Authors

JL Morin

JL Morin grew up in inner-city Detroit. She proffered moral support while her parents sacrificed all to a failed system. Wondering what the Japanese were doing right, she decamped to Tokyo. Her debut Japan novel, Sazzae, won an eLit Gold Medal, and a Living Now Book Award. Her second novel, Travelling Light, was a USA Best Book Awards finalist, and her third, Trading Dreams, became ‘Occupy’s first bestselling novel’. Her climate fiction novel, Nature’s Confession, won first place in the Dante Rossetti Book Awards; a Readers’ Favorite Book Award; a LitPick 5-Star Review Award; and an excerpt received an Honorable Mention in the Eco-Fiction Story Contest, published in the Winds of Change anthology of eco-fiction. Her second cli-fi novel, Loveoid, is a Cygnus Sci-fi 1st place winner, among others.

Her cli-fi novels are on course syllabi at many universities. Ivy League professors have facilitated discussions with JL Morin’s writing, and it is discussed in textbooks, such as Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach, by Andrew Milner, ‎and J. R. Burgmann, 2020, published by Oxford University Press.

Her most recent work, Tuck-a-tuck Dragon, is a diverse rhyming children’s book illustrated by children throughout their childhood from the ages of 2–21. Translated into French and Greek, it is an Indie Book Award Finalist, and was longlisted by the Chanticleer Little Peeps Book Awards.

JL Morin’s writing draws on a breadth of experience. She traded derivatives in New York while studying nights for her MBA at New York University’s Stern School of Business; worked for the Federal Reserve Bank posted to the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center; presented the news as a TV broadcaster; and she is adjunct faculty at Boston University. Morin’s fiction has appeared in The Harvard Advocate and Harvard Yisei, and her articles and translations in The Huffington Post, Library Journal, The Detroit News, European Daily, Livonia Observer Eccentric Newspapers, The Harvard Crimson, and Agence France Presse while she worked in their Middle East Headquarters.

Charles Degelman

Charles Degelman, is an award-winning author, performer, and producer living in Los Angeles. His recent novel, A Bowl Full of Nails, set in the counterculture of the 1970s, collected a Bronze Medal from the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Awards and was a finalist in the Bellwether Competition, sponsored by Barbara Kingsolver. His novel Gates of Eden, set during the anti-war movement of the 1960s, won an Independent Publishers book award, and his first screenplay, “FIFTY-SECOND STREET”, garnered an award from the Diane Thomas Competition, sponsored by UCLA and Dreamworks. His first novel, A Bowl Full of Nails, was a finalist in the Bellwether Competition, sponsored by Barbara Kingsolver. He is on the Faculty of California State University where he teaches writing in the Television, Film, and Media Studies/Communications Studies program.

Sean Elder

Sean Elder is a freelance writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York; Salisbury, CT; and Palo Alto, CA. His short story ‘The Vale of Cashmere’ was first published in Harvard Square Edition’s anthology Voice from the Planet. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Details, Vogue, Elle, New York, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, Premiere, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Redbook, Glamour and numerous other publications. He was also an editor at a few of those places and still works on print magazines and digital publications. A piece he wrote for O: The Oprah Magazine about being a stay-at-home dad was included in a best-of O collection entitled Live Your Best Life that was published in 2005.

Sean Elder wrote a media column for Salon and before that reviewed web sites for the New Yorker (“Only Connect”). His essay “The Lock Box” was included in a collection of men’s writing, The Bastard on the Couch (Morrow, 2004), and was later reprinted on three continents. He co-authored a book with former Marine Captain Josh Rushing of Control Room fame, entitled Mission Al Jazeera, which was published by Palgrave in 2007. He also works as a book doctor and edited Making the Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat by Dr. David Dosa (Hyperion, 2010), a New York Times bestseller. He has taught writing at Eugene Lang College, part of Manhattan’s New School University, and is am now working on another non-fiction book, with Amos Kamil: Great Is the Truth: The Horace Mann Sex Scandal and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School. He blogs for the boomer website Purple Clover, and a short film based on his short story “Stain Removal” was filmed by director Mark Russell in 2013.

Erika Raskin

Erika Raskin’s debut novel, Close (Harvard Square Editions) is a gripping story about a modern family that a TV therapist tries to help. Her second novel, Best Intentions, is being published by St. Martin’s Press (August 15, 2017). The daughter of a novelist and human rights activist, she grew up in Washington, D.C. Her family lived in an old brick row house that was a hub of the anti-war and women’s movement. There was an endless soundtrack of Motown, classical music and politics. She’s been writing off and on since elementary school. (She still remembers  a short story she wrote in fourth grade that began: “Drip, drip, drip the faucet was leaking again. Or was it the rain?”)

Her fiction has been recognized by the Reynolds Price competition, Glimmertrain, and the Virginia Commission on the Arts. She’s been a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her essays have appeared in print and on public radio. Her husband has been her boyfriend since she was 18. They have three children, two sons-in-law and many siblings, nieces and nephews. When they all get together they turn touch football, card games and ping-pong into blood sports.

Visit Erika’s website at www.erikaraskin.net – Author Twitter @ErikaRaskin

Yang Huang

Yang Huang grew up in Jiangsu, China and came to the US to study computer science. While working as an engineer, she studied literature and pursued writing, her passion since childhood. Her debut novel Living Treasures (Harvard Square Editions) is a Nautilus Award winner, a Living Now Book Award medalist, a Pen/Bellwether Prize finalist and a Top Ten Historical Novel of 2014 at Foreword Reviews. Yang’s second novel is a Juniper Prize Winner and was published by University of Massachusetts Press.

Michael Ferro

Born and bred in Detroit, Michael A. Ferro holds a degree in creative writing from Michigan State University. He has received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for their New Writers Award and won the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction in 2008. TITLE 13 (Harvard Square Editions) is his debut novel. Michael’s fiction and essays have been featured in numerous online and print publications. Michael has lived, worked, and written throughout the Midwest, currently as a Sportswriter and a Features Writer for CBS Detroit. In 2014, Michael became a national music and sports columnist for AXS. He currently resides in rural Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Additional information and writing can be found at: www.michaelaferro.com and @MichaelFerro

Stu Krieger

Among his more than 25 produced credits, Stu Krieger wrote the animated classic The Land Before Time for producers Steven Spielberg & George Lucas. The 2017 Riverside International Film Festival is presenting Stu Krieger with its Lifetime Achievement Award in Screenwriting at their opening night gala on April 21, 2017. Stu Krieger’s first novel, That One Cigarette, a story of ordinary people making extraordinary ripples in the ocean of life, will be published by Harvard Square Editions in the fall of 2017.

Stu Krieger is a professor of screen and television writing in the University of California Riverside’s Department of Theatre, Film & Digital Production and in the Creative Writing for the Performing Arts MFA Program at UCR. Each fall, he also teaches the Producing the Screenplay class at USC’s Peter Stark MFA Producing Program.

He has been a story editor and writer on Spielberg’s Amazing Stories and the supervising producer on the ABC Television series Jack’s Place. Krieger co-wrote the Emmy award winning mini-series A Year in the Life and was nominated for a Humanitas Prize for co-writing the Disney Channel original movie, Going to the Mat. He also wrote ten original movies for the Disney Channel, including Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century and its two sequels, Tru Confessions, Smart House, Phantom of the Megaplex, and Cow Belles. He served as the head writer and story editor of the animated preschool series Toot & Puddle on Nickelodeon in 2008-2009.

His first full-length play, Chasing Smoke, debuted in a staged reading at Garry Marshall’s Falcon Theatre in Burbank in July 2014. His short film script Bad Timing was produced by the UCR Department of Theatre, Film & Digital Production in March, 2016. He is an Executive Producer of The Binding, a 2016 feature film written and directed by his son, Gus Krieger and also served as an Executive Producer of My Name is Myeisha, Gus’s second feature film which Gus co-wrote with UCR TFDP Professor Rickerby Hinds. Myeisha was shot entirely on location in Riverside in October 2016.

Watch Stu Krieger’s TEDx Talk, “Choose Joy.”

Get Stu Krieger’s Book

Rajani Kanth

Rajani Kanth, author, has held affiliations with some of the most prestigious universities in the world. He has also served as an advisor to the United Nations. He is the author/editor of several academic works in political economy and culture-critique, is a novelist and poet, and has also scribed several screenplays. He is, presently a visiting fellow at Harvard University, and permanent trustee of the World Peace Congress.

He takes a keen interest in human wellbeing, women’s issues, peace, and environmental sustainability. His most current academic work, in belles-lettres format, is The Post-Human Society. He has also published a book of poetry and a self-help work on nutrition and health. Hailing from India, he is a US citizen: and lives, for the most part, in solitary unconfinement in the scenic, if stark, foothills of the Wasatch Front in Utah.

Ruben Varda

Ruben Varda’s humorous story ‘Consultation’ about a celestial chemistry class was first published in the HSE anthology Voice from the Planet, later reprinted in Cambridge Book Review, and was lauded by British reviewer The Truth about Books, which named Planet ‘Book of the Month’.

Ruben was born in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia. He received his PhD in physics from the Moscow Lomonosov University and then taught and conducted research in Armenia at Yerevan University and the Academy of Sciences.

In 1992, he moved to Denmark and in 1996 was posted by the Danish Ministry of Research in Brussels. Since then he has lived in the capital of Europe, where he manages R&D projects involving EU-Russian cooperation in nanoelectronics.

In 2005-2006 he wrote in Russian and later published in Moscow his first fantasy novel “The Girl with a Lute”. Ruben is now writing his second novel.

Diane Haithman

Diane Haithman has been an Arts Staff Writer for the Los Angeles Times and is a major contributor to Nikki Finke’s infamous Deadline Hollywood Daily industry website. She was the LA Times’ Writer-in-Residence at the Annenberg School of Journalism, University of Southern California, and is currently on the Membership Committee of PEN USA. An excerpt of her forthcoming novel was first published in HSE’s Voice from the Planet.

Prior to joining the LA Times, Diane was based in Los Angeles as the West Coast Bureau Chief, associate film critic and Hollywood columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Formerly in Detroit, Diane covered arts and entertainment and served as the paper’s dance critic. She has been a Critic Fellow at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s New Playwrights Conference and has also written for Art News, Opera News and Ad Week magazines.

Diane is an honors graduate of the University of Michigan’s Honors College with a joint degree in English and Psychology (senior thesis: “The Generation of Humor as a Function of Intelligence”). At Michigan, she won prestigious Hopwood Awards in playwriting and short fiction.  She is co-author of the book The Elder Wisdom Circle Guide for a Meaningful Life (Penguin/Plume 2007). An excerpt from her novel Dark Lady of Hollywood was a finalist in the prestigious William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition (novel-in-progress category) in 2003.

Diane lives in Studio City, California with husband Alan Feldstein and Heidi the German shepherd, an aspiring dog actress.

Matthew Schultz

Matthew Schultz was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the Director of the Writing Center at Vassar College, where he also teaches courses in literary modernism, composition and rhetoric, and writing pedagogy. He is the author of Haunted Historiographies: The Rhetoric of Ideology in Postcolonial Irish Fiction and holds a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from John Carroll University and a Ph.D. in modern Irish literature from Saint Louis University.

Kunyang He

Kunyang He is a Chinese author writing in English. He has written two independent films and one documentary featuring the new generation of Chinese immigrants and international students in the States. He is also a translator and an English teacher, who takes teaching very seriously. The College of Corn is his first novel.