featured authors page one

Lisa Scottoline spent many hours as a child in her local library and her love for reading was encouraged by the librarians she was lucky enough to meet along the way. A true believer in the importance of promoting reading, Lisa is a strong advocate and dedicated fan of libraries and librarians. In her small way, Lisa tries to give back to a system which has given so much too so many, by participating in library events across the country. She has been to several library conferences and has visited libraries from coast to coast. A regular at the Philadelphia Free Library, Lisa participated in the "Visiting Author" series at the Des Moines Public Library, was a keynote speaker at the New Jersey Library Association Conference and was a banquet speaker for the Oregon/Washington Library Association Conference. For more on Lisa Scottoline, click HERE
	Denise Wiles Adams is able to research old gardens and landscapes by digging through the letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, household records, and diaries of the past. She has distilled hundreds of antique nursery catalogs into a unique survey that creates a database of more than 25,000 plants — an invaluable, scientific, yet practical reference on American heirloom ornamental plants that the professional designer and home gardener alike will find indispensable. Ms. Adams lives what she preaches in her home — originally a mid-19th century tavern in Buckingham County, Va. With her family and their 10 cats, she keeps gardens with an emphasis on heirloom plant species and cultivars.
	Michelangelo Altiere, a pen name used by Michael London to honor his mother and grandmother, is the author of Dearest, a unique collection of letters and ephemera that tell the story of a romance set along the Ohio River in the late 1800’s. Using small boxes with faded ribbons and a dried rose to hold a collection of love letters, Altiere enables his reader to unfold the story as they read each letter. Dearest is the first in a planned series of “experience novels.”
	Laura Treacy Bentley is from Huntington, West Virginia. Her work has been published in Ireland and the United States in literary journals such as The New York Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review, Antietam Review, and in numerous anthologies. She received a Fellowship Award for Literature in 1994 from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts. Her poem, "Drinking Coffee at the Central City Cafe" was featured on A Prairie Home Companion website and in March 2003, she has read her poetry with Ray Bradbury at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA.
	Jon Carloftis was born and raised in Kentucky on the banks of the Rockcastle River where his parents operated a popular tourist attraction. Carloftis studied horticulture, landscape architecture and art history at the University of Kentucky. After moving to New York City, he started designing rooftop gardens, balconies and courtyards for art collectors where the beauty of his work spread to others and his business blossomed. He is a contributing editor to Garden Design magazine and a regional writer for Country Gardens.
	Shutta Crum is an author, librarian, storyteller, teacher, wife, mother, grandmother, and someone who makes quilts. Crum was a librarian for almost 25 years at the Ann Arbor (MI) District Library. In 2002 she won the Michigan Library Association Children's Services Award of Merit as youth librarian of the year. Her first book was titled Who Took My Hairy Toe? and her latest book is A Family for Old Mill Farm. She says the fun part of writing is taking traditional rhythms and using them in a different way to create something totally new. She is sure that without the deep love she had for her other career as a children's librarian, she would not have become a children’s author.
	Debbie Dadey grew up along the Ohio River, boating and skiing in the Henderson Boat and Ski Show. In fact, she was the top person on the five and seven person pyramid! She is now the author and co-author of over 140 children's books, including The Worst Name in Third Grade, The Swamp Monster in Third Grade, Whistler's Hollow (set in Kentucky in the 1920’s), and The Adventures of The Bailey School Kids series. Dadey specializes in high-interest books for reluctant readers. She currently resides in Furlong, PA, with her husband, three children, and three dogs.
	Jack Dickinson is a West Virginia native and is a 1966 graduate of Marshall University. A retired IBM systems engineer, Jack is currently employed by Marshall University as the bibliographer of the Rosanna Blake Confederate Collection. This collection has been ranked among the top five Southern and Confederate history collections in the United States. Dickinson is the 1999 recipient of the Jefferson Davis Historical Writing Award from the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the History Writer’s Award from the WV Department of Archives and History. He is the author of 10 books and numerous magazine articles on the Civil War, including articles published in the Encyclopedia of the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster) and the West Virginia Encyclopedia.
	Mark DeFoe was born in Oklahoma and attended Oklahoma State University for two English degrees before earning his PhD at the University of Denver. DeFoe joined the West Virginia Wesleyan College faculty in 1975, where he has taught literature and writing and also serves as department chairperson and assistant dean of the college. He has conducted writing workshops for writers of all ages and he has read from his work at public readings at colleges, libraries, and art centers. A former Bread Loaf Scholar and editor of The Laurel Review, a nationally circulated literary magazine, DeFoe published his first poetry chapbook, Bringing Home Breakfast, in 1982. His poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, magazines and journals.
	Joe Geiger is a historian and archivist and serves in many capacities at the WV Division of Archives and History as Assistant Director. He teaches West Virginia History at Marshall University as an adjunct professor and is the author of The Civil War in Cabell County, West Virginia: 1861-1865. He has also written numerous articles that have appeared in scholarly publications.
	Dave Lieber has been a humorist, storyteller and award-winning columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for nearly 30 years. His stories of wrongdoing and right-doing in newspapers and magazines have led to countless changes in governments, schools and communities. Because of his ability to combine real-life experiences with outstanding storytelling skills, Lieber is consistently rated by audiences as one of their favorite speakers. The winner of the coveted Will Rogers Humanitarian Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists for his good deeds in the community, Lieber was named “Best Columnist in the American Southwest” by the Press Club of Dallas.
	Ken and Melanie Light, a husband and wife photographer - writer team, present Coal Hollow, with arresting black and white photographs and powerful oral histories that chronicle the legacy of coal mining in southern West Virginia. Mr. Light is a social documentary photographer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and exhibitions and Ms. Light is a writer and an oral historian. Together, they traveled hundreds of miles through rugged, isolated terrain recording the stories of a range of people whose lives were shaped by coal - people who have lived here all their lives and those who returned to the hills when their lives failed elsewhere.
	Dr. Allen H. Loughry II holds four separate law degrees including a JD from Capital University School of Law. In addition, Dr. Loughry has served as a WV Senior Assistant Attorney General and has argued more than 20 cases before the West Virginia Supreme Court. and has even filed legal pleadings before the U.S Supreme Court. He has worked for the Ohio Supreme Court and has written for two newspapers and the Associated Press. He is currently a law clerk to Justice Elliott "Spike" Maynard of the West Virginia Supreme Court. His book, Don’t Buy Another Vote: I Won’t Pay for a Landslide, is a look at political corruption in West Virginia.
	Mary Alice Mairose is the residence curator at the Ohio Governor's Residence and is editor of Our First Family’s Home, scheduled to be published in 2008 by Ohio University Press and Swallow Press. This richly illustrated volume tells the story of the home that has served as Ohio’s executive residence since 1957, and of the nine governors and their families who have lived in the house. The book offers the first complete history of the residence and garden that represent Ohio to visiting dignitaries and the citizens of the state alike. Once in a state of decline, the house has been restored and improved by its residents over the years. Development of the Ohio Heritage Garden has increased the educational potential of the house and has sparked an interest in the preservation of native plant species.
	Sharyn McCrumb is an award-winning southern author best known for her “Appalachian Ballad” novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains. She has found recent success with St. Dale and her latest Once Around The Track, both with a NASCAR theme. McCrumb, whose books have been translated into more than ten languages, has lectured on her work at Oxford University, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Bonn, Germany, and at universities and libraries throughout the country. A film of her novel The Rosewood Casket is currently in production, directed by British Academy Award winner Roberto Schaeffer.
	John McKernan teaches at Marshall University and his forthcoming book, Postcard from Dublin, is based on an earlier series of writings compiled as a chapbook that won the 1997 Dead Metaphor Press Chapbook Contest. McKernan, who began teaching English at Marshall in 1967, has received numerous awards for teaching. In 2003 McKernan received a poetry fellowship from the WV Commission of the Arts. The following year he received the Robert C. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has published two textbooks and has edited poetry publications including ABZ: A Poetry Magazine. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Field, Antaeus, New England Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
	Jean Edward Smith is the John Marshall Professor of Political Science at Marshall University. He is the author of a dozen books, including most recently FDR, a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Smith’s FDR,” said Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post, “is a model presidential biography…Now at last we have the biography that is right for the man.” In addition to FDR, Smith is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Chief Justice John Marshall, and Gen. Lucius D. Clay. A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia, he taught at the University of Toronto for 35 years before joining the faculty at Marshall University in 1999.
	Kevin Stewart, winner of the 1999 Texas Review Novella Prize for Margot, is a native of Princeton, WV. His educational background is quite varied with degrees in English from Concord College and Radford University and in Architecture and Civil Engineering from Bluefield State. Currently a professor of English and creative writing at Potomac State College, Stewart spent several years working in architecture, engineering, and auto upholstery to support his writing, as well as serving as an adjunct instructor at several higher education institutions. His fiction appeared in various publications, including The Antietam Review, The Distillery: Artistic Spirits of the South, and Kestrel: A Journal of Art and Literature. His latest work is The Way Things Always Happen Here was published by Vandalia Press, a literary imprint of WVU Press.