Melinda Clayton is the author of The Cedar Hollow Series, which includes novels Appalachian Justice, Return to Crutcher Mountain, Entangled Thorns, and Shadow Days.
Clayton also authored Blessed Are the Wholly Broken and Making Amends, two dark tales of tragedy and suspense.
In addition to writing, Clayton has an Ed.D. in Special Education Administration and is a licensed psychotherapist in the states of Florida and Colorado.
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of six novels, including one comedy/satire and six within the contemporary fantasy and magical realism genres. His short stories include the paranormal Emily’s Stories, Cora’s Crossing, Moonlight and Ghosts, and The Lady of the Blue Hour. A three-story collection of folk tales, The Land Between the Rivers, is set in the Florida Panhandle not far from the settings used in Conjure Woman’s Cat.
His work has appeared in The Lascaux Prize 2014 Anthology, Spirits of St. Louis: Missouri Ghost Stories Anthology, Quail Bell Magazine, A View inside Glacier National Park: 100 years, 100 Stories, Future Earth Magazine, The Smoking Poet Magazine, Nonprofit World Magazine, Nostalgia Magazine, and Living Jackson Magazine.
Campbell lives on a north Georgia farm with his wife and three cats. He grew up in the Florida Panhandle where Boy Scout camping trips, family day trips and dozens of hours spent driving his smoking 1954 Chevrolet from the Georgia border to the Gulf coast introduced him to every river, swamp, sink hole, beach, and all-night diner within an 11,000 square mile area often called “the other Florida” and “the forgotten coast.”
Florida’s Tate’s Hell Forest, longleaf pine forests, Apalachicola River, Garden of Eden trail, small towns, and dusty unpaved roads were a perfect place for growing up and for telling the story of his novella Conjure Woman’s Cat.
Robert Hays has been a newspaper reporter, public relations writer, magazine editor, and university professor and administrator. A native of Illinois, he taught in Texas and Missouri and retired in 2008 from a long journalism teaching career at the University of Illinois.
He has spent a great deal of time in South Carolina, the home state of his wife, Mary, and was a member of the South Carolina Writers Workshop. His publications include academic journal and popular periodical articles and ten books, including his collaborative work with General Oscar Koch, G-2: Intelligence for Patton.
Robert and Mary live in Champaign, Illinois. They have two sons and a grandson and share (long story!) a cat named Eddie with the family next door.
Scott was born in Northern Wisconsin in 1951 and matured in the 1960s in Detroit, Michigan and the California desert. He's a hippie—he believes in peace, compassion, nature, and beauty. This is what he writes about.
He's highly educated. He's spent 60 percent of his life in school. He didn’t like school. In fact, he hated it. He found very little peace, compassion, nature, and beauty in school. Just the opposite. His higher education is in music, not creative writing or English. Go figure. Or if there are any professorial types out there you can smirk and say to your scholarly friends, “It figures.”
In his 40s, while still writing his Ph.D. dissertation, and suffering from academically induced PTSD, he got into a rock band and wrote lots of song lyrics. Hence, he became a poet, and never finished his degree.
He's also a classical guitarist and painter. He's married to a fabulous master gardener, humanist, poet, and novelist. Between them, they have four wonderful adult children and a beautiful grandchild.
Smoky Zeidel is a poet and novelist whose love of the natural world is thematic in all she writes. She taught writing and creativity workshops for many years at venues throughout the Midwest before succumbing to her bohemian urges and moving to Southern California. Her work has earned her two nominations for the prestigious Pushcart Prize.
Smoky lives in a ramshackle cottage in the hills outside Los Angeles with her husband Scott and a plethora of animals, both domestic and wild.
