The Good Word Podcast

Five-time Pearl Award-winning singer/songwriter, April Meservy, has been featured on over 100 albums and compilations released all over the world, as well as in film and commercial work.

April’s cover of “With or Without You” is currently being featured in the Short Performance routine of Canadian pair figure skaters, Eric Radford and Meagan Duhamel, in their bid this season for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Recently a Posi Award Finalist in the “Social Action and Justice” category in the 11th Annual Posi Music Awards, April performed her nominated original song at the awards ceremony held in Tampa, Florida. Her latest music video, “Truth Speak,” was also a 2016 Posi Award Finalist in the “Music Video” category and was featured at the festival.

I’ll Be Home For Christmas – April Meservy #LightTheWorld Video

Originally hailing from Reno, Nevada, April has brought her love for singing and songwriting to her performances in places as far away as China and as close as Salt Lake City, such as her invitation to sing in Salt Lake City’s Olympic Square during the 2002 Winter Olympics. She has performed alongside platinum-selling singer-songwriter Matt Nathanson, CAKE, Lindsey Stirling, David Archuleta, among other notable musicians across the country from Los Angeles to Boston.

April has incredible vocal diversity and performs different genres of music from jazz and blues to folk and pop. She is a multiple peal award winner, and now owns and operates her own record label Forêt d’Musique, (Jèrriais: “Forest of Music”) on which she released Somewhere Between Sunsets and on which she, and her small management team, continue to release new music. April is joining us as part of the Light the World Initiative.

 

For more information on April Meservy, click here to visit her website.

For more information on the #LightTheWorld Campaign click here.

Listen to April Meservy’s cover of With Or Without You as part of the Canadian Figure Skater performance as referenced in the podcast.

K.A. is the mother of two incredible boys and has been married to her high school sweetheart for nineteen years. Writing and making up stories is something she has enjoyed doing for as long as she can remember.

As a child, she spent summers borrowing books from the Book Mobile, and hiding under her bed with a bag of cookies and a flashlight to enjoy great literary adventures. Some of her all-time childhood favorite books are, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings. She has always been a huge fan of fantasy and science fiction.

As an adult, she spends her days chauffeuring her boys between work, art and music lessons, running a household, and reading and writing every chance she gets. She is here to talk about her first published novel, A Chosen life, which is part 1 in The Chosen Chronicles. She also has many short stories, unrelated to The Chosen Chronicles, that you can read on her blog that you can find through her website KA Parkinson.com

Treg A. Julander has been an attorney for 20 years.  After graduating from George Washington University with highest honors, he began his legal career with a large Washington, D.C. firm.  He went on to become a partner at Rutan & Tucker, LLP, a large Southern California law firm, where he specialized in writing appellate briefs.  Treg left law firm life in 2008 to establish and run the general counsel’s office for Advent Companies, Inc., a general contractor that builds affordable housing. He is now in private practice as Of Counsel at Ostergar Law Group P.C.

In addition to Until Murder Do Us Part, Treg is the author of Corporate America, a short story, which has been published in several journals.  He has also published two professional articles.  Treg podcasts abour rock music at www.RockTaleHour.com and blogs about California law at www.LegalMusing.com.

Orange County appellate lawyer and author, Treg Julander, recently released his debut legal thriller. Until Murder Do Us Part is about an attorney, Michael Kingston, at an elite Washington, D.C. law firm, who wakes up after a terrifying nightmare to find his hands around his wife’s throat, almost killing her. When she winds up dead a few nights later, suffocated in their bed, Mike claims that he killed his wife in his sleep. Until Murder Do Us Part (Parables Publishing 2014) is available in paperback and ebook (www.TregJulander.com).

Jason Pruett moved around as a child. He found comfort in picture books and he began to create his own. He entered picture book competitions in elementary school and started sending his work to publishers in high school.

After years of art school and drawing, Jason has started illustrating picture books for publishers. You can see his work in the upcoming Seek and Find: Book of Mormon Stories (Cedar Fort 2015) and A is for Abinadi (Cedar Fort 2014). Jason is also proud of the children’s comic book he illustrated, Jimmy Brass: 2nd Grade Detective (WE Comics 2012-2013).

Jason lives in the Los Angeles area and is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).

For more information on Jason Pruett, visit his website:

http://www.jasonpruett.com/books.html

Charlie Holmberg was born in Salt Lake City, Utah to two parents who sacrificed a great deal to give their very lazy daughter a good education. As a result, Charlie learned to hate uniforms, memorized all English prepositions in alphabetical order, and mastered the art of Reed-Kellogg diagramming a sentence at age seven. She entered several writing contests in her elementary years and never placed.

Being a nerd, Charlie started writing fan-fiction as a teenager in between episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She became a full-fledged band geek with mediocre talent in high school, where she met her husband. While she strove to win his attention by baking him cookies and throwing ramen noodles at his house, he didn’t actually ask her out until six years later. Charlie began taking writing seriously during her undergrad at Brigham Young University, where she majored in English and minored in editing. She finally won a few writing contests. She graduated with her BA in 2010 and got hitched three months later. Shortly afterwards, her darling husband dragged her to Moscow, Idaho, where he subsequently impregnated her.

In summer 2013, after collecting many rejection letters and making a quilt out of them, Charlie sold her ninth novel, The Paper Magician, and its sequel to 47North with the help of her wonderful agent, Marlene Stringer. She currently lives with her family in Utah. Someday she will own a dog.

Click here to buy The Paper Magician

Click here to buy The Glass Magician

Click here to buy The Master Magician

Click here to buy Followed by Frost

Ilima Todd was born and raised on the north shore of Oahu and currently resides in the Rocky Mountains. She never wanted to be a writer even though she loves books and reading. She earned a degree in physics instead. But the characters in her head refused to be ignored, and now she spends her time writing science fiction for teens. When she is not writing, Ilima loves to spend time with her husband and four children.

She is here to talk about her book that was a 2014 Whitney Award Finalist in the Young Adult Speculative Fiction, and best new author.

Click here to purchase Ilima Todd’s new book, Remake.

A.L. Sowards was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in Moses Lake, Washington. As a child, she wrote self-illustrated storybooks at her grandparent’s house and attended her first writer’s conference when she was in third grade.

She was a previous guest on The Good Word, back in our first year of production, almost two years ago now. She was nominated for a Whitney Award with the book she was promoting at that time and is nominated again this year for her book, Deadly Alliance. Welcome back. AL. Sowards.

To purchase a copy of Deadly Alliance click here.

Kimberley Griffiths Little was born in San Francisco, but now lives in New Mexico with her husband and three sons in a solar adobe home on the banks of the Rio Grande. Her award-winning writing has been praised as “fast-paced and dramatic,” with “characters painted in memorable detail” and “beautifully realized settings.” Kimberley adores anything old and musty with a secret story to tell and makes way too many cookies while writing. She’s stayed in the haunted tower room at Borthwick Castle in Scotland; held baby gators in the bayous of Louisiana, sailed the Seine in Paris; ridden a camel in Petra, Jordan; shopped the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul; and spent the night in an old Communist hotel in Bulgaria. Kimberley’s Awards include: Southwest Book Award, Whitney Award for Best Youth Novel in 2010, Bank Street College Best Books of 2011 & 2014, Crystal Kite Finalist, and New Mexico Book Award Finalist. She has been nominated again as a Whitney Award Finalist for her book Forbidden, printed by Harper Collins. Welcome Kimberly Griffiths Little to The Good Word.

To purchase a copy of Forbidden, click here.

Amy Harmon is a USA Today and New York Times Bestselling author. Amy knew at an early age that writing was something she wanted to do, and she divided her time between writing songs and stories as she grew. Having grown up in the middle of wheat fields without a television, with only her books and her siblings to entertain her, she developed a strong sense of what made a good story. Her books are now being published in several countries, truly a dream come true for a little country girl from Levan, Utah.

Amy Harmon has written several novels – the USA Today Bestsellers, Making Faces and Running Barefoot, as well as Infinity + One, Slow Dance in Purgatory, Prom Night in Purgatory, and the New York Times Bestseller, A Different Blue. Her newest release, The Law of Moses, is now available and is a Whitney Award finalist. For updates on upcoming book releases, author posts and more, join Amy at www.authoramyharmon.com.

Award-winning author Carla Kelly is a veteran of the New York and international publishing world. Carla is best known for her Regency Romances, those novels of manner and wit, made popular more than two centuries ago by Jane Austen. Carla has made certain types of Regencies her own, particularly novels and stories about people who are not lords and ladies. Many of them are hard-working and hard-fighting members of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines in the Channel Fleet, and the British Army on the Spanish Peninsula.

For those that listened to our last interview, you will have learned that readers and reviewers enjoy Carla’s no-nonsense, no-frills writing, which she can trace directly to her high school training in journalism. Her stories are noted for historical accuracy and wry humor, featuring ordinary people who do extraordinary things, when called upon.

In her free time, Carla likes to flop on her $35 couch and read crime fiction, and what history interests her at the time. She is married to her husband, Martin, a retired professor of academic theatre. The Kellys have five children and grandchildren.

To purchase Carla Kelly’s Whitney Award winning book, Softly Falling, click here.