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More authors coming soon!
Grisel Y. Acosta
Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is a full professor at the City University of New York-BCC. Their poetry collection, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, was a 2020 finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (Get Fresh Books, 2021). Her latest book, Wild, is forthcoming in 2026 from FlowerSong Press. She is the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies Journal, and a Poetry Editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ). Select work is in Poetry Magazine; Poem-A-Day; The Baffler; Best American Poetry; Split This Rock; Paterson Review; Acentos Review; Inkwell Journal; and The Hopkins Review. They are a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet, a Macondo Fellow, and a VONA Fellow. Dr. Acosta was recently appointed to the CUNY Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Ph.D. program faculty.
Marcia Bradley
Marcia Bradley moved from LA to earn her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College in 2017 after attending Antioch University. She received a Bronx Council on the Arts/New York City BRIO Fiction Award, was a Pushcart nominee in 2022, and her writing has appeared in The Chicago Review of Books and The Capital Gazette, among other publications. She received scholarships to Ragdale, Community of Writers, and Eckerd College Writers’ residencies. A proud Chicagoan and breast cancer survivor, Marcia teaches at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, North Central College in Illinois, and was a 2025 guest teacher for the Drexel University MFA program. She lives in the Bronx. Her debut novel, The Home for Wayward Girls, was published by HarperCollins in 2023.
Patricia Brody
My Blazing World is PATRICIA BRODY’s second collection from Salmon Poetry. Her other books are American Desire (New Women’s Voices Award, Finishing Line, 2009) and Dangerous To Know (Salmon, 2013). Brody has an MSW (Columbia) and an MA of English Lit and Poetry (City College) where her mentors included Marilyn Hacker and Marie Ponsot. She taught English and American Literature at Boricua College in Washington Heights, and practiced as a psychotherapist for 30 years in New York City.
Brody resides on the East coast now, but lived and worked in the Bay Area way before tech, where she was an editor for Guitar Player magazine. She wrote the “first-woman-on-the-cover-story,” about guitarist-blues singer, and 2023 GRAMMY award winner, Bonnie Raitt.
Patricia now teaches an amazing group of women poets on Zoom – Seeking Your Voice: Women Writing Poetry & Memoir – which originated at Barnard College Center for Research on Women. She lives with her artist- photographer husband Tom Kostro and three vocal felines, 20 miles north of NYC. The poet’s three grown children will visit tomorrow.
Two sonnets in the new book, each called “Blue Hour,” won recent prizes from UK competitions. Brody’s poems and photographs have appeared in many print & online journals, and anthologies from Artemis , Barrow Street , BigCityLit , Bright Hills: 25 Years , Crosswinds , Glint , The Thomas Hardy Review , Levure Litteraire , Orbis , Raintown Review , Fire and Rain: Eco- Poetry of California , Junctures (NZ), Mom Egg Review , Moria , Paris Review , Western Humanities Review and others.
Brody resides on the East coast now, but lived and worked in the Bay Area way before tech, where she was an editor for Guitar Player magazine. She wrote the “first-woman-on-the-cover-story,” about guitarist-blues singer, and 2023 GRAMMY award winner, Bonnie Raitt.
Patricia now teaches an amazing group of women poets on Zoom – Seeking Your Voice: Women Writing Poetry & Memoir – which originated at Barnard College Center for Research on Women. She lives with her artist- photographer husband Tom Kostro and three vocal felines, 20 miles north of NYC. The poet’s three grown children will visit tomorrow.
Two sonnets in the new book, each called “Blue Hour,” won recent prizes from UK competitions. Brody’s poems and photographs have appeared in many print & online journals, and anthologies from Artemis , Barrow Street , BigCityLit , Bright Hills: 25 Years , Crosswinds , Glint , The Thomas Hardy Review , Levure Litteraire , Orbis , Raintown Review , Fire and Rain: Eco- Poetry of California , Junctures (NZ), Mom Egg Review , Moria , Paris Review , Western Humanities Review and others.
David Browne
David Browne is a senior writer at Rolling Stone, where he has written cover stories on the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Robin Williams and many more. He is the author of eight books, including "Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital," and biographies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Grateful Dead, Sonic Youth and Jeff and Tim Buckley. He was previously the music critic at Entertainment Weekly. Browne was awarded a National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the LA Press Club for his reporting in Rolling Stone on the 2023 attack on the music festival in Israel.
Photo credit - Maeve Browne.
Photo credit - Maeve Browne.
Lee Carey
Lee is from Glasgow, Scotland, and moved to Rye in 2002. Many of you will know her as Lee Sandford, from her outdoor fitness classes at Rye Town Park and the Health and Fitness column she wrote for the Rye Record for fifteen years. As a Chartered Accountant in her twenties, she expressed a desire to write a novel, that has only taken thirty years to fulfill!
Publishing The Glass Pass has meant that 2025 has been ridiculously hard work, but very gratifying. She has been touched at how proud and supportive family and friends have been, in making her publishing dream come true.
Publishing The Glass Pass has meant that 2025 has been ridiculously hard work, but very gratifying. She has been touched at how proud and supportive family and friends have been, in making her publishing dream come true.
Margot Clark-Junkins
Margot Clark-Junkins is a founder of the literary festival. She attended Mount Holyoke College and received a MA in Design & Curatorial Studies from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. In 2024, she published “Following the Front: The Dispatches of WWII Correspondent Sidney A. Olson” (Bloomsbury). She writes a Substack column by the same name and is currently at work on a book of short stories.
Karen Dukess
Karen Dukess is the author of Welcome to Murder Week, which was an instant USAToday bestseller, and The Last Book Party, which was an IndieNext and Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers pick. She lives in Pelham, New York, and on Cape Cod, where she hosts the Castle Hill Author Talks for Truro Center for the Arts.
Avery Carpenter Forrey
Avery Carpenter Forrey is the author of Social Engagement, which was a GMA Buzz Pick and featured by Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Buzzfeed, and other publications. As Managing Editor at theSkimm, she cowrote the #1 New York Times bestseller How to Skimm Your Life. Her writing has also appeared in The Cut, GQ, and Lit Hub. She holds an MFA in fiction from NYU and lives in Connecticut with her husband and daughter.
Jacqueline Friedland
Jacqueline Friedland is the USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of both historical and contemporary women’s fiction. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and NYU Law School, she practiced as a commercial litigator for as long as she could stand it. She then returned to school to earn her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has been writing ever since.
Jackie’s books have been awarded the 2020 and 2021 gold medals in fiction from Readers’ Favorite. Her novels have also been named the 2021 Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of the Year, the SheReads Best Book Club Pick of 2021, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Star finalist for 2022. She regularly reviews fiction for trade publications and appears at schools and other locations as a guest lecturer. Her fifth novel, Counting Backwards, was released by Harper Muse in March 2025.
Jackie lives in Westchester, New York with her husband, four children, and two dogs.
Jackie’s books have been awarded the 2020 and 2021 gold medals in fiction from Readers’ Favorite. Her novels have also been named the 2021 Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of the Year, the SheReads Best Book Club Pick of 2021, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Star finalist for 2022. She regularly reviews fiction for trade publications and appears at schools and other locations as a guest lecturer. Her fifth novel, Counting Backwards, was released by Harper Muse in March 2025.
Jackie lives in Westchester, New York with her husband, four children, and two dogs.
Paula Fung
Paula Fung lives in Rye, NY, along with her husband, and three daughters. She produces Writes & Bites in Rye, a reading salon in her hometown. She also produces a show on public access television, Rye Views, and co-hosts a podcast; Cook and the Comic. Her personal essays are on the things she knows, which are; cooking, sailing, and family life. Her work has been published at the blog Sailing Anarchy and Read 650; “The Kids are Alright”, “Holidays”, “ On Mothers”, and “Jew-ish. Paula is one of the directors of the Literary Festival.
Caren Osten Gerszberg
Caren Osten Gerszberg is a writer, certified positive psychology life coach, meditation teacher, and TedX speaker. For over two decades, she’s been contributing to The New York Times, Psychology Today, Travel & Leisure, and others, covering health, wellbeing, travel and parenting.
Currently working on a memoir, Caren is also the co-editor, and a contributor to, Drinking Diaries: Women Serve their Stories Straight Up.
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Caren holds an MA from New York University, where she is a former professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Based in Larchmont, NY, when she’s not writing, coaching or teaching, Caren is likely hiking, doing yoga, cooking, playing pickleball, and spending time with her husband, dog, and three adult kids.
Currently working on a memoir, Caren is also the co-editor, and a contributor to, Drinking Diaries: Women Serve their Stories Straight Up.
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Caren holds an MA from New York University, where she is a former professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Based in Larchmont, NY, when she’s not writing, coaching or teaching, Caren is likely hiking, doing yoga, cooking, playing pickleball, and spending time with her husband, dog, and three adult kids.
Andrea Atkins Hessekiel
Andrea Atkins Hessekiel is an editor at the Rye Record. She is a journalist working in both the newspaper and magazine industries, has freelanced for more than 30 years for national print and digital publications. Hundreds of her articles and essays have appeared under the byline Andrea Atkins in O, The Oprah Magazine; AARP, The Magazine; The Washington Post, Better Homes & Gardens, Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, NextAvenue.com and EverydayHealth.com to name just a few. Over the last decade, Andrea has taught personal essay writing to adults at the Scarsdale Adult School and coached hundreds of high school students on their college essays through her company My College Essay Coach.
Barbara Josselsohn
Barbara Josselsohn is a best-selling author of nine historical and contemporary novels. Her newest book is The Secret Orphanage (Bookouture, 2025), a multigenerational story about an American schoolteacher who becomes embroiled in the French Resistance and a present-day librarian intent on discovering her grandfather’s wartime secrets. Barbara teaches novel and memoir writing at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, Westport Writers Workshop, and Scarsdale Library, and has also published hundreds of articles and essays in major and regional publications about family, home and relationships. A member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, she helped found and now coordinates the Scarsdale Library Writers Center, which promotes and supports local writers. Other than writing, her biggest passion is her family: her husband, her three adult kids, and her rescue pup, a mini-schnauzer named Albie. She is currently at work on a new historical novel, with a touch of magical realism, that is scheduled for release in Summer, 2026.
Betsy Lerner
Betsy Lerner is the author of the recently released novel, Shred Sisters (Grove Press, October 2024). She is also the author The Bridge Ladies, The Forest for the Trees and Food and Loathing. With Temple Grandin, she is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions. She received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry where she was selected as one of PEN’s Emerging Writers. She also received the Tony Godwin Publishing Prize for Editors. After working as an editor for 15 years, she became an agent and is currently a partner with Dunow, Carlson and Lerner Literary Agency.
Nicole Graev Lipson
Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has been shortlisted several times for The Best American Essays. You can find her at www.nicolegraevlipson.com.
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