Susan Wiggs' life is all about family, friends...and fiction. She lives at the water's edge on an island in Puget Sound, and she commutes to her writers' group in a 17-foot motorboat. She serves as author liaison for Field's End, a literary community on Bainbridge Island, Washington, bringing inspiration and instruction from the world's top authors to her seaside community. (See www.fieldsend.org) She's been featured in the national media, including NPR's "Talk of the Nation," and is a popular speaker locally and nationally. According to Publishers Weekly, Wiggs writes with "refreshingly honest emotion," and the Salem Statesman Journal adds that she is "one of our best observers of stories of the heart [who] knows how to capture emotion on virtually every page of every book." Booklist characterizes her books as "real and true and unforgettable." She is the recipient of three RITA (sm) awards and four starred reviews from Publishers Weekly for her books. The Winter Lodge and Passing Through Paradise have appeared on PW’s annual "Best Of" lists. Several of her books have been listed as top Booksense picks and optioned as feature films. Her novels have been translated into more than two dozen languages and have made national bestseller lists, including the USA Today, Washington Post and New York Times lists. The author is a former teacher, a Harvard graduate, an avid hiker, an amateur photographer, a good skier and terrible golfer, yet her favorite form of exercise is curling up with a good book. Readers can learn more on the web at www.susanwiggs.com and on her lively blog at www.susanwiggs.wordpress.com.

Barbara Samuel is a multiple RITA award-winning author with more than 38 books to her credit in a variety of genres. She has written historical and contemporary romances, a number of fantasy novellas with the likes of Susan Wiggs, Jo Beverley and Mary Jo Putney. She now writes women’s fiction about families, dogs, and food as Barbara O’Neal. Her work has captured a plethora of awards, including six RITAs; the Colorado Center for the Book Award (twice); Favorite Book of the Year from Romance Writers of America, and the Library Journal’s list of Best Genre Fiction of the year, among many others.You can find a full list of all titles here. Now living back in her hometown of Colorado Springs, Barbara writes in a study overlooking Pikes Peak, a pin that draws her home from her travels. She shares her home with Christopher Robin, a British endurance athlete, a gorgeous and lovable chow mix named Jack; a very, very old Siamese named Esmerelda; a rescued street cat who has become the fattest silver tabby on the planet, and the wonder twins, two tuxedo kittens from a local shelter, whose names have changed several times. Yes, a lot of animals. An avid photographer, cook, and traveler, Barbara keeps a log of travels, recipes, and photos at her blog, A Writer Afoot, where she also sometimes posts writing advice. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook, but she doesn’t promise to be particularly interesting there.

Roberta Gellis has been one of the most successful writers of historical fiction of the last few decades, having published about 25 meticulously researched historical novels since 1964. She was married to her husband Charles for over 50 years and they lived together in Lafayette, Indiana with a lively Lakeland terrier called Taffy. She has one child called Mark. Her page at the Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase