A World Without Books

The author, Michael H. Blaine spent a career at the Clinton Correctional Facility. Having been an Officer, Sergeant, and Lieutenant, his story reveals the changes he observed and what he experienced. Refusing to compromise his principles and sickened by the downward spiral that Clinton was experiencing, he retired months before the first successful escape at Dannemora on June 6, 2015.

Ruby McConnell is a registered geologist who writes about nature, art, and culture with a particular emphasis on the intersection of the environment and human experience. A recipient of numerous honors, including the Literary Arts Oregon Literary Fellowship, she has written extensively about the Pacific Northwest and the environment.

Laya V Smith is an author, audiobook narrator and academic curriculum creator. Following a particularly rebellious youth, she graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in history. She lives in Salt Lake Cory, Utah with her husband, two children and one beefy Labrador.

Michael Lee Nirenberg is a filmmaker and writer. He has directed several music videos and the award-winning documentary Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story. Mr. Nirenberg has contributed to national magazines and websites. Since 2006, he has worked as a scenic artist on many movies and television shows. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and two children.

Audrey Keown set Murder at Hotel 1911 (Crooked Lane 2020) in Chattanooga, Tennessee where she began writing as a journalist. Her fiction features themes of redemption and connection to the past. Like her protagonist, she has battled anxiety and hopes that writing about it will help lift the stigma.

Maggie Kast is the author of The Crack Between the Worlds: a dancer’s memoir of loss, faith and family (Wipf and Stock, 2009) and a novel, A Free, Unsullied Land (Fomite Press, 2015). Side by Side but Never Face to Face, a novella plus stories, was published by Orison Press in June 2020.

Mike Puican has published poems in Poetry, Bloomsbury Review, Crab Orchard Review, and New England Review, among other journals. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Warren Wilson College. He leads poetry workshops at St. Leonard’s House for formerly incarcerated men and at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago.

MW Larson is an author, editor, and translator based in Tokyo. His short stories and essays have appeared in Catapult, Colorado Review, Portland Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ninth Letter, and Witness. In 2013, he was awarded a Fulbright grant to research his first book, When the Waves Came.

Lynn Downey is a native Californian, and a western historian and writer. She has many books and journal articles under her belt, and her next two books will be about the original American vacation: dude ranching. Lynn lives in California's wine country north of San Francisco.

Sandell Morse is the prize-winning author of the memoir, The Spiral Shell, A French Village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II. Morse’s nonfiction has been noted in The Best American Essays series and published in Creative Nonfiction and Ploughshares, and the New England Review among others.