Ann Anastasio and Lani Longshore are writers, fiber artists, and entertainers.
Ann plays viola in two orchestras. She is a docent at the historic Santa Fe, New Mexico, hotel La Fonda and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, because she loves to learn and share that information. As well as being a museum junkie, she is also an art quilter, and the co-producer of Art Quilt Santa Fe, an annual art quilt retreat. For more information go to: www.artquiltsantafe.com.
Lani Longshore writes a weekly blog at www.lanilongshore.wordpress.com. She has been published in Eve’s Requiem: Tales of Women, Mystery, and Horror, and in the anthologies of the California Writers Club Tri-Valley Branch.
Together, Ann and Lani entertain quilt guilds as Broken Dishes Repertory Theatre. Their musical comedy productions celebrate quilts and the women who make them.
Patricia J. Boyle grew up in upstate New York, spending summer vacations in the Adirondacks. Since childhood, she has been awed by the natural world and fascinated by mathematics. These interests led her to earn a degree in math and earth science education from Cornell University. Afterwards, she studied weather at the State University of New York at Albany, earning a masters’ degree in atmospheric science. 
In Bennington, Vermont, Patricia taught math and computer science at Southern Vermont College. Later, she worked as a research meteorologist at the Naval Post-graduate School in Monterey, California. When she and her family moved to Livermore, Patricia taught math and science for nearly two decades, working with students in elementary, middle, and high school.
In recent years, Patricia has turned to writing poems and short stories and indulging her love of fantasy tales. Find out more about Patricia and her current projects at www.patriciajboyle.com.
Sharon Burgess was born and raised in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. She has also lived in Albany, Georgia and Arvada, Colorado, California, and Texas. She enjoys traveling both domestically and abroad. On the North American continent, she especially enjoys the Pacific Northwest and the Yukon Territory. Overseas her favorite place to visit is Ireland, closely followed by western Turkey, particularly Asia Minor.
Her Spruce Creek Romance series includes Simply Irresistible, Simply Provocative, and Simply Outrageous. You can visit her website at www.SharonBurgess.com.
V. Z. Byram was born in a displaced persons camp in post World War II Germany of Latvian parents. They immigrated to the USA when she was three. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, has won numerous writing awards, taught literature and writing as an adjunct professor and is a past president of the Philadelphia Writers Conference. Song of Latvia is her first novel. Visit her on Facebook or at www.vzbyram.com.
P. C. Chinick, originally from Seattle, has lived in California for over 25 years. She has spent the majority of her career in Information Technology as a project manager working for various Fortune 500 companies. She holds an MBA in international business from John F. Kennedy University.
In 2014 she published her first spy thriller novel, Red Asscher~Living in Fear winner of Writer Advice 2013 for “Scintillating Starts.” Living in Fear took a gold medal winner from Global eBook Awards for best thriller and silver medal from Bellaonline.
She published Red Asscher~Living in Turmoil in 2016, Living in War in 2020, and is currently working on a Red Asscher historical romance prequel.
She has also contributed short stories to the Tri-Valley Branch Anthology, Voices of the Valley: First Press; Voices of the Valley: Encore; Written Across the Genres; and The California Writers Club Literary Review.
For more information please visit: www.redasscher.com.
George Cramer lives in Northern California, with his wife, Cathy. They have four adult children.
When his career in law enforcement ended, due to multiple line-of-duty injuries, a second career in private and corporate investigations took him in a new and equally challenging direction.
Mr. Cramer left the corporate environment where he last worked as the head of Global Investigations, Safety & Security for the Palm, Inc. Division of Hewlett-Packard. He specialized in Standards of Business Conduct, undercover operations; insurance and corporate fraud; crimes against business; and the protection of intellectual property.
He is recognized as an expert in the area of Interviewing and Interrogation and has presented numerous seminars, including at ASIS-International and High Technology Crime Investigators international conferences.
George Cramer’s love of writing and the English language resulted in his return to college, where he earned two additional degrees. One in English and a Master of Fine Arts/Creative Writing – Fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
He is currently working on two projects, a thriller spanning forty years, and a modern-day police procedural.
E. Ruth Harder
grew up on a farm in Uvalde County Texas and has lived in Livermore, California since October 1965. She spent the majority of her working career at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory as a Technical Information Specialist (TIS). She holds a Masters in Library Science from San Jose State University. After 22 years as a TIS, she retired.
In younger years as a “stay at home Mom,” she wrote magazine articles that were published in The Camper Coachman and The Craftsman Magazine.
Advances in Library Administration and Organization, Vol. 13, 1995 published her article, “Library Automation’s Effect on the Interior Design of California Public Libraries.”
She has written numerous puppet scripts that are performed for children at Sunday worship services at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Livermore.
“California Writers Club, Tri-Valley, with the critique groups and workshops helps me realize my writing gifts and encourage me to pursue my dream of becoming a known writer.”
Hans Fellmann currently lives between Prague, where he teaches to keep the lights on and writes to keep from going nuts, and Livermore in Northern California, where his funky little ass grew up. During the last twenty years, Hans has been tiptoeing the globe and scribbling it all down. To date, he has visited over eighty countries on six continents, and he continues to “blow it up” each summer.
By the skin of his teeth, Hans earned a BA degree from the University of California at San Diego in International Studies, with an emphasis on the Middle East. His articles and short stories have appeared (albeit not magically) in the UCSD Guardian, the San Diego Union-Tribune and The Prague Revue. To improve his craft, and to buy his folks keychains so they could claim their son went to grad school, he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2013.
He recently completed a second semi-autobiographical book which he is “polishing.” It is about his pants-on-the-head-crazy experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan. The working title is Saving Jahan. He will soon begin a third manuscript about his life as a broke writer in Prague.
In his spare time, Hans studies languages, the more obscure the better. He speaks Czech, Turkmen, Farsi, and Spanish, with varying degrees of proficiency. He is also a huge geography and book nerd. When he is not backpacking he has his eyes crawling over a map of a long-forgotten Central Asian republic or his nose buried deep in a book by a fellow B.A.M.F.
Mary Heaton grew up in Northern California, with her six siblings, and, as her mother used to say, “There is never a dull moment!” These memorable childhood experiences presented Mary with a great deal of writing material from which to choose.
Mary is a retired Montessori teacher, who has an innate love of learning, which she has shared with her children and hundreds of students over the years.
Mary’s passions are her five amazing children, writing in the wee hours of the morning, gardening in the shade of her sycamore trees, singing to hospice patients, practicing yoga with enlightened friends, swimming for miles, and hosting Chinese international students in her home.
Mary is a published author of short stories and poetry and her first book, Rambling Through the Emerald Isle.
Neva Hodges made the leap from wanting to write to writing. At age seventy-nine, her father handwrote his memoir on legal paper. Neva, as well as putting pen to paper, joined a critique group, took classes, and became a member of the California Writers Club.
Neva loves to travel and is intrigued by different languages and cultures. She lived in Jerusalem, Israel for three years. She drew from some of her experiences there in her novel Against the Wall.
Ed Miracle lives with his wife in an adobe house they built together in Northern California. He is a university graduate who served six years in the U.S. Navy Submarine Service. Now retired from his computer systems career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Ed continues to support his community as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical responder.
Ed’s award-winning personal narrative “Submarine Dreams” is available as a free download from his website at www.edmiracle.com
Vidhima Shetty is a senior in high school from the bay area. She serves as the editor-in-chief of her school newspaper and has reported for Stanford University’s newspaper, The Stanford Daily. Currently, she reports for the LA Times through its High School Insider program and runs her own writing blog, The Write Reason. Vidhima published An Adolescent’s Guide to ME/CFS (Russian Hill Press, 2018) to raise awareness about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome after hearing that 24 million patients suffer across the globe without a cure. She hopes to use her writing abilities as an outlet for marginalized voices and looks forward to pursuing a career in journalism.
Patricia H. Wheeler has been a therapy dog handler since 2002. She has had four dogs with successful careers as therapy dogs, two of which have died, and two of which are still very active. She has taken them for over 4,000 hours of work as therapy dogs
at a variety of places throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Her dogs have visited people of all ages, infants to centenarians, and served people with a variety of cognitive, emotional, physical, and social challenges. Dr. Wheeler completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology and her master’s degree in counseling at the University of Rochester (New York), her MBA in management at Armstrong College in Berkeley, California, and her PhD in education/policy analysis at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to being a therapy dog handler for her dogs, she is a tester/observer for the Alliance of Therapy Dogs and has checked out over 175 potential therapy dog teams in the Bay Area. She has written books and many articles about therapy dogs and given several presentations on this topic. She loves to travel and has been to about 50 countries and all but one continent (Australia). She is an active musician and plays in several concert bands and a flute choir. She has two sons and four grandchildren.
Steven and Maureen Wincor live in San Jose, California and are the owners of Gibson (Grand Champion Dawin Braveheart), and Oakley (MTS Fully Loaded”). The book is based on Maya (Champion Sublime and Why Not) and Aiden (Champion Jaset’s Justification) who since the original printing have passed over the rainbow bridge. The Wincor’s belong to Furry Friends Pet Assisted Therapy and Alliance of Therapy Dogs, two non-profit therapy pet service organizations. All of their dogs were rehomed from previous owners. They have gone through obedience training and passed the Canine Good Citizen test (Oakley is in the process for her CGC).
Their calm and loving-demeanor made them ideal dogs for therapy work. At the time of this writing, Gibson is 4 ½ years old and Oakley is 3 ½ years old. Maya and Aiden had over 500 visits doing therapy work, and now Gibson and Oakley have obtained numerous visits in their burgeoning therapy careers. Steve Wincor is a tester/observer with Alliance of Therapy Dogs. He has presented therapy work to many different audiences over the years and explains how it differs from Service or Emotional therapy. Maureen and Steve encourage all people with well-behaved pets to consider undertaking therapy work.
Email the Wincor’s at Mayaauthor@sbcglobal.net for more information on therapy dogs.