Participants

Ellen Jensen Abbott's debut novel is Watersmeet. She writes fantasy novels for young adults. She lives in Pennsylvania and teaches high school English at the Westtown School.

Sam Abell's forty year career is dedicated to achieving art from documentary photography. He has pursued his goal primarily through lengthy in-depth assigments for National Geographic magazine. Through his books he has emerged as an influential voice in contemporary photography.

Mario Acevedo writes the Felix Gomez vampire-detective mystery series. Mario travels the astral plane (using frequent flyer miles) to channel the undead, werewolves, vampires, and alien gangsters for his stories. He lives and writes in Denver, Colorado

Chuck Adams has survived in publishing for almost 40 years, as an editor at Dell/Delacorte (12 years) and Simon & Schuster (15 years), and currently at Algonquin Books (4+ years). He has worked with writers Kinky Friedman, Sandra Brown, Joseph Heller, Mary Higgins Clark, James Lee Burke, Susan Cheever, and Ellen Gilchrist, as well as Charlton Heston, Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan, and Neil Simon.

Jonathan Alderfer, National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America, writes and illustrates books on bird identification. Most recently, he co-edited two new field guides for National Geographic, on birds of the Eastern U.S and of the Western U.S.

Tasha Alexander, A Poisoned Season, attended the University of Notre Dame as an English major to have a legitimate excuse to spend all her time reading. She is the author of two other historical suspense novels as well as Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of the novel Rails Under My Back and most recently, the story collection Holding Pattern. He has also written two collections of poetry. Allen teaches in the Writing Program at the New School.

Anna Alter is the author and illustrator of many books for children, including What Can You Do with an Old Red Shoe? and Abigail Spells. A Charlottesville native, Anna now calls Boston home.

Mark Andrews, author of Meet Me At The Mountain, is the founder/executive director of Therapeutic Adventures, a non-profit charitable education organization providing adaptive outdoor programs for persons with differing abilities -- disabilities, chronic medical impairments, and other special health needs

Cris Arbo is an award-winning illustrator whose most recent book, In the Trees, Honeybees, by Lori Mortensen, has just been released. Her other titles All Around Me I See by Laya Steinberg, In A Nutshell and The Dandelion Seed by Joseph Anthony.

Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational and a professor at Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, is a behavioral economist. His seemingly simple experiments, which have policy implications for social planning, indicate that people don't make economic decisions in a rational way.

Paul Aron, author of We Hold These Truths, is senior editor at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Previously he was a reporter for The Virginia Gazette and executive editor at Simon and Schuster.

Jennifer Atkinson is the author of three collections of poetry, Drift Ice, The Drowned City, and The Dogwood Tree. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia.

Frankie Y. Bailey, a Virginia native, is a criminal justice professor at University at Albany (SUNY). Her most recent non-fiction book is about African American mystery writers. Her mystery series features crime historian Lizzie Stuart.

David Baldacci, author of Divine Justice and 16 other novels, will release First Family in April 2009.Famous for his thrillers, he is a lawyer, born and raised in Virginia. He and his wife have established the Wish You Well Foundation which supports family literacy.