Kelley is a storyteller in both print and film. A native of Portland, Oregon, and graduate of USC’s film school, Kelley has a BA and an MFA in film production. He is an author, (Dennis Barton Is A Bastard and Other Stories, From Arrah Wanna To Muleshoe, Road Dog, The Angry Filmmaker Survival Guide: Part One & Part Two) and an Independent Filmmaker. He has written and directed three full length features (Birddog, The Gas Café, & Kicking Bird), eight short films, and quite a few documentaries. His films have aired on PBS, Canadian and Australian television, and have been shown at Film Festivals including London, Sydney, Annecy, Sao Paulo, Sundance, Chicago, Aspen, Mill Valley, and Edinburgh. In addition to his own films he was the sound designer on six of Gus Van Sant's feature films including, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, and Finding Forrester, and Todd Haynes film, Far From Heaven. He also did the sound on Will Vinton’s, The Adventures of Mark Twain, and three Claymation specials for CBS. With no distributor interested in his independent films, Kelley Baker, the Angry Filmmaker, ripped a page out of the punk rock handbook and went looking for his audience in a used minivan with his faithful 120 pound Chocolate Lab, Moses. “When Moses and I hit the road, it was scary, demanding and a shit ton of fun. Fierce storms, terrifying fog, icy roads, uncontrollable laughter, and oftentimes far too much alcohol. Without that big old dog I’m not sure how I would’ve survived.” – Kelley Baker Every fall and spring they traveled the country showing his films at art house theaters, film festivals, colleges, and biker bars. Logging over two hundred thousand miles, they encountered a collection of Fellini-esque characters including two hyper-intellectual pro wrestlers in West Virginia, a lying Chicago hotel desk clerk who cost Kelley his home, civil rights workers knocking back rum at Hank Williams’ grave, and a way overzealous drug sniffing border patrol dog outside El Paso, Texas. Kelley gave an audio workshop for employees of a porn channel, got yelled at in a haunted bar in Memphis, was asked to leave Oral Roberts University, and drove twenty-four hundred miles in three days so he wouldn’t miss his daughter’s choir recital. Moses swam in two oceans, fifteen lakes, and enthusiastically marked thousands of spots from sea to shining sea. To learn more about Kelley and his work we invite you to check out his website, www.angryfilmmaker.com, for more information.

Eric Smith is a Young Adult author and literary agent living in Philadelphia. His next book, Jagged Little Pill: The Novel, a collaboration with Alanis Morissette, Diablo Cody, and Glen Ballard, will be published with Abrams in April 2022. It’s an adaptation of the Grammy and Tony award winning musical. His latest books include You Can Go Your Own Way (Inkyard Press) and the acclaimed anthology Battle of the Bands (Candlewick), co-edited with award-winning author Lauren Gibaldi. It’s currently being adapted for film by Playground Entertainment. His novel Don’t Read the Comments was a YALSA 2021 Best Fiction for Young Adults selection. The paperback is out now. He has short stories and essays in the anthologies Color Outside the Lines by Sangu Mandanna (Soho Teen), Body Talk by Kelly Jensen (Algonquin), Allies by Dana Alison Levy and Shakirah Bourne (DK), All Signs Point to Yes by Candice Montgomery, cara davis-araux, and Adrianne Russell (Inkyard), and Adoptee to Adoptee by Nicole Chung and Shannon Gibney (Harper). His other books include the IndieBound bestseller The Geek’s Guide to Dating (Quirk), Inked (Bloomsbury), the anthology Welcome Home (Flux), and contemporary fantasy novel The Girl and the Grove (Flux).

Susan Devan Harness is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, a cultural anthropologist, writer and speaker, and author of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption. Bitterroot recently received the Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado for Best Creative Nonfiction by a Female Writer, as well as Best Indigenous Writer and Best Creative Nonfiction in the High Plains Book Awards. Bitterroot was also a finalist in the Colorado Book Awards. Ms. Harness shared her expertise on the TEDxMileHigh stage with her presentation "Adopting a Child of a Different Race? Let's Talk..." Ms. Harness' profession, as well as her experience as an American Indian transracial adoptee, gives her a unique perspective on the history of Native Americans in contemporary culture. In addition to her scholarly book "Mixing Cultural Identities Through Transracial Adoption (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009) she has written numerous articles about American Indian history and assimilation policies, and is a highly sought-after speaker., both nationally and internationally. She has an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology and an M.A. in Creative Nonfiction, both from Colorado State University. She is also an affiliate in the Department of Anthropology and Geography at CSU.

Shannon Gibney was born in 1975, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was adopted by Jim and Sue Gibney about five months later, and grew up with her two (biological) brothers, Jon and Ben. Shannon has loved to read and to write as far back as she can remember. When she was in second grade, she started making “books” about her family’s camping trips, and later graduated to a series on three sibling detectives in fourth grade.When she was 15, her father gave her James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, a book that changed her life and made her see the possibilities of the written word. The novel took a long, difficult look at relations between Blacks and Whites, the poor and the rich, gay and straight people, and fused searing honesty with metaphorical beauty. After this experience, Shannon knew that she needed to read everything Baldwin had ever written, and also that she wanted to emulate his strategy of telling the most dangerous, and therefore liberating kind of truth, through writing. High school was a time for tremendous growth for Shannon, as she had the opportunity to attend Community High, a place that nurtured independence and creativity. At Carnegie Mellon University, Shannon majored in Creative Writing and Spanish, graduating with highest honors in 1997. She was awarded their Alumni Study/Travel Award, and used it to travel to Ghana to collect information for a short story collection on relationships between African Americans and continental Africans. At Indiana University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, Shannon honed her understanding of the basic elements of story-writing. She was in Bloomington from 1999 to 2002, and earned an M.A. in 20th Century African American Literature, as well as her M.F.A. while she was there. As Indiana Review editor, she conceived of the literary journal’s first “Writers of Color” special issue, and brought it to fruition, also in 2002. Shannon has called Minneapolis home since 2002. She moved there right after completing her graduate work at Indiana, and took a job at the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, the state’s oldest Black newspaper. A three-year stint as managing editor of this 75-year-old publication introduced Shannon to the vibrant, growing, and diverse Black community in the Twin Cities, and also gave her vital insight into the inner-workings of a weekly newspaper. When she left in 2005, Shannon had written well over 100 news and features stories for the paper. The Bush Artist Fellows Program took Shannon’s daily life in a new direction. In 2005, she was awarded a grant, which allowed her to quit her job at the Spokesman, and devote most of her time to her creative work. After completing her Bush fellowhip in summer 2007, Shannon joined the faculty in English at Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC) in the fall, and became Full-Time Unlimited (FTU) faculty there in 2009. She lives with her son Boisey, and daughter Marwein, in the Powderhorn neighborhood of South Minneapolis. Shannon’s Young Adult (YA) novel SEE NO COLOR was published by Carolrhoda Lab, a division of Lerner Publications, in November, 2015, and subsequently won a 2016 Minnesota Book Award in the category of Literature for Young Adults. She was also awarded a $25,000 2015 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers, administered by the Loft Literary Center. She used the funds to support work on a family memoir, tentatively titled Love Across the Middle Passage: Making an African/African American Family. Other publications this year include a short story in the Sky Blue Water anthology of children’s literature from Minnesota writers, the opening essay in the critically-acclaimed and popular A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota anthology, edited by Sun Yung Shin. The Star Tribune published an excerpt of Shannon’s essay “Fear of a Black Mother,” which you can read here. In 2017, look for Shannon’s short story “Salvation,” in Eric Smith’s new anthology of adoption-