Authors

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a poet, the editor of The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction, and a contributor to A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Irish Times, and Literary Hub. She is also the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, which seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities. In You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions), translated by Fady Joudah, the ordinary and profound moments of life under Israeli occupation include art, garlic, taxis, sleepy soldiers at checkpoints, the smell of trash on a winter street, lovers who don’t return, making beds, cleaning up vomit, and reading recipes. Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strange moments. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling.” You Can Be the Last Leaf offers a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority.

Chantel Acevedo is the author of adult novels, including The Distant Marvels, a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the middle-grade novel Muse Squad: The Cassandra Curse. She was born in Miami to Cuban parents. In the middle-grade mystery The Curse on Spectacle Key (Balzer + Bray), Frank Fernandez never stays in one place for long. His parents renovate unusual buildings and turn them into homes, so the family moves a lot – which makes it hard for bookish Frank to make friends. So when his parents announce they’re moving to Florida’s Spectacle Key to live in a lighthouse, and for good, he’s thrilled. But the place isn’t the perfect forever home they’d imagined. The lighthouse is falling apart, and there are knocks on the door and mysterious sighs and sniffles, but no one is ever there. There’s even a creepy doll that seems to move on its own. Is Spectacle Key haunted? Then Frank meets a girl in old-fashioned clothes. She has no memory of who she is. But she does know that the island is under a curse – and she needs Frank’s help to figure out how to lift it.

Elliot Ackerman is the author of several novels, including Red Dress in Black and White. His writing often appears in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and his stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Writing. He is both a former White House fellow and a Marine who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. Ackerman left the military 10 years before the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August 2021, but found himself pulled back into the conflict. Afghan nationals who had worked closely with the American military and intelligence communities now faced brutal reprisal, and Ackerman joined an effort by a group of journalists and other veterans to arrange flights and secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan (Penguin Press) documents the weight of 20 years of war bearing on a single week, the week the war ended. It is a play in five acts, beginning with the initial invasion after 9/11 and ending in a tragic fifth act, a prelude to Afghanistan’s dark future.

Rafael Agustin was a writer on the award-winning CW show Jane the Virgin. He is a Sundance fellow for his TV family comedy Illegal, based on his life as a formerly undocumented American. Agustin co-created and co-starred in the national touring and award-winning autobiographical comedy N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, which received acclaim from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Denver Post, and won awards for its advancement of social justice in the arts. In Illegally Yours: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing), Agustin writes about having his world turned upside down when he tried to get his driver’s license during his junior year of high school. His Ecuadorian parents were then forced to reveal his immigration status. The family bonded together to navigate Rafa’s school life, his parents’ work lives (doctors in their home country, they were reduced to working menial jobs in the U.S.) – and their shared secret life as undocumented Americans. An alternatingly hilarious and touching exploration of belonging and identity, Illegally Yours asks a simple question: What does it mean to be American?

Meenakshi Narula Ahamed was born in Calcutta (Kolkata), India. She’s enjoyed a varied career working as a development consultant, journalist, and the foreign correspondent for New Delhi Television (NDTV), based in London. Since returning to the U.S. in 1996, her op-eds and articles have been published in The Asian Age, Seminar, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She divides her time between the U.S. and India. In 1951, President Truman told Ambassador Chester Bowles that he “thought India was pretty jammed with poor people and cows wandering around the streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges, but I did not realize that anybody thought it was important.” It has been a long journey. Following Indian independence, India and the U.S. were caught in a dysfunctional cycle of resentment and mistrust for decades. In A Matter of Trust: India U.S. Relations from Truman to Trump (HarperCollins India), Ahamed draws on a trove of presidential papers, newly declassified documents, memoirs, and interviews to reveal the prejudices, insecurities, and political imperatives that so often have cast a shadow over this vital relationship.

Meagan Albright is a Youth Services Librarian III at NSU Alvin Sherman Library with 20+ years experience in bookstores and libraries. She’s served on local and national committees championing youth literacy, including the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC) Batchelder Award Selection Committee, Notable Children’s Book Committee, Theodor Seuss Geisel Award Selection Committee, and Intellectual Freedom Committee, among others. Meagan has written for the ALSC blog and published in peer-reviewed journals including “Children & Libraries” and “Public Libraries”, where her article on library service to the LGBTQ community received “Public Libraries” Feature Article Award. She’s a dreamer and a doer dedicated to literacy and libraries.

B. B. Alston lives in Lexington, South Carolina. His debut novel, Amari and the Night Brothers, is a New York Times and Indie bestseller. In Amari and the Great Game (Balzer + Bray), the second in the Supernatural Investigations trilogy, Amari Peters is sure that her first summer as a junior agent for the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs will be a breeze. After all, she recently found her missing brother and saved the entire supernatural world. But there’s a fearsome new anti-magician agenda, fierce junior agent rivalries, and her brother Quinton’s curse is steadily worsening. Amari’s plate is full! So when the secretive League of Magicians offers her a chance to be its new leader, she declines; she’s got enough to worry about. But her refusal means someone else steps forward – and it’s a magician with dangerous plans for the League.

CARELIA ALVARADO, founder of The Online Bridge, is a luminary in digital marketing and artificial intelligence, with a robust academic background in advertising and specializations in digital Infoproducts and marketing. Her career spans corporate and consultancy work, emphasizing the Latin American and Hispanic markets in the U.S. The Online Bridge stands out for its AI-driven marketing strategies, and making complex technologies accessible to businesses and entrepreneurs. Alvarado’s practical education approach has empowered hundreds, earning her a 2023 BizHacker Award for her innovative and comprehensive market insights. As a mother and technology enthusiast, she balances her career with a rich family life, and looks forward to launching an AI program for digital marketing and writing a book in Spanish, aiming to empower Latino professionals with AI-centric, human-focused marketing strategies.

Jonathan Ames is the author of the novels I Pass Like Night, The Extra Man, and Wake Up, Sir!, as well as the nonfiction books The Double Life Is Twice as Good: Essays and Fiction, What’s Not to Love?, My Less Than Secret Life, I Love You More Than You Know, and most recently, You Were Never Really Here (adapted into the film starring Joaquin Phoenix). He’s the creator of two TV series, Blunt Talk and Bored to Death, and fought two amateur boxing matches as “The Herring Wonder.” Happy Doll, the title character of A Man Named Doll: A Novel (Mulholland Books), is a charming if occasionally inexpert private detective living beneath the Hollywood sign. A veteran of both the Navy and LAPD, Doll supplements his meager income as a P.I. by working at a local Thai spa that offers its clients “special services.” Armed with his 16-inch steel telescopic baton and biting dry humor, he protects the women who work there from clients who don’t understand the word “no.” But he’s out of his depth with one violent patron – and then an old friend from his days as a cop shows up at his door with a bullet in his gut.

Deb Aoki is the creator of Mangasplaining and the comic strip Bento Box, which appears in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. She works as a freelance writer, artist, illustrator, and consultant, providing content to Sony, eBay, Google for Education, PayPal, and many others. As a writer, Aoki crafts articles and reviews about manga and independent comics for Publishers Weekly, Anime News Network, Graphic Novels Reporter, Honolulu Advertiser, and Honolulu Weekly. She will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation between Helen McCarthy, Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (Stone Bridge Press), and Alex Dudok de Wit, translator of Miyazaki’s manga classic, Shuna’s Journey (First Second).