Elizabeth Peavey

Elizabeth Peavey is a Portland-based freelance writer and teacher. Her one-woman show, My Mother's Clothes Are Not My Mother, premiered in Portland this past fall to sold-out houses and is now touring the state. She is the author of Outta My Way: An Odd Life Lived Loudly and of Maine & Me, which was awarded the Maine Literary Award for Best Maine-themed Book. Since 1993, her writing has been featured in Down East magazine, where she is a contributing editor. She teaches public speaking at the University of Southern Maine and has also taught creative nonfiction at the University of Maine at Farmington. Her latest book, Glorious Slow Going -- a collaboration with renowned Maine landscape painter Marguerite Robichaux --  was one of three finalists for the John N. Cole Maine-themed Nonfiction Award in the upcoming Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Maine Literary Awards.

Jim Nichols

Jim Nichols is a native Mainer who lives in Warren with his wife, Anne. His work has been widely published in Magazines like Esquire, Night Train, elimae, Portland Monthly, Zoetrope ASE and Narrative and has won several awards, including the Willamette Fiction Prize, a River City Writing Award and a Maine Arts Commission Independent Artists Fellowship. His story collection Slow Monkeys and Other Stories (Carnegie Mellon) appeared in 2003.

Jim's novel Hull Creek (Down East Books) is a bawdy but empathetic look at the challenges faced by young men who still go down to the sea in ships. It received an IPPY award (Silver Medal for fiction) for 2012 and also won 2nd prize in this year's Book Award for Fiction at the Maine Literary Awards. 

Janis Bolster

Janis Bolster grew up in small towns in Maine. After post-English-major stints at things like checking off boxes on insurance claim reports and performing for a blind professor those tasks that his Seeing-Eye dog couldn't manage, she found her way to a job in publishing that has become a career. When she discovered that copy editors and proofreaders almost always share her enthusiasm for mysteries, she got the idea for the Sally Jean Chalmers series. In Murder in Two Tenses (Reck House Press, 2010), Sally is an editorial assistant getting experience in the business – and in the side effects of murder. In The Lost Daughters (Reck House Press, 2011), Sally works on a historic diary in Portland, Maine, and becomes a suspect when her employer is murdered.

Bolster has moved back to Maine, settling into an old shipwright's house in Bath that is making its way into the third Sally Jean Chalmers mystery, tentatively titled Emily Dickinson in the Attic.

Maria Padian

Maria Padian is the author of the young adult novels Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best and Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress, which was chosen by the ALA and YALSA as one of the Best Books for Young Adults and also received a Maine Lupine Honor Award and Maine Literary Award.  Her next novel for young adults, Out of Nowhere, will be released in Spring 2013.  All of her work is published by Knopf Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House. 

A graduate of Middlebury College and the University of Virginia, Maria lives in Brunswick, Maine with her family.  To learn more about her, visit mariapadian.com.

Jessica Kinney

Jessica Kinney is a Maine native and mother of six children who lives and writes on the coast of Maine. A Bowdoin College graduate and former middle- and high-school English teacher, Jessica says The Pig Scramble was inspired by a true story about her husband, who grew up as the youngest child on a Maine dairy farm and really did win a pig at a local fair.

Perhaps a result of being from Maine and most certainly because of the many books she has enjoyed through the years, Jessica has long admired character-driven stories about seemingly every-day events of real people. Living in an out-of-the-way place often requires creativity and resourcefulness to make ends meet -- hard work, colorful characters, and rich story-telling are natural by-products of this experience. Jessica viewed much of this first-hand, growing up, and seeks to incorporate similar themes in her stories.

Rohan Henry

Rohan Henry is a Jamaican born author illustrator who lives in the cold state of Maine. He enjoys spending time with his wife, his two kids and his giant cat Honey Bee. Honey Bee, who weighs in at about 18 pounds, is often mistaken for a small adult dog. Honey Bee’s litter box is located in the basement of the Henry family home next to Rohan’s drawing table. Honey Bee enjoys taking catnaps on Rohan’s desk chair and Rohan is thankful for his personal seat warmer.