professor turned expressive arts therapist. Her lifelong passions for the arts, metaphysics, spirituality, and philosophy come together in her 2021 philosophical-spiritual novel, "Jonas and the Mountain: A Metaphysical Love Story" (Sacred Stories). Although fictional, she considers it to be the truest work she’s ever written. Janis's writing can be found in literary journals and anthologies, including in two creative nonfiction anthologies that she conceived and edited: "Body Breakdowns: Tales of Illness and Recovery" and "Emails From India: Women Write Home." She has presented her work in Canada, the US, and India, and lives in British Columbia. https://
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Martha Hunt Handler
Martha Hunt Handler grew up dreaming of wolves and has always understood that her role in this lifetime is to tell stories and be a voice for nature. She has been an environmental consultant, a magazine columnist, an actress, and a polar explorer, among other occupations. When she and her four children relocated from Los Angeles to New York more than twenty years ago she began to literally hear the howls of wolves. This marked the beginning of her work advocating on behalf of wolves at the Wolf Conservation Center (nywolf.org). Winter of the Wolf is Martha's debut novel.
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You can learn more about her at https://marthahunthandler.com/ or follow her on facebook at Martha Hunt Handler or on Instagram at @marthahunthandler. -
Anna Rollins
Anna Rollins is the author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl (out December 9, 2025 from Eerdmans). Her groundbreaking debut memoir examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites. Her writing has appeared in outlets like The New York Times, Slate, Electric Literature, Salon, Joyland, and more. She’s also written scholarly articles about composition and writing center studies. She’s an award-winning instructor who taught English in higher education for nearly 15 years. She is a 2025 Tamarack Foundation for the Arts Literary Arts Fellow. A lifelong Appalachian, she lives with her husband in West Virginia where they’re raising
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Melissa Monroe
Melissa M. Monroe, Ph.D., L.Ac was awarded Honorable Mention in Writer's Digest 2023 Self-Published Book Awards for her book, "Mom's Search for Meaning." She is a mom, freelance writer, acupuncturist, and host of the podcast This Club Suuucks: Grief Support for Parents After the Lasagnas Are Long Gone. She lives with her daughter and dog in Los Angeles but heads to the mountains whenever possible.
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Catherine Shields
Catherine (Cathy) Shields writes about parenting, disabilities, and self-discovery. In debut memoir, The Shape Of Normal, A Memoir Of Motherhood, Disability And Embracing A Different Kind Of Perfect, Cathy explores the truths and lies parents tell themselves. Her book was named a category WINNER in the 2023 American Writing Awards, and her writing has twice been nominated for a Pushcart. Her essays have been published in NBC Today. Newsweek, Bacopa Literary Review, Grown and Flown, Brevity Blog, Mother Magazine, U Revolution, and Write City Magazine. Cathy resides in Miami, Florida with her husband. They enjoy taking long bike rides and kayaking. Follow her on her Instagram @cathyshieldswriter..
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Anne Pinkerton
Anne Pinkerton is author of Were You Close? a sister's quest to know the brother she lost.
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Anne’s poetry and essays have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Ars Medica, Modern Loss, “Beautiful Things” at River Teeth Journal, Sunlight Press, Stone Gathering, The Bark, Entropy, Lunch Ticket, The HerStories Project, among other journals, as well as the anthologies, The Pandemic Midlife Crisis: Gen X Women on the Brink and Nothing Divine Dies: A Poetry Anthology About Nature.
Anne holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bay Path University and studied poetry as an undergrad at Hampshire College.