Julia Spencer-Fleming

[We regret that Julie Spencer-Fleming will not be able to attend this year's show.]

Julia Spencer-Fleming, with one parent from Tuscaloosa, AL and the other from Argyle, NY, likes to think of herself multi-geographical. A former military brat, she grew up in places as diverse as Mobile, Rome, Stuttgart and Syracuse. A graduate of Ithaca College, George Washington University and the U Maine School of Law, she took up writing while still a stay-at-home mother of two. During the time it took to finish her first book, she got a full-time job at a Portland, Maine, law firm and had a third child. Julia didn't want to write yet another lawyer-sleuth, so she used her army past and a keen eye for the goings-on at her Episcopal church to create Clare Fergusson, first female priest in the small Adirondack town of Millers Kill. The result, In the Bleak Midwinter, made debut history when it won the St.Martin's/Malice Domestic contest, the Dilys Award from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, and the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for Best First Novel. Its sequel, A Fountain Filled With Blood, was a Borders Original Voices selection, and the third book in the series, Out of the Deep I Cry, was St. Martin's Minotaur's lead title this April. Now happily quit of the law, Julia lives and works in a 180-year-old farmhouse in the southern Maine countryside with her husband, three children, and beloved big dog.

Eva Murrary

Eva Murrary is the author of ‘Well Out to Sea’, a book of interesting articles on life at Matinicus Island. 

In 1987, Eva moved from the Rockland area to Matinicus, having been hired to teach at the island’s one-room school. Two years later, she married the island electrician and stayed to raise their family there (the children are now in college).

Over the years, she has become an emergency medical technician, started a small bakery, taken on a number of roles in municipal government and local organizations, started the community’s recycling program, and been a first responder to emergencies both real and imagined.  

Since 2003, she’s also been a regular columnist for several publications including Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors, the Working Waterfront, the (Rockland) Village Soup and Free Press, and Down East Online.  

Eva bakes bread in a wood stove, spins wool, digs potatoes, collects useful herbs, cuts hay with a scythe and swings a blacksmith’s hammer.  Perhaps not surprisingly, she sometimes writes her articles with pencil and paper.  

‘Well Out to Sea’ shares stories of a unique community, of an interdependence that is all too rare these days but necessary for this island’s survival. 

Tess Gerritsen

Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. A graduate of Stanford University, Tess went on to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was awarded her M.D.

While on maternity leave from her work as a physician, she began to write fiction. In 1987, her first novel was published. Call After Midnight, a romantic thriller, was followed by eight more romantic suspense novels. She also wrote a screenplay, “Adrift”, which aired as a 1993 CBS Movie of the Week starring Kate Jackson.

Tess’s first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Her suspense novels since then have been: Life Support (1997), Bloodstream (1998), Gravity (1999), The Surgeon (2001), The Apprentice (2002), The Sinner (2003), Body Double (2004), Vanish (2005), The Mephisto Club (2006), The Bone Garden (2007), The Keepsake (2008; UK title: Keeping the Dead), Ice Cold (2010; UK title: The Killing Place), and her forthcoming Last To Die (August 2012).  Her books have been published in forty countries, and more than 25 million copies have been sold around the world.

Her books have been top-3 bestsellers in the United States and abroad. She has won both the Nero Wolfe Award (for Vanish) and the Rita Award (for The Surgeon). Critics around the world have praised her novels as “Pulse-pounding fun” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “Scary and brilliant” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “Polished, riveting prose” (Chicago Tribune). Publisher Weekly has dubbed her the “medical suspense queen”.

Her series of novels featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the TNT television series “Rizzoli & Isles” starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander.

Now retired from medicine, she writes full time. She lives in Maine.

Robin Hansen

West Bath author Robin Hansen has been researching and writing books about mittens for almost 30 years.  She is a recognized expert on traditional Maine mittens and has given workshops around the country, and even beyond our borders.  She is a folklorist and journalist as well, and her articles have appeared in Interweave Knits, Piecework, and Knitter’s Magazine, amongst many others.  She is the author of seven books on northern folk mittens, including two books for children: the best-selling how-to-knit book ‘Sunny’s Mittens’, and ‘Ice Harbor Mittens’.  Her latest book ‘Ultimate Mittens’ is a collection of 28 magnificent mitten patterns! This book is meant to carry on the tradition of folk mittens, passed down through the years.  Robin says it best: "Mittens are hardly more than a swatch with a thumb.  Their small format makes them ideal canvases for learning new techniques, playing with colors, or using fun techniques considered too laborious for larger garments".

Barbara Walsh

Barbara Walsh is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who has worked for newspapers and magazines in Florida, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Ireland. Her children’s book, Sammy in the Sky, is illustrated by painter Jamie Wyeth; it was inspired by her family’s first dog, Sam, a loyal and loving hound who died in 2004. She is also the author of August Gale: A Father and Daughter’s Journey into the Storm, an adult biography and memoir.

Barbara lives in Maine with her family and their coonhound Jack, a rescue dog from Tennessee.

Her website is: http://barbarawalsh.net/

George C. Daughan

George C. Daughan holds a Ph.D. in American History and Government from Harvard University and is a recipient of the 2008 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for his previous book, If By Sea: The Forging of the American Navy – From the Revolution to the War of 1812 (Basic Books, 2008; paperback edition, October 2011). Daughan spent three years in the United States Air Forced during the Vietnam War, and was an instructor at the Air Force Academy and director of the MA program in international affairs there. Subsequently, he taught at the University of Colorado, the University of New Hampshire, Wesleyan University and Connecticut College. He resides in Portland, Maine. 

http://www.georgedaughan.blogspot.com/

Virginia Cassarino-Brown

A native of Bethesda, Maryland, Virginia Cassarino-Brown moved to Maine twenty-nine years ago and has made her home there ever since. She spends most of the school year as an educator of young children in Harpswell, Maine. She is constantly energized by their enthusiasm for everyday life and their love of learning.  During the past year, she has traveled to many elementary schools and community libraries to share her book with others and loves to touch upon the tender balance between wildlife, the environment and people. She and her husband Allan, spend much of their summers at their camp in Oquossoc, Maine where his experience with a tangled loon inspired her to write this story.  Virginia has written stories for the magazine, Adventures for the Average Woman and the anthology Thin Threads: More Real Stories for Life Changing Moments. The Tangled Loon is her first children’s book.

Sarah Braunstein

Sarah Braunstein is the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children, a finalist for the 2011 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. In 2010 she was named one of “5 Under 35” fiction writers by the National Book Foundation, and she received a 2007 Rona Jaffe Writer's Award. Stories and essays have appeared in the AGNI, Post Road, Ploughshares, The Sun, Nylon Magazine, Maine Magazine, and on NPR’s All Things Considered. She teaches in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Based in Portland, Maine, she is at work on a second novel.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a writer and teacher. His first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, was chosen by Lisa Russ Spaar for the Vassar Miller Prize and published by the University of North Texas Press in 2012.

His poems have appeared in magazines including 32 Poems, Blackbird, Guernica, Linebreak, Maine Magazine, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, Western Humanities Review, and Verse Daily, and in the anthologies Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. His articles and reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, Pleiades, Publishers Weekly, and Time Out New York. He has received awards for his poems from the Bellevue Literary Review and UC Berkeley.

With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, he has taught writing and literature in public and private middle schools, high schools, and colleges in California, Vermont, New York, and Maine. In 2011 he was named one of Maine’s “emerging leaders” by the Portland Press Herald and MaineToday Media for his work directing The Telling Room, where he still occasionally teaches writing. He lives in Portland, ME with his family, serves as Poetry Editor of Maine magazine, and is at work on a novel.