Featured Speakers

Information on featured speakers will be continually added to this page as we receive it!

Elizabeth George

Elizabeth George is the author of eighteen best selling novels. She has won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, and France's Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her novel A Great Deliverance, for which she was also nominated for the Edgar and the Macavity Awards. She has also been awarded Germany's MIMI for her novel Well-Schooled in Murder.

Most of her novels have been filmed by for television by the BBC and have been broadcast in the U.S. on PBS's Mystery series.

Elizabeth George currently lives in Seattle, Washington, making frequent trips to London where she has a flat in South Kensington.

Gail Tsukiyama

Gail Tsukiyama is the bestselling author of six novels, including Women of the Silk, The Samurai’s Garden, and her newest book, The Street of a Thousand Blossoms. She has been a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. She divides her time between El Cerrito and Napa Valley, California.

Jane Hamilton

Jane Hamilton’s first novel, The Book of Ruth, was published in 1988 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Book Award in 1989. The Book of Ruth was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1996, and it was the basis for a 2004 television film of the same title. In 1994, she published A Map of the World, which was adapted for a film in 1999 and, the same year, was also an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her third novel, The Short History of a Prince, published in 1998, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. This book was also shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize. She has since published two more novels, both set in Wisconsin.

Christopher Merrill

Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Aleš Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes, among them, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon; and four books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, his journalism appears in many publications, and he is the book critic for the daily radio news program, The World. He has held the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, and now directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.

Tim Cahill

Tim Cahill is a travel writer who lives in Livingston, Montana. He is a founding editor of Outside magazine and currently serves as an "Editor at Large" for the magazine. He also is a frequent contributor to National Geographic Adventure magazine. He has written ten books recounting his adventure travel experiences and blends his own brand of humor into his stories.

Along with professional long-distance driver Garry Sowerby, Cahill set a world record for speed in driving the entire length of the American continents, from Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego in southern Argentina up along the Pan-American Highway to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in twenty-three days, twenty-two hours, and forty-three minutes. This trip was the source material for his book Road Fever.

Bryan Christy

Bryan Christys first job was as a morticians apprentice. A freelance writer, he has worked for Playboy and National Geographic. He graduated from the University of Michigan Law School and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Tokyo University Law School. His first book The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the Worlds Greatest Reptile Smugglers, will be published by TWELVE in August 2008

Michael Perry

Michael Perry is a humorist and author of the bestselling memoir Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, and the essay collection Off Main Street. Perry has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion and Salon.com, and is a contributing editor to Men’s Health. His essays have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered and he has performed and produced two live audience recordings (I Got It From the Cows and Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow). Perry lives in rural Wisconsin , where he remains active as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical responder. He can be found online at www.sneezingcow.com

Bob Mayer

New York Times bestselling author Bob Mayer has published over 35 books ranging from military techno-thriller to political thriller to non-fiction to science fiction to romantic adventure. He has over three million books in print with four books to be published in 2007, including WHO DARES WINS: Special Operations Tactics for Building Your Winning A-Team; The Novel Writer’s Toolkit: A Guide To Writing Great Fiction And Getting It Published; and as the primary contributor to The Writer’s Digest Writing Kit coming out in August 2007 and the editor of Hunting Al Qaeda.