Leavitt is a graduate of Yale University and a professor at the University of Florida, where he is the co-director of the creative writing program. He is also the editor of Subtropics magazine, The University of Florida's literary review. Leavitt, who is openly gay, has frequently explored gay issues in his work. He divides his time between Florida and Tuscany, Italy.

Born in San Francisco in 1970, Erik Orrantia lived in the San Francisco Bay area until 1997. By that time, he had earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Counseling at California State University in Hayward. His original intention was to build a practice in psychotherapy. He then felt a calling to explore the world and entered an International Study Program in Mexico City where he earned a teaching credential. He currently works as a middle school teacher in San Ysidro, California, along the Mexican-American border. He was voted Teacher of the Year in 2008 for his school district. He has traveled extensively throughout Mexico. He now spends most of his time in Tijuana with his partner and dedicates his free time to writing.

Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York. He is the author of the novel Did You Ever Have A Family and the memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. He has written for the New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, New York magazine, The Guardian, and Harper’s Bazaar.

Jennifer Camper is a cartoonist and graphic artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Her art examines gender, race, sexuality and politics, especially from the viewpoint of a Lebanese-American gay woman. Her books include Rude Girls and Dangerous Women, a collection of her cartoons that mix humor with political commentary, and subGURLZ, a graphic novel following the adventures of three women living in abandoned subway tunnels. Camper is also the editor of, and a contributor to, Juicy Mother, a comix anthology focusing on the work of women, people of color and queers. Her comics and illustrations have appeared in magazines, newspapers, comic books and anthologies, and her art has been exhibited in the US and Europe. (from the author's website)

LaShonda Katrice Barnett is an American author, radio host, teacher, lecturer. Her fiction, music books and plays are known for their themes about the African diaspora and race. She has a collection of short stories, three music books, a trilogy of full-length plays. Her 2015 debut novel Jam! On the Vine, drew attention to the author and scholar. In 2014, Barnett's short stories were featured in The Chicago Tribune, Gemini Magazine and Guernica Magazine. She's been nominated twice for the 2015 Pushcart Prize. LaShonda Katrice Barnett was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1974. She grew up on Park Forest, Illinois. Barnett has identified herself as a lesbian and often writes with same-sex female characters in mind in her short stories, plays and her first novel Jam! On the Vine. She's held residencies at the Noepe Center for Literary Arts-Martha’s Vineyard, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She's been a Tennessee Williams Fellow and received a Standards Best Small Press Book Award for her short stories collection "Callalou & Other Lesbian Love Tales" in 2007. Barnett has a love for music, as evidenced with her jazz program for WBAI (99.5 FM, NYC). She hosted a jazz show. In 2007, Barnett interviewed female musicians about the African diaspora and edited "I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft and "Off The Record: Conversations With African American & Brazilian Women Musicians" in 2015. Barnett lectured on women in jazz at the Lincoln Center and in on jazz as a whole in several countries. Barnett taught at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College on history and literature. Barnett received her B.A. from the University of Missouri, a M.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph. D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. She earned a B.A. in Women's History from the University of Missouri and an M.A. in Women's History from Sarah Lawrence College. Barnett received grants for her work from National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the College Language Association. Barnett lives in upper west side Manhattan as a full-time writer. (from Wikipedia)

Paige Braddock is an Eisner-nominated artist and writer and the Chief Creative Officer at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates. She won a Children's & Family Emmy Award for her work on the Apple documentary, "Who Are You, Charlie Brown?" which won for outstanding nonfiction program. Braddock has illustrated several Peanuts children’s books. Her other graphic novels for children include the series, Stinky Cecil with Andrews McMeel and Peanut, Butter, & Crackers with Penguin Kids. The third installment in the Peanut, Butter, & Crackers series, ON THE TRAIL, is out now. She lives with her wife Evelyn and their two dogs and a cat in Sebastopol, California.

Marion Dane Bauer is the author of more than one hundred books for young people, ranging from novelty and picture books through early readers, both fiction and nonfiction, books on writing, and middle-grade and young-adult novels. She has won numerous awards, including several Minnesota Book Awards, a Jane Addams Peace Association Award for RAIN OF FIRE, an American Library Association Newbery Honor Award for ON MY HONOR, a number of state children's choice awards and the Kerlan Award from the University of Minnesota for the body of her work. She is also the editor of and a contributor to the ground-breaking collection of gay and lesbian short stories, Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence. Marion was one of the founding faculty and the first Faculty Chair for the Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her writing guide, the American Library Association Notable WHAT'S YOUR STORY? A YOUNG PERSON'S GUIDE TO WRITING FICTION, is used by writers of all ages. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen different languages. She has six grandchildren and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her partner and a cavalier King Charles spaniel, Dawn. ——————————————————- INTERVIEW WITH MARION DANE BAUER ——————————————————- Q. What brought you to a career as a writer? A. I seem to have been born with my head full of stories. For almost as far back as I can remember, I used most of my unoccupied moments—even in school when I was supposed to be doing other "more important" things—to make up stories in my head. I sometimes got a notation on my report card that said, "Marion dreams." It was not a compliment. But while the stories I wove occupied my mind in a very satisfying way, they were so complex that I never thought of trying to write them down. I wouldn't have known where to begin. So though I did all kinds of writing through my teen and early adult years—letters, journals, essays, poetry—I didn't begin to gather the craft I needed to write stories until I was in my early thirties. That was also when my last excuse for not taking the time to sit down to do the writing I'd so long wanted to do started first grade. Q. And why write for young people? A. Because I get my creative energy in examining young lives, young issues. Most people, when they enter adulthood, leave childhood behind, by which I mean that they forget most of what they know about themselves as children. Of course, the ghosts of childhood still inhabit them, but they deal with them in other forms—problems with parental authority turn into problems with bosses, for instance—and don't keep reaching back to the original source to try to fix it, to make everything come out differently than it did the first time. Most children's writers, I suspect, are fixers. We return, again and again, usually under the cover of made-up characters, to work things through. I don't know that our childhoods are necessarily more painful than most. Every childhood has pain it, because life has pain in it at every stage. The difference is that we are compelled to keep returning to the source. Q. You write for a wide range of ages. Do you write from a different place in writing for preschoolers than for young adolescents? A. In a picture book or board book, I'm always writing from the womb of the family, a place that—while it might be intruded upon by fears, for instance—is still, ultimately, safe and nurturing. That's what my own early childhood was like, so it's easy for me to return to those feelings and to recreate them. When I write for older readers, I'm writing from a very different experience. My early adolescence, especially, was a time of deep alienation, mostly from my peers but in some ways from my family as well. And so I write my older stories out of that pain, that longing for connection. A story has to have a problem at its core. No struggle

Jewelle Gomez (b. 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American writer and cultural worker. Gomez was raised by her great grandmother, Grace, who was born on Indian land in Iowa to an African American mother and Ioway father. Grace returned to New England before she was 14 when her father died and was married to John E. Morandus, a Wampanoag and descendent of Massasoit, the sachem for whom Massachusetts was named. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s she was shaped socially and politically by the close family ties with her great grandmother, Grace and grandmother Lydia. Their history of independence as well as marginalization in an African American community are threaded throughout her work. Her high school and college years were ripe with Black political and social movements which is reflected in much of her writing. Subsequent years in New York City placed her at the heart of Black theatre including work with the Frank Silvera Writers Workshop and many years as a stage manager for off Broadway productions. There she became involved in lesbian feminist activism and magazine publication. She was a member of the Conditions (magazine) Collective, a lesbian feminist literary magazine. More recent writing has begun to reflect her Native American (Ioway, Wampanoag) heritage. Her work lives at the intersection of these multiple ethnicities, the ideals of lesbian/feminism and class. Gomez is the author of seven books, but is most known for the double Lambda Literary Award winning novel The Gilda Stories (Firebrand Books, 1991). This novel, which reframes the traditional vampire mythology, taking a lesbian feminist perspective, is an adventure about an escaped slave who comes of age over two hundred years. According to scholar, Elyce Rae Helford, "Each stage of Gilda's personal voyage is also a study of life as part of multiple communities, all at the margins of mainstream white middle-class America." (UTOPIAN STUDIES, 3.22.01) She also authored the theatrical adaptation of the novel Bones and Ash which toured 13 U.S. cities performed by the Urban Bush Women Company (1996). The book, which remains in print, was also issued by the Quality Paperback Book Club in an edition including the play. Her other books include Don't Explain , a collection of short fiction; 43 Septembers , a collection of personal/political essays; Oral Tradition , poems collected and new. Her fiction and poetry is included in over one hundred anthologies including the first anthology of Black speculative fiction, Dark Matter: A Century of African American Speculative Fiction , from Warner Books, edited by Sheree R. Thomas; Home Girls: a Black feminist Anthology from Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and Best American Poetry of 2001 edited by Robert Haas. Gomez has written literary and film criticism for numerous publications including The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, Ms. Magazine and Black Scholar. She's been interviewed in periodicals and journals over the past 25 years including Advocate, where writer Victoria Brownworth discussed her writing origins and political insterests (September 21, 1993). In the Journal of Lesbian Studies (Vol. 5, #3) she was interviewed for an article entitled "Funding Lesbian Activism," which linked her career in philanthropy with her political roots. She's also interviewed in the 1999 film produced for Public Television, After Stonewall, directed by John Scagliotti. Her newest work includes a forthcoming comic novel, Televised, which recounts the lives of survivors of the Black Nationalist movement and was excerpted in the anthology Gumbo edited by Marita Golden and E. Lyn Harris. She is also authoring a play about James Baldwin being written in collaboration with [a: Harry Waters

Susan Stinson's novels are Venus of Chalk (2004), Fat Girl Dances with Rocks(1994) and Martha Moody(1995). Spider In A Tree is her novel in progress. Belly Songs, a collection of poetry and lyric essays, was published in 1993. Her work—which has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Seneca Review, Curve, Lambda Book Report and The Women's Review of Books—has received the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction as well as a number of fellowships. She was born in Texas, raised in Colorado, and now lives in Northampton, MA. Susan has given workshops and been a featured speaker at Dartmouth College, Amherst College, Wheaton College, Hampshire College, University of Massachusetts, and Smith College, as well as conferences such as the National Women's Studies Association, Nolose, NAAFA, OutWrite, and Saints and Sinners Literary Festival. Honors Grants and fellowships from the Vogelstein Foundation, Millay Colony, Blue Mountain Center, Money for Women/​Barbara Deming Fund, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and others. Venus of Chalk was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

Armistead Maupin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1944 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he served as a naval officer in the Mediterranean and with the River Patrol Force in Vietnam. Maupin worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina, before being assigned to the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. In 1976 he launched his groundbreaking Tales of the City serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Maupin is the author of nine novels, including the six-volume Tales of the City series, Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener and, most recently, Michael Tolliver Lives. Three miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney were made from the first three Tales novels. The Night Listener became a feature film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. He is currently writing a musical version of Tales of the City with Jason Sellards (aka Jake Shears) and John Garden (aka JJ) of the disco and glam rock-inspired pop group Scissor Sisters. Tales will be directed by Jason Moore (Avenue Q and Shrek). Maupin lives in San Francisco with his husband, Christopher Turner.

Julie Anne Peters was born in Jamestown, New York. When she was five, her family moved to the Denver suburbs in Colorado. Her parents divorced when she was in high school. She has three siblings: a brother, John, and two younger sisters, Jeanne and Susan. Her books for young adults include Define "Normal" (2000), Keeping You a Secret (2003), Luna (2004), Far from Xanadu (2005), Between Mom and Jo (2006), grl2grl (2007), Rage: A Love Story (2009), By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead (2010), She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not... (2011), It's Our Prom (So Deal with It) (2012), and Lies My Girlfriend Told Me (2014). Her young adult fiction often feature lesbian characters and address LGBT issues. She has announced that she has retired from writing, and Lies My Girlfriend Told Me will be her last novel. She now works full-time for the Colorado Reading Corps.

I used to say I’d be a teacher or a lawyer or a hairdresser when I grew up but even as I said these things, I knew what made me happiest was writing. I wrote on everything and everywhere. I remember my uncle catching me writing my name in graffiti on the side of a building. (It was not pretty for me when my mother found out.) I wrote on paper bags and my shoes and denim binders. I chalked stories across sidewalks and penciled tiny tales in notebook margins. I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories. I also told a lot of stories as a child. Not “Once upon a time” stories but basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it! There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends’ eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying but I didn’t stop until fifth grade. That year, I wrote a story and my teacher said “This is really good.” Before that I had written a poem about Martin Luther King that was, I guess, so good no one believed I wrote it. After lots of brouhaha, it was believed finally that I had indeed penned the poem which went on to win me a Scrabble game and local acclaim. So by the time the story rolled around and the words “This is really good” came out of the otherwise down-turned lips of my fifth grade teacher, I was well on my way to understanding that a lie on the page was a whole different animal—one that won you prizes and got surly teachers to smile. A lie on the page meant lots of independent time to create your stories and the freedom to sit hunched over the pages of your notebook without people thinking you were strange. Lots and lots of books later, I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book’s binder. Sometimes, when I’m sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing’s coming to me, I remember my fifth grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said “This is really good.” The way, I—the skinny girl in the back of the classroom who was always getting into trouble for talking or missed homework assignments—sat up a little straighter, folded my hands on the desks, smiled and began to believe in me.

Hi Goodreads! I've only created this profile to claim my name here, and I don't check messages here or add friends. I invite you to follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or visit my website at malindalo.com. BIO: Malinda Lo is the bestselling author of Last Night at the Telegraph Club, winner of the National Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, as well as Michael L. Printz and Walter Dean Myers honors. Her debut novel Ash, a Sapphic retelling of Cinderella, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award and the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the Lambda Literary Award. She can be found on social media @malindalo or at malindalo.com.

I am Brent Hartinger, a novelist and screenwriter. I’ve published fourteen novels, had nine screenplays optioned, and had two of my projects turned into feature films. My first novel, Geography Club (2003), is the story of a gay teen named Russel Middlebrook. It was one of the first in a new wave of break-out LGBTQ young adult fiction, and it was adapted as a feature film in 2013. I subsequently wrote three more books about Russel, calling them The Russel Middlebrook Series. I tried to give these books a lot of humor and heart. In 2013, I continued Russel’s story as he grew up, into his twenties, in a new, stand-alone series called Russel Middlebook: The Futon Years. These books are “new adult” (making Russel one of very few literary characters to “jump” genres in projects created by the same author). In 2017, I released a new, stand-alone series starring Russel’s gay disabled friend Otto Digmore, called The Otto Digmore Series. I love mysteries and thrillers. My 2016 gay teen puzzle box thriller Three Truths and a Lie was nominated for an Edgar Award (this, and my 2005 novel Grand & Humble, are real mind-benders, trust me). My 2007 YA mystery, Project Pay Day, is much lighter, and has also been adapted as feature film (which I wrote), to be released in 2020. Here are all my books: THE OTTO DIGMORE SERIES * The Otto Digmore Difference (book 1) * The Otto Digmore Decision (book 2) RUSSEL MIDDLEBROOK: THE FUTON YEARS * The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (book #1) * Barefoot in the City of Broken Dreams (book #2) * The Road to Amazing (book #3) THE RUSSE MIDDLE BROOK SERIES * Geography Club (book #1) * The Order of the Poison Oak (book #2) * Double Feature: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies/Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies (book #3) * The Elephant of Surprise (book #4) * Two Thousand Pounds Per Square Inch (a free short story) MY OTHER BOOKS * Project Pay Day * Three Truths and a Lie * Grand & Humble * Shadow Walkers I also love to travel. In fact, I no longer have a home. Instead, I travel the world indefinitely with my husband, writer Michael Jensen, moving to a new country every few months. You can follow our "digital nomad" journey at BrentandMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com I try hard to write books that are page-turners, and movies that are fast-paced and accessible. If I had to describe my own writing projects, I would say, “Strong central concept, strong plot, strong character and voice.” Basically, I see myself as a storyteller. But I think “story” is a lot more than “beautiful language” or complicated camera angles, which I often find self-indulgent and distracting. In most cases, I think the important thing for a writer or filmmaker is to get out of the way and just tell the damn story. I answer all questions, so feel free to contact me on social media, or through my website: BrentHartinger.com Cheers! Brent Hartinger

Richard McCann was a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He lived in Washington, D.C., where he was a longtime professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. A gay writer,[1] he was the author of Mother of Sorrows, a collection of linked stories. It won the 2005 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares and was also an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award recipient, as well as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Amazon named it one of the Top 50 Books of 2005. McCann's book of poems, Ghost Letters, won the 1994 Beatrice Hawley and Capricorn Poetry awards. With Michael Klein, he edited Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The Atlantic," Esquire, Ms., Tin House, Ploughshares, and numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, Best American Essays 2000, and The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the Yaddo Corporation. In 2010, he was the Master Artist at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL