Monday, April 7, 2008 7pm
Wendy Merrill, Author of Falling into Manholes

Book Passage || 51 Tamal Vista Dr., Corte Madera
For Info: See Book Passage or 415-927-0960

Meet Wendy Merrill, a quirky, attractive, in-recovery-from…well, you can pretty much name it…who, while seemingly on the quest for her perfect mate, keeps falling into manholes. After losing herself in an endless series of attachments, this serial mater comes to see how her relationships with men are indicative of all her relationships - with alcohol, food, drugs, family, friends, and most of all, herself.

Monday, March 3, 2008

Karen Templer, Editor in Chief and Doug Cruickshank, Features Editor of Readerville online

Editor in Chief, Karen Templer, and Features Editor, Douglas Cruickshank will talk about Readerville, the content and the community.

In the nearly 8 years since Readerville first appeared online, it has taken many forms. It was first a place where readers and writers and publishing insiders could meet each day to find out what’s interesting in the world of books. In 2001 a full-fledged online bookstore was added and Readerville began publishing content. In 2002 the bookstore went away and a print magazine was launched, called The Readerville Journal. The Readerville Journal ceased publication in 2003, but the website survived and continues to be the wacky and thought-provoking community it started out as.

Monday, May 5, 2008
Kemble Scott, Author of SoMa

Kemble Scott is the author of the bestselling novel SoMa. A longtime journalist before turning to fiction, Kemble has three Emmy awards for his work in television news. He also helps run San Francisco’s literary festival Litquake, and he’s the editor of the monthly e-zine SoMa Literary Review and the weekly email blast SF Bay Area Literary Arts Newsletter.

SoMa tells the interwoven stories of young people of the tech-driven “millennials” generation on a journey of thrills and self-discovery in San Francisco’s notorious South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood. The novel is based on the true tales of the city. Publishers Weekly describes SoMa as “a fun, frisky novel of shock horror.”

Monday, April 2, 2007 7pm
Book Passage - CORTE MADERA || 51 Tamal Vista Dr. || Corte Madera
For Info: Book Passage or leftcoastwriters@aol.com

Broadcast journalist and Emmy-winner, Jan Yanehiro has skydived with the Army’s Golden Knights and ventured up a frozen waterfall…all in the name of getting a good story! Jan pioneered the magazine format on television as co-host of Evening Magazine, a nightly program in San Francisco from 1976-90.

Ted is a San Francisco-based literary agent and a member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, Ted represents a wide range of journalists, scholars and other authors of intelligent, adult nonfiction, with a particular interest in current affairs, biography, history, business, science, environment, pop culture, lifestyle, travel, health and medicine.

Ted has broad experience on both the business and editorial sides of publishing. Before opening the agency he held several senior publishing positions in licensing, marketing, PR and business development, including VP Marketing & Business Development at Nolo Press and the head of electronic publishing and licensing for Miller Freeman.

Ayelet Waldman’s mystery series, the Mommy-Track Mysteries, published by Berkley Prime Crime, a division of Penguin Putnam, draws on her experience of the sunny SoCal world of mall-hopping and Mommy-and-Me, and her working familiarity with the criminal mind, with courtrooms and jail cells, with a darker Los Angeles of drug dealers and bank robbers, gangbangers and boiler-room scam artists, that she gained during her time as a criminal defense attorney.

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, the daughter of first- and second-generation Japanese-American parents, was born in 1934 in Inglewood, California. During World War II, when more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans were interned in camps set up by the U.S. government, Houston and her family spent nearly four years in one of those camps, Manzanar, located in the desert between California and Nevada. Her book, Farewell to Manzanar, co-authored with James D. Houston, is the true story of her family’s experience during and after internment. Houston has also written a novel, The Legend of Fire Horse Woman, as well as many essays and short stories first collected in Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian American Womanhood and now widely anthologized. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Humanities Prize and the Christopher Award, both for the screenplay Farewell to Manzanar; an award from the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Wonder Woman award; the U.S.-Japan Cultural Exchange Fellowship; an Arts American Traveling Lectureship in Asia; and a Rockefeller Foundation residency at Bellagio, Italy. Houston lives in Santa Cruz, California, with her husband and three children.

Gail Tsukiyama was born in San Francisco, California to a Chinese mother from Hong Kong and a Japanese father from Hawaii. She attended San Francisco State University where she received both her Bachelor of Arts Degree and a Master of Arts Degree in English with the emphasis in Creative Writing.  Most of her college work was focused on poetry and she was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award. She is also the first author to receive the Asia Pacific Leadership Award from the Center of the Pacific Rim and the Ricci Institute. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has been a part-time lecturer in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, as well as a freelance book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. During 1997 to 1999, she sat as a judge for the Kiriyama Book Prize and is currently Book Review Editor for Pacific Rim Voices.
 

Charles E. Toombs practices in the areas of tax, business and real estate law.  He counsels clients in different areas of sophisticated tax planning for their business and investments.  He advises clients in matters regarding organizing, operating, merging and dissolving various business entities with particular emphasis on those clients involved in the construction industry.  He advises clients in matters involving intellectual property, including trademark law and acts of unfair competition.  He also advises nonprofit entities on operational issues and compliance with applicable tax requirements.  Mr. Toombs represents clients regarding issues before the State Board of Equalization, the State Franchise Board, and the Internal Revenue Service.
 

For two years, Michael Shapiro roamed the world interviewing
leading travel writers where they live. He met Jan Morris in
Wales, Tim Cahill in Montana, Frances Mayes in Tuscany, and Peter
Matthiessen at the east end of Long Island. He caught up with
Pico Iyer in California and met Bill Bryson in New Hampshire just
before Bryson moved back to England. The result is “A Sense of
Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives and
Inspiration,” a fascinating collection of conversations ranging
from how travel has deepened each writer’s understanding of the
world to how these authors  developed the skills and discipline
to succeed as writers. Shapiro also interviewed Paul Theroux,
Isabel Allende, Simon Winchester, Arthur Frommer, Redmond
O’Hanlon, Jonathan Raban, Rick Steves, and others.
 

Shaffer loves to travel and turn her travels into art. She has
performed with the California Shakespeare Festival, Theatre
Works, A Traveling Jewish Theatre, and other companies as well as
touring worldwide with her solo shows, Miss America’s Daughters
and the award-winning Let My Enemy Live Long! Her most recent
play, Baby Taj, which premiered in 2005, was named one of the Top
Ten Shows of the Year by the “SF Chronicle,” the “Oakland
Tribune,” and the “San Jose Mercury News”; it was also nominated
for a National Theatre Critics Steinberg Award.
 

Terry Ryan, the sixth of Evelyn and Kelly Ryan’s ten children, is the author of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words on Less (Simon & Schuster). 

She is the writing half of the cartooning team of T.O. Sylvester, whose single-panel cartoons have appeared in the pages of The San Francisco Chronicle, 

Ms. Magazine, Mother Jones, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, Boy’s Life, Datamation, Vegetarian Times, Bay Guardian, San Francisco Magazine, Women’s 

Glib Cartoon Calendars, and a number of textbooks and anthologies. T.O. Sylvester’s literary cartoons ran weekly in the San Francisco Chronicle for 16 years (1983-1999). 

Terry Ryan, the sixth of Evelyn and Kelly Ryan’s ten children, is the author of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words on Less (Simon & Schuster). 

She is the writing half of the cartooning team of T.O. Sylvester, whose single-panel cartoons have appeared in the pages of The San Francisco Chronicle, 

Ms. Magazine, Mother Jones, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, Boy’s Life, Datamation, Vegetarian Times, Bay Guardian, San Francisco Magazine, Women’s 

Glib Cartoon Calendars, and a number of textbooks and anthologies. T.O. Sylvester’s literary cartoons ran weekly in the San Francisco Chronicle for 16 years (1983-1999). 

Anneli is a UC Berkeley graduate, a journalist, a coauthor of five offbeat travel books with her husband Kristan Lawson (most recently “California Babylon” and “Weird Europe”), and an author of three books, the latest of which is Party of One: the Loners’ Manifesto. She is also a columnist for crimemagazine.com and a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. You can visit Anneli’s website at www.annelirufus.com 

Jeff Phillips is a Senior Travel Editor at Sunset Magazine and has written for a number of national magazines. His articles on travel and the environment have been recognized with four Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards. 

MELBA PATILLO BEALS is a dynamic keynote speaker, coach, author,
and a former news reporter for KQED and NBC-affiliate, KRON-TV
with numerous appearances on Oprah Winfrey, Fresh Air, Good
Morning America and C-Span’s Booknotes. She is the author of
“Warriors Don’t Cry” and “White is a State of Mind.”
 

In 1957, while most teenage girls were listening to Buddy Holly’s
“Peggy Sue,” watching Elvis gyrate and collecting crinoline
slips, a 15-year-old MELBA PATTILLO was escaping the hanging rope
of a lynch mob, dodging lighted sticks of dynamite, and washing
away burning acid sprayed into her eyes by segregationists
determined to prevent her from integrating Little Rock’s Central
High School. As a teenager, she was caught up in the center of a
civil rights firestorm which stunned this nation and altered the
course of history.
 

SUSAN (SUZY) PARKER, an award-winning freelance writer and 

outdoor enthusiast, is the author of “Tumbling After: Pedaling 

Like Crazy After Life Goes Downhill,” a memoir that tells the 

story of how her life changed in a split second when a freak 

cycling accident left her husband, Ralph, permanently paralyzed 

below the shoulders. In this memoir devoid of self-pity and told 

with candor and wry humor, Suzy chronicles the transformation of 

her household into an oddball family of caretakers. 

Suzy Parker reports on life with Ralph in the “San Francisco 

BRAD NEWSHAM has taken four global back-packing trips and turned
two of them into memoirs: “All the Right Places” (Random House,
1989) and “Take Me With You” (Travelers Tales, 2000).  From 2002
to 2005, he was the driving force behind Backpack Nation, a
non-profit organization he founded in order to “transform the
West’s roughly 3 million travelers into an army of global
ambassadors, and thereby help to save our world.”
 

For the past 21 years, Brad has worked as a San Francisco taxicab
driver (“No, I was never the Chronicle’s ‘Night Cabbie’,” he
says).  He is currently working on a book about a year behind the
wheel.
 

Wes “Scoop” Nisker is author of the enduring classic Crazy Wisdom 

and the widely acclaimed Buddha’s Nature, and is Editor-in-Chief 

of the Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind. For the past twenty-five 

years he has been both a popular San Francisco Bay Area radio 

personality and a nationally known Buddhist meditation teacher. 

PAUL McHUGH, is the outdoors feature writer for the “San 

Francisco Chronicle,” and the editor of “Wild Places: 20 Journeys 

into the American Outdoors” (Foghorn Press, 1996), a book about 

North American journeys. Paul is also the author of “The Search 

for Goodbye-to-Rains” (Daedalus Books, 1980). His love of the 

outdoors originally was developed in the flatlands of the 

Everglades and the Florida Keys. Ski mountaineering, as well as 

sea kayaking (he won a surf kayak world championship with Team 

USA in 1988), are among his passions. Paul will talk about his recent 

Boston born Harvard grad Malcolm Margolin founded Heyday Books in 1974. Heyday publishes books on California history, natural history, literature, travel and Native American life. A talented author–his works include numerous books, essays, and articles–Malcolm is also the recipient of many honors and awards including The Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association and a California Council award for the Promotion of History “in recognition of efforts to preserve and advance the history of California Indians.” He is the founder of Clapperstick Institute, co-founder of The Inkslingers and Native California network and serves on the board of the California Studies Association, River of Words, the San Francisco Bay Area Book Council, the Yosemite Association, Save the Bay and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. The books that he has written include The East Bay Out: A Personal Guide to the East Bay Regional Parks, The Earth Manual: How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming It, The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs and The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area. The books that he has published are too numerous to mention. He is an extremely popular lecturer and presenter. He also publishes News from Native California and was the original publisher of Bay Nature. 

Krista Lyons-Gould is the VP of Editorial for Avalon Publishing 

Group and works in APG’s California division, in Emeryville, 

overseeing editorial and production for the travel reference 

imprint, Avalon Travel Publishing, and for the trade imprint, 

Seal Press. Most of her time is focused on Seal Press, which is 

dedicated to publishing important books by and for women for the 

last 25 years, from “Getting Free,” the first book to announce 

domestic violence as an issue, and women’s travel anthologies, 

such as “France, A Love Story: Women Write About the French 

Get the INSIDE SCOOP on “What We’re Looking For” from a 

publisher’s point of view from LINDY HOUGH, Publisher and 

Editorial Director of North Atlantic Books and Frog. Ltd. North 

Atlantic Books, located in Berkeley, has consistently been rated 

as one of the 10 Fastest Growing Independent Publishers of the 

last ten years nationwide by Publishers Weekly. Hough spends much 

of her time on product acquisitions. 

Lindy Hough is a poet and fiction writer who founded North 

Atlantic Books in 1977 with her husband, Richard Grossinger. 

Tess Uriza Holthe has a Bachelor’s in accounting.  She was born and raised in San Francisco.  When the Elephants Dance is her first novel, inspired by her family’s first hand account of World War II Philippines.  She is currently finishing a second novel.

SUSAN GRIFFIN is a well-known writer and poet, known for
combining genres in innovative and powerful forms. Her latest
work, “The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues,”
was published in 2001. Sierra Club Books published “Woman and
Nature,” a work that is considered an environmental classic, in a
new edition in 2000. “A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of
War,” a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Critics Award, won the prestigious BABRA award and was a New
York Times Notable Book for 1992. Her essays on gender and
society were collected in “The Eros of Everyday Life,” in 1994.
 

Bronx-born Jeff Greenwald moved west when he was 19 and has lived in Oakland, California for the past 15 years.  Since 1979 he has traveled throughout the world, working as a writer, photographer and visual artist.
 

His first book, Mr. Raja’s Neighborhood: Letters from Nepal, was published in 1985; many consider it a “cult classic” of Asian travel literature.  Shopping for Buddhas, published in 1990, was reissued by Lonely Planet in 1996. The revised edition won the Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Best Travel Book of the Year and has been translated into five languages.  The Size of the World: Once Around Without Leaving the Ground – a chronicle of his nine-month, 29,172-mile, around the world overland voyage – was a national bestseller in 1995, while Future Perfect, Greenwald’s quirky look at the impact of Star Trek on global culture, appeared in 1998.
 

Don George has been a pioneering travel writer and editor for more than two decades. Currently the global travel editor for Lonely Planet, Don writes the award-winning “Traveler at Large” column for lonelyplanet.com and serves as Lonely Planet’s global spokesperson, working with print, radio and TV journalists, editors and producers around the world. Prior to joining Lonely Planet, Don was travel editor at the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle and then founded and edited Salon.com’s travel site, “Wanderlust.” He has edited four anthologies, including Lonely Planet’s highly acclaimed The Kindness of Strangers and A House Somewhere: Tales of Life Abroad, and has published more than 600 articles in magazines and newspapers around the globe. Don has received dozens of awards for his writing and editing, including, most recently, the 2002 Pacific Area Travel Association’s Gold Award for Best Travel Article and the Society of American Travel Writers 2002 Lowell Thomas Award. In two and a half decades of wandering, he has visited more than 60 countries; he has also worked as a teacher in Athens, a translator in Paris and a TV talk show host in Tokyo. Don is co-founder and chairman of the annual Book Passage Travel Writers Conference and has been a Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism; he frequently speaks about travel writing and travel industry issues around the world. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children. 

Catherine Fowler has more than 20 years of experience in book and
Internet publishing. She has worked for such prestigious
companies as Random House, Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, Excite
and WebMD.  With the inception of Redwood Agency, Fowler is
focusing on the core of her expertise:  the development of
informative and fun products, working with talented writers and
editors, and negotiating contracts.
 

Daniel Ellsberg was born in Detroit in 1931. After graduating 

from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. Summa cum Laude in Economics, he 

studied at Cambridge University, spent three years in the U.S. 

Marine Corps, serving as rifle platoon leader, operations 

officer, and rifle company commander, and earned his Ph.D. in 

Economics from Harvard University in 1962. 

Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and 

served as a consultant to the Department of Defense and the White 

House specializing in problems of the command and control of 

Janis Cooke Newman is a writer whose essays and travel stories 

have appeared on Salon.com, in several Travelers’ Tales editions, 

and in various magazines and newspapers across the country. She 

is the author of the memoir, “The Russian Word for Snow” (St. 

Martin’s Press; 2001). Her historical novel, “Mary,” about the most 

confounding woman in American history, Mary Todd Lincoln, will be 

published in September 2006 by MacAdam/Cage. 

After 10 years of varied employment as a bike messenger, waitress, typesetter, Alaskan cook and bike shop manager, Alison read one of those annoying career help books, Jobs for English Majors and Other Losers, and discovered copy editing. She realized it was something she had been doing automatically for years, much to the chagrin of friends and coworkers, and decided to try to get paid for it. She got a job at the Phoenix Journal in the East Bay, then Diablo Magazine, then the Chronicle. She started as senior editor with the magazine in 1998 and was named editor the day before her second maternity leave a year and a half ago. A voracious reader, Alison’s been working ever since to make the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine into something she would spend time on a Sunday morning reading. Alison has launched many a literary career in the Bay Area. With a readership estimated at over 1,000,000, her publication has tremendous reach. Alison will share an editor’s point of view, 

The day after the World Trade Center was destroyed, TAMIM ANSARY
sent an anguished e-mail to twenty friends discussing the attack
from his perspective as an Afghan American. The message reached
millions. Born to an Afghan father and American mother, Ansary
grew up in the intimate world of Afghan family life and emigrated
to San Francisco thinking he’s left Afghan culture behind
forever. At the height of the Iranian Revolution, however, he
took a harrowing journey through the Islamic world, and in the
years that followed, he struggled to unite his divided self and
to find a place in his imagination where his Afghan and American
identities might meet. This inner journal is chronicled in his
beautifully written memoir, “West of Kabul, East of New York.”
 

BRUCE ANDERSON is the editor of VIA, a travel magazine (with a 

circulation of three million readers) for AAA members in five 

western states. He has been the editor of VIA since December 

1998. Anderson, formerly a writer-reporter for Sports Illustrated 

magazine for 10 years, also served as the editor of Stanford 

magazine. During his five-year tenure at Stanford, the magazine 

twice won the Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year Award, an honor 

presented by Newsweek to the nation’s best college or university 

publication. Anderson has also written articles for Sports 

Born in Peru, Isabel Allende was the daughter of diplomats and raised in Chile. She is the author of the novels Portrait in Sepia, Daughter of Fortune, The Infinite Plan, Eva Luna, Of Love and Shadows, and The House of the Spirits. Additional works include the short story collection The Stories of Eva Luna, and the memoirs Paula, Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, and My Invented Country. City of the Beasts is her first novel in a trilogy for young readers. She lives in California with her husband. 

www.isabelallende.com 

A former publicity director for Simon and Schuster, Alice comes equipped with 30 years experience in publishing. She is now an independent publicist and publishing consultant whose successes include four simultaneous New York Times bestsellers, a first-time author launch (Douglas Wood, author and illustrator of Old Turtle) that resulted in the sale of 800,000 copies and a Literary MarketPlace Outside Services Award for Advertising, Promotion and Publicity. 

JAMES DALESSANDO, was the co-founder of the Santa Cruz Poetry
Festival, the nation’s largest literary event for four years and
which brought together Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles
Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Bob Kaufman and musicians
like Charles Lloyd and Anthony Braxton. He has published four
books: poetry in Canary In A Coal Mine, the highly acclaimed San
Francisco murder mystery Bohemian Heart (St. Martin’s Press),
true crime (Citizen Jane), and his new novel, 1906, an epic
recreation of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire. He is
a 20-year veteran of the Writer’s Guild of America, West, and has
written the screenplays for all three of his books, including
1906, which was sold to Warner Brothers after a heated Hollywood
bidding war. He is currently writer and co-director, with
four-time Oscar winner Ben Burtt, of The Damnedest Finest Ruins,
a feature documentary about the 1906 earthquake. He is also
co-executive producer and screenwriter of Citizen Jane for Wolper
Productions and Court TV, producer and co-writer, with Lidia
Fraser, of Draconin, a trilogy of novels and animated feature
films. He teaches the longest-running screenwriting course in San
Francisco and served as the writer for the award-winning House of
Blues Radio Hour. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

With articles ranging from experiencing the culture shock of Japan and chronicling the lives of survivors of Hiroshima, to choosing the world’s worst airport, finding solitude in Tahoe’s Emerald Bay, and packing puffins, geysers and the Blue Lagoon in to a 72-hour stopover in cool, hot Iceland, John Flinn is not only well-known for being a world traveler and writer, he has the insider tips on writing, submitting, and getting YOUR work published in the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers. John Flinn is the Travel Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and he is one of the key faculty members for this year’s Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference.

Kevin Smokler is one of the nation’s leading thinkers on the future of contemporary
literature, publishing and the arts at large. He is the founder of The Virtual Book Tour
and editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, June 2005),
an anthology that features this generation’s most intriguing young authors writing on the
state and future of literature in our media-saturated 21st century. Smokler’s essays and critiques have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, The Believer, Ready Made and on National Public Radio. Smokler also lectures nationwide (at Book Expo America, The Commonwealth Club, among other venues) on the future of reading and publishing, the literary life and the role of technology in the arts. His publishing consultancy serves such clients as Time Warner Book Group, Harper Collins, Mental Floss magazine and the Idea Festival.

Jennifer L. Leo is a Chinese-American who was born with a gift
for gab and a hunger for an everlasting craps game (which
probably explains her recent move to Las Vegas). Editor of
Travelers Tales (San Francisco) titles, “Whose Panties Are
These?,” “More Misadventures from Funny Women on the Road” and
the best-selling “Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny
Women Write from the Road,” Jen is also the co-editor of “A
Woman’s Path.”

Firoozeh Dumas moved with her family from Abadan, Iran, to Whittier, California, at the age of seven. With great humor and a sense of adventure, Dumas chronicles the American journey of her wonderfully engaging family in Funny In Farsi: A Memoir Of Growing Up Iranian In America, which was selected as a finalist for the PEN award in the Creative Nonfiction category. In a series of deftly Drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple with American culture in a story of Identity, discovery and family love. You may have heard Firoozeh’s commentaries on NPR. Dumas graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She lives with her husband and children in Northern California.

Georgia I. Hesse was founding travel editor of the San Francisco Examiner and held that position on the S.F. Examiner-Chronicle for 20 years. She has contributed to several anthologies, is a co-author of travel guides to France and California published by Fisher and by Berlitz, and teaches travel writing and related courses at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Georgia holds the Chevalier/Ordre de la République from Tunisia and the Ordre du Mérite from France. She is a graduate of Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, and attended the University of Strasbourg, France, on a Fulbright scholarship. She claims to have been born on Crazy Woman Creek near Buffalo, Wyoming.
For more information, visit www.whereintheworld-scribe.com.

Sheldon Siegel graduated from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. He has been in private practice in San Francisco for over twenty years and specializes in corporate and securities law with the firm of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP. His four novels, Special Circumstances, Incriminating Evidence, Criminal Intent and Final Verdict, have all been national best sellers. His fifth novel, The Confession, will be released August 2004. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into seven languages.
He lives in Marin County with his wife, Linda, and twin sons, Alan and Stephen. He is at work on his next Mike Daley story.

Larry Habegger, executive editor of Travelers’ Tales, has been writing about travel since 1980. He has visited almost fifty countries and six of the seven continents, traveling from the frozen Arctic to equatorial rain forest, from the high Himalayas to the Dead Sea. In the early 1980s he co-authored mystery serials for the San Francisco Examiner with James O’Reilly, and since 1985 their syndicated column, “World Travel Watch,” has appeared in newspapers in five countries and on WorldTravelWatch.com. As series editors of Travelers’ Tales, they have worked on some seventy titles, winning many awards for excellence. Larry regularly teaches the craft of travel writing at workshops and writers conferences, and he lives with his family on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill.
Visit www.larryhabegger.com for more information.

Oscar Villalon has been the Book Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle since 2001. He has been with the paper since 1996, and has been Deputy Book Editor and a copy editor for “Datebook.”Oscar is currently a member of the jury for the annual California Book Award and serves as a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Prior to working at The Chronicle, Oscar was a news editor at the Glendale News Press in Los Angeles, California.

Journalist Constance Hale grew up in Hawaii but left the islands to get a bachelors degree from Princeton and a masters from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC-Berkeley. Hale worked as a reporter and editor at the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, Wired, and Health and her freelance journalism has appeared in those publications, as well as in Honolulu, HotWired, and the Atlantic Monthly. Her travel essays have been published in several anthologies, Via, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. Hale is the author of two popular books on language, Sin and Syntax and Wired Style. Once dubbed, “Marion the Librarian on a Harley,” Hale speaks extensively about the craft of writing, sin and syntax, and the intersections of language and technology. She is on the faculty of UC-Berkeley Extension, Book Passage, and the Writing Salon.

Fran Gage owned Fran Gage Pâtisserie Française in San Francisco for ten years. The bakery consistently won critical acclaim locally and nationally for its pastry, bread, and chocolates. She closed the bakery following a fire in 1995 and now writes about food. Her first book, Bread and Chocolate, My Food Life In & Around San Francisco , (Sasquatch Books, 1999) is a collection of stories about food with recipes to match. A Sweet Quartet, Sugar, Almonds, Eggs, and Butter , (North Point Press, 2002) is a book celebrating the building blocks of pastry making, including recipes. Excerpts from both books were chosen for Best Food Writing . Her most recent book is Williams-Sonoma Cake . Fran is a charter member of the Baker’s Dozen and a co-author of The Baker’s Dozen Cookbook . She also writes frequently for Saveur , and Fine Cooking  and has contributed to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America  and Gastronomica.

For over 20 Years Michael Johnson has been training people to do good in public radio. But baby, that’s not all. Michael’s produced music shows for 13 years on KALW and KPFA in San Francisco. He was the associate producer for the Peabody Award Winning NPR series Lost and Found Sound, editor and digital mix engineer for Spirits of the Present: The Legacy from Native America for Radio Smithsonian (PRI) carried on over 500 stations across the US and Canada (APR), and associate producer for the documentary series Legacies: Tales From America.