Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior correspondent and associate editor of The Washington Post. From 2009 to 2011, he reported on the war in Afghanistan for the Post. Mr. Chandrasekaran has served as the Post's national editor and as an assistant managing editor and in 2003 and 2004, was the bureau chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the reconstruction of Iraq. Prior to going to Iraq, he was the Post's bureau chief in Cairo; a Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta; and, in the months following September 11, 2001, covered the start of the war in Afghanistan and events in Pakistan. Mr. Chandrasekaran’s best-seller, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which recounted the troubled American effort to reconstruct Iraq, not only won the Overseas Press Club Book Award, the Ron Ridenhour Prize, and Britain’s Samuel Johnson Prize, but was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2007 by the New York Times. He served as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, an author in residence at the Center for a New American Security, and a journalist in residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. Mr. Chandrasekaran holds a degree in political science from Stanford and lives in Washington, DC. Click to view Mr. Chandrasekaran's website.

Jake Tapper

Jake Tapper is chief Washington correspondent and anchor for CNN. Prior to joining CNN, he was the senior White House correspondent for ABC News and part of the team that won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Live Coverage of a Current News Story for reporting on the 2008 inauguration of President Obama. A three-time winner of the prestigious Merriman Smith Award for presidential coverage, Mr. Tapper also appears regularly on Good Morning America, Nightline and World News with Diane Sawyer. He has served as the national correspondent for Salon.com, as a columnist for TALK magazine, and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Weekly Standard, among many other publications. Mr. Tapper lives in Washington, DC.

John A. Nagl

Moderator - John A. Nagl is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the Minerva Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy and is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. His writings have been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy, among others. Lt. Col. Nagl has appeared on The News Hour with Jim Leher, National Public Radio, 60 Minutes, Washington Journal, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He led a tank platoon in Operation Desert Storm and served as the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in Operation Iraqi Freedom, earning the Combat Action Badge and the Bronze Star medal. He earned his master’s degree in military arts and sciences from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, where he received the George C. Marshall Award as the top graduate, and his doctorate from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

Juliet Eilperin

A born-and-bred Washingtonian, Juliet Eilperin has worked as a staff writer for the Washington Post for fifteen years. Since April of 2004, she has served as the Post’s national environmental reporter, reporting on science, policy and politics in areas including climate change, oceans and air quality. In pursuit of these stories, Ms. Eilperin has gone scuba diving with sharks in the Bahamas, trekked on the Arctic tundra with Selma Hayek and Jake Gyllenhaal, and searched on her hands and knees for rare insects in the caves of Tennessee. Her first book, Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives, has been featured on NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Ms. Eilperin’s latest book, Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks, has been featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday” and in People, Smithsonian and Popular Science magazines. She has been a contributor to the Princeton Reader: Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University; Can We Talk? The Rise of Rude, Nasty, Stubborn Politics; and Deadlock: The Inside Story of America’s Closest Election.

Lee Zanger

Moderator - Lee Zanger is the Chair of Key School's Upper School Science Department and a chemistry teacher.

Ralph Eshelman

Ralph Eshelman has over thirty years of cultural resource management experience. He was co-director of the Patuxent River Cultural Resource Survey which discovered and partially excavated an American War of 1812 military vessel from the U.S. Chesapeake Flotilla. He also conducted a holistic inventory of War of 1812 and Revolutionary War sites in Maryland for the National Park Service’s National Battlefield Protection Program and served as the historian for the “Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail” Study Team of the National Park Service. Mr. Eshelman is the senior author of The War of 1812 in the Chesapeake: A Guide to the Historic Sites of Maryland, Virginia and District of Columbia and the author of A Travel Guide to the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake: Eighteen Tours in Maryland, Virginia, & the District of Columbia. He is also the senior author of In Full Glory Reflected: Discovering the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake (co-authored with Burt Kummerow), a work funded in part by the National Park Service, the Chesapeake Gateways Program, and the Maryland War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission. Mr. Eshelman has two books in press on legends and tales from the War of 1812.

James H.  Johnston

James H. Johnston is a lawyer and writer who grew up in Independence, MO, Harry Truman's hometown. He earned a degree in mathematics from the University of Kansas, and a law degree from the University of Michigan. Mr. Johnston’s law practice in Washington, DC, has been in telecommunications and intellectual property. He turned to writing as a hobby about twenty years ago and it has grown into a second career. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Legal Times of Washington, American Lawyer, and the Maryland Historical Society Magazine. One of those articles, about a slave named Yarrow Mamout, won a journalism award. Mr. Johnston has two books to his credit: The Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough published in 2009, which deals with a woman's recollections of life in Richmond and Washington during the Civil War and From Slave Ship to Harvard:Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family, published in 2012. He resides in Bethesda, MD. NOTE: Direct descendents of Yarrow Mamout, the subject of author James H. Johnston's book, will be attending this panel discussion.

Edward C. Papenfuse Jr.

Moderator - Edward C. Papenfuse Jr. has held the positions of Maryland State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents since 1975. As director of the extensive activities of the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, Dr. Papenfuse is responsible for the Archives' vast collection of government and private materials. He played a major role in the design of the present Archives building which was completed in 1986, initiated the creation of the award-winning Maryland State Archives website, and teaches courses at the University of Maryland, College Park, the University of Maryland Law School, and the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Papenfuse is the author of numerous articles and books, including In Pursuit of Profit: The Annapolis Merchants in the Era of the American Revolution (1975), with Joseph M. Coale, The Hammond-Harwood House Atlas of Historical Maps of Maryland, 1608-1908 (1982), and The Maryland State Archives Atlas of Historical Maps of Maryland 1608-1908 (2003). He has also developed an approach to providing web-based reference services and teaching courses. Dr. Papenfuse received his undergraduate degree from the American University, an M.A. from the University of Colorado, and his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins.

Caroline Leavitt

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, and on the Best Books of 2011 lists from the San Francisco Chronicle, the Providence Journal, Bookmarks, and Kirkus Reviews. A book critic for the Boston Globe and People, her work has appeared in Real Simple, More, Redbook, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and more. Ms. Leavitt teaches novel writing at UCLA and Stanford online and works with writers privately. Her new novel Is This Tomorrow will be published by Algonquin in May 2013. Ms. Leavitt lives in Hoboken, NJ, with her husband and teenage son. Click to view Ms. Leavitt’s website.

Photo by Catherine Pelura

Erika Robuck

Erika Robuck is an avid reader and a contributor to the popular fiction blog, "Writer Unboxed" in addition to maintaining her own blog, "Muse." Her first novel Receive Me Falling was self-published and was a best books awards finalist in historical fiction from USA Book News. Her novel Hemingway's Girl was released in September 2012 by NAL/Penguin, and will be followed by Call Me Zelda in 2013. She is a member the Maryland Writers’ Association, the Hemingway Society and the Historical Novel Society. A native Annapolitan, Ms. Robuck spends her time on the East Coast with her husband and three sons. Click to view her website and click to listen to a segment featuring Ms. Robuck on WYPR's Maryland Morning show.

Photo by Susan Kalergis

Christopher Tilghman

Christopher Tilghman is the author of two short story collections, In a Father's Place and The Way People Run, and three novels, The Right-Hand Short, Mason's Retreat and Roads of the Heart. He is currently the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia and teaches at the Napa Writers’ Conference. After graduating from Yale, where he played bass in a jazz group, Mr. Tilghman served three years in the Navy. He has been a corporate copywriter and journalist and was an editor at the literary magazine Ploughshares. Mr. Tilghman and his wife, writer Caroline Preston, divide their time between Charlottesville, VA, and the Eastern Shore. Click to view Mr. Tilghman’s website.

Bethanne Patrick

Moderator - Bethanne Patrick is a writer and author and journalist-but above all, she's a reader, one who has built her career on talking and writing about books. Known in social media as @TheBookMaven, she founded the popular #fridayreads hashtag in 2009, and has led a weekly conversation that has grown to include tens of thousands of readers around the world. Ms. Patrick’s four-year WETA-PBS show "The Book Studio" featured today's most popular authors, including Julie Andrews, Lidia Bastianich, and Ken Burns. She also helped to launch the AOL Books Channel, Shelf Awareness for Readers, and Book Riot, and has worked as an editor for PAGES magazine and Publishers Weekly. Ms. Patrick is the author of two books, An Uncommon History of Common Things and An Uncommon History of Common Courtesy, both from National Geographic Books. She writes a monthly column for Virginia Quarterly Review on feminism and culture, and her work has appeared in print and online publications including O the Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, AARP The Magazine, The Daily Beast, and TheAtlantic.com. A graduate of Smith College, she holds a master's degree in English from the University of Virginia. She is currently writing a work of literary history for National Geographic Books.

Mickey Edwards

Mickey Edwards is vice president of the Aspen Institute and serves as director of the Aspen Institute’s Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership. He was a Republican member of Congress for sixteen years, serving as a member of the House Republican Leadership and as a member of the Appropriations and Budget Committees. After leaving the Congress, Mr. Edwards taught for eleven years at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and for five years as a lecturer at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Maryland Law School and at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute and a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School. Mr. Edwards is a member of the board of directors of the Constitution Project, has co-chaired task forces on judicial independence and war powers, and served on the American Bar Association Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the American Society of International Law Task Force on the International Criminal Court. He has been a regular political commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and a weekly political columnist for the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, as well as other major newspapers. Mr. Edwards’s articles have appeared in magazines ranging from The Atlantic to The Public Interest. He is a frequent public speaker and has been a guest on many of the nation’s leading radio and television news and opinion broadcasts.

Michael Steele

Moderator - Michael Steele is a  politician, MSNBC political analyst, author, and columnist for the online magazine The Root. He was named as the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2009 through 2011 and, from 2003 to 2007, he served as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. In 2006, Mr. Steele made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, then served as chairman of GOPAC, the political training organization of the Republican party. He was a political commentator for Fox News and a partner at the law firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae LLP before making his bid for RNC Chairman. Mr. Steele co-founded the Republican Leadership Council, a "fiscally conservative and socially inclusive" political action committee, in 1993.

Brigid Kemmerer

Brigid Kemmerer is the author of the Elemental Series (Elemental, Spark, Storm, and Fearless) for young adults. Her latest novel in the series, Spirit, will be released in May, 2013. She has lived all over the United States, from the desert in Albuquerque to the lakeside in Cleveland before settling in the Annapolis area with her husband and three boys. Ms. Kemmerer started writing in high school when she wrote a book about four vampire brothers wreaking havoc in the suburbs. Those four brothers have morphed into the boys living in the pages of the Elemental Series. While most writers require peace and quiet while writing, she prefers pandemonium and writes while her three boys are being “boys” in her home. Click to view Ms. Kemmerer’s website.

Lea Nolan

Lea Nolan writes the kinds of stories she sought as a teen—smart paranormals, bright heroines, crazy-hot heroes, diabolical plot twists, plus a dose of magic, a draft of romance, and a sprinkle of history. She holds degrees in history and women’s studies concentrating in public policy and spent fifteen years as a health policy analyst and researcher. Her debut Young Adult novel, Conjure is book one in The Hoodoo Apprentice Series. Ms. Nolan lives in Edgewater, MD, with her husband and three children.Click to view Ms. Nolan’s website and read about her in the Annapolis Patch article, "Local Women Redefine Careers as Coffee-Shop Novelists."

Jessica Spotswood

Jessica Spotswood is the author of Born Wicked, the first book in the Cahill Witch Chronicles. The sequel, Star Cursed, will be released June 18, 2013. She grew up in a tiny one-stoplight town in Pennsylvania and studied theater in college and graduate school. Now she lives in Washington, DC, with her playwright husband. Click to view Ms. Spotswood’s website.

Jon Skovron

Moderator - Jon Skovron has been an actor, musician, lifeguard, Broadway theater ticket seller, warehouse grunt, technical writer, and web developer. Now he is the author of Young Adult novels Struts & Frets, Misfit, and the forthcoming Man Made Boy (Viking, Oct 2013). He lives with his two sons outside Washington, DC. 

Sharon Lerner

Sharon Lerner is a senior fellow at Demos, a progressive think tank and a contributor to a number of publications, including The American Prospect, The Nation and Slate/XX. She has worked as a public radio producer and a reporter for The Village Voice, where she wrote two regular columns and covered women’s issues and health. Ms. Lerner’s written work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and Ms. among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2005 Front Page Award for News Coverage; the 2005 Jane Cunningham Croly/GFWC Print Journalism Award for excellence in covering issues of concern to women; a special award from the Women and Politics Institute for coverage of women’s issues post-9/11; the Ray Brunner Science Writing Award from the American Public Health Association; and a National Headliner Award for her radio feature reporting. Ms. Lerner lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. Click to view Ms. Lerner's website.

Hanna Rosin

Hanna Rosin is the senior editor at The Atlantic magazine and founder and editor at DoubleX, Slate’s site for women.  She has worked as a staff editor for The New Republic, and has written for GQ and New York magazines, and the Washington Post.  Ms. Rosin has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and The Today Show. She was nominated for a National Magazine Award for her Atlantic story, "A Boy's Life," about transgender children. Ms. Rosin's stories have been included in the anthologies Best American Magazine Writing and Best American Crime Reporting.  She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and three children. Click to view Ms. Rosin’s website.

Stephen D. Wrage

Moderator - Stephen D. Wrage earned his B.A. in classics at Amherst College. On graduating he went to Athens for two years where he taught at Athens College, a school for Greek students. Returning to the U.S. he taught at St. Albans School in Washington, worked at the Brookings Institution, and attended the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Beginning in 1980, he served as assistant dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Dr. Wrage has published scholarly articles and books on a variety of topics in ethics and American foreign policy and is the author of a number of widely-used case studies of actual ethical quandaries experienced by officers in the American military. In 1991 he held a Pew Faculty Fellowship in International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government. In 1995 he spent a Fulbright year teaching at the National University of Singapore and has written about that city-state for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic Monthly. In 2004 he published Immaculate Warfare, a study of the ethical, practical and command issues raised by precision guided munitions. His latest book is Spirits Talking: Six Conversations on Right and Wrong in the Affairs of States. Dr. Wrage is an open ocean sailor and brews his own beer.

Photo by Andrew Olsen

Corey Olsen

Corey Olsen is an assistant professor of English at Washington College in Chestertown, MD, where he teaches courses on topics such as Chaucer, courtly love, Arthurian literature, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is the president and founder of the Mythgard Institute, a new online teaching center for the study of Tolkien and other works of imaginative literature. His website and podcasts, where Dr. Olsen brings his scholarship on Tolkien to the public, are extremely popular. The site has attracted more than 1.8 million visitors since its launch and there have been more than 275,000 downloads of his podcasted lectures. The producers at the History Channel took notice, inviting Dr. Olsen to discuss Tolkien as part of their series, "Clash of the Gods." He earned his B.A. in English and astrophysics from Williams College and his Ph.D. in medieval literature from Columbia University. Click to view Dr. Olsen's website.

Alex Cortright

Moderator - Alex Cortright is the morning show host and music director of Annapolis radio station, WRNR. For more than a decade, Mr. Cortright has voiced countless commercials and narrated many documentaries, corporate presentations and training films. He has interviewed world-renowned personalities in the entertainment industry including musicians, writers, actors, as well as politicians. Mr. Cortright lends his voice to charitable events and to arts organizations like the Art League and the Maryland Federation of Art. He has been a moderator for the Annapolis Book Festival since 2009.

Peter Beilenson

Peter Beilenson is the CEO of Evergreen Health Cooperative, a member-owned health care model authorized by the Affordable Care Act. He spent twenty years in public health leadership having served as Howard County Health Officer and Baltimore City Health Commissioner.  Dr. Beilenson has received many national and local awards for his innovative health policies including the Milton and Ruth Roemer Award from the American Public Health Association, Innovator of the Year Award from The Daily Record, and a Baltimore Power 20 Award from the Baltimore Business Journal. He received an undergraduate degree from Harvard, an M.D. from Emory University School of Medicine, and a master's degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. In his book Tapping into The Wire, Dr. Beilenson uses episodes of HBO’s inner city drama The Wire to challenge misconceptions about real-world connections between drugs, crime and poverty, and the public health role in addressing these issues.

Photo by David Kidd

Alan Ehrenhalt

Alan Ehrenhalt, one of nation’s leading urbanologists, is a contributing editor at Governing magazine and a lecturer in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.  He is the author of The United States of Ambition, The Lost City, and Democracy in the Mirror. Mr. Ehrenhalt has contributed to the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, and the Wall Street Journal. In 2000, he was the recipient of the American Political Science Association's Carey McWilliams Award for distinguished contributions to the field of political science by a journalist. He lives in Arlington, VA.

Charlie Flanagan

Moderator - Charlie Flanagan is the director of educational programs at the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives in Washington, DC. Previously, he was a teacher and Humanities Department Chair at The Key School for two decades.

Lee Kravitz

Lee Kravitz is an award-winning journalist, editor and media executive. In October 2007, after losing his job as editor-in-chief of Parade, the Sunday newspaper magazine, he went on ten journeys to close circles and make amends. The resulting book, Unfinished Business: One Man's Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things (Bloomsbury), has been called "a great lesson for us all" (Mitch Albom) and "a triumphant love letter to the human condition" (Marlo Thomas) and has been published in eight languages. The paperback edition (with a forward by Passages author Gail Sheehy) features an Unfinished Business Toolkit for people who are seeking to grow, heal and reinvent themselves in these uncertain times. Mr. Kravitz has appeared on the Today Show and NPR's Talk of the Nation and been profiled in Reader's Digest, USA Today and many other publications. He writes an Unfinished Business blog for PsychologyToday.com. Click to view Mr. Kravitz's website.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is an award-winning science journalist and public speaker. She has appeared on The Today Show, National Public Radio, and ABC News. Ms. Nakazawa has been a regular contributor to More, and her work has appeared in Parade, Time, Parenting, Psychology Today, The Washington Post, Glamour, and Ladies Home Journal. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2012 AESKU award, presented to those who have made a lifetime contribution to the field of autoimmune disease. She received her undergraduate degree from Duke University and is a graduate of the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Program. Click to view Ms. Nakazawa's website.

Mary Truitt Hill

Moderator - Mary Truitt Hill, winner of a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and a Maryland State Arts Council Award in Fiction, has been teaching in Key’s Upper School Humanities Department for fourteen years. Prior to coming to Key, Ms. Hill taught literature and writing at George Washington University and the College of William and Mary. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a degree in art history and literature, and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University in creative writing. Ms. Hill, who is the mother of five children, is currently writing a book about natural childbirth.

Photo by Rick's Image Works

Kenneth D. Ackerman

Kenneth D. Ackerman, a writer and attorney in Washington, DC, has a special interest in history, especially overlooked eras like the Gilded Age or the post-World War I Red Scare. He is a blogger and runs a publishing house, Viral History Press. Mr. Ackerman has written dozens of articles and is the author of The Gold Ring : Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869; Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield; Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York; and Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties. His newest work is the ebook, Abraham Lincoln's Convention: Chicago 1860. Click to visit his webpage page.

Photo by Dan Murano

Grace Cavalieri

Grace Cavalieri is the author of sixteen books and chap-books of poetry, including her newest chap-book, Gotta Go Now. Ms. Cavalieri has had twenty-eight plays produced, most recently “Anna Nicole: Blonde Glory” in New York City in 2011. She founded two small presses, both of which are still thriving, The Washington Writer’s Publishing House and The Bunny and the Crocodile Press. Now celebrating her thirty-sixth year on-air, Ms. Cavalieri produces and hosts “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” for public radio and she is the poetry columnist for the Washington Independent Review of Books. Among honors she holds is the 2013 George Garrett Award, the Pen-Fiction Award, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, the Bordighera Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Award, the inaugural Columbia Award, and the CPB Silver Medal. Click to visit Ms. Cavalieri's webpage page.

Thor Sigvaldason

Thor Sigvaldason is the former head of an advanced technology group within the consulting practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers which included regular briefings on the impact of emerging technologies. Mr. Sigvaldason has over twenty years of experience with computers in a variety of disciplines and holds advanced degrees in economics. He has had several appointments at research centers including McGill University, the Canadian Institute for Public Policy, and the London School of Economics.

Laura Strachan

Laura Strachan founded Strachan Literary Agency in 1998, which specializes in representing literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. Ms. Strachan is a current member of both the Maryland and District of Columbia Bars, as well as the Author's Guild, and was cited in the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Poets & Writer's Magazine as one of "21 Agents You Should Know." Strachan Literary Agency is located in Annapolis, Maryland.

Stewart Moss

Moderator - Stewart Moss is the Executive Director of The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, one of the largest literary centers in the country. Prior to coming to the Center, Mr. Moss worked for more than thirty years as an educator and fundraiser in educational institutions around the country. An avid poet, he has taught literature and creative writing in both the USA and abroad. Scotland, Greece, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and Nepal are among the countries in which he has lived and worked. A native of Boston, Mr. Moss lives in Annapolis.  

Susan Coll

Susan Coll is the events and programs director at Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC. She is also the author of four novels, including Acceptance and Beach Week. Her fifth novel, The Stager, will be published by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar Straus and Giroux in 2014. Click to view Ms. Coll’s website.

Gary Krist

Before turning to narrative nonfiction with The White Cascade and his latest book, the New York Times bestseller City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster that Gave Birth to Modern Chicago, Mr. Krist wrote three novels―Bad Chemistry, Chaos Theory and Extravagance and two short-story collections―The Garden State and Bone by Bone. He has been a regular book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, Salon, and The Washington Post Book World, and his stories, articles and travel pieces have been featured in National Geographic Traveler, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Playboy, The New Republic, Esquire, and on National Public Radio's "Selected Shorts." Mr. Krist's stories have also been anthologized in such collections as Men Seeking Women, Writers' Harvest 2, and Best American Mystery Stories. He has been the recipient of the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Travel Journalism, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Krist lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Click to read a New York Times book review of City of Scoundrels.

Margaret Talbot

Margaret Talbot has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 2003. Prior to that she was a contributing writer at The New York Times magazine and executive editor at The New Republic magazine. Ms. Talbot’s articles and essays have been collected in anthologies including The Best American Science Writing and The Anchor Essay Annual, and she is the recipient of a 1999 Whiting Writer's Award. She chronicles the life of her father, veteran Warner Bros. actor Lyle Talbot, in her first book, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century. Ms. Talbot lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and two children.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of the forthcoming novel Man Alive! (due out September 3, 2013), as well as The Bowl Is Already Broken and The Frequency of Souls, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her fiction has won the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy, the James Jones First Novel Award, and the American Short(er) Fiction Award, and has been nominated for the Orange Prize. Ms. Zuravleff has taught writing in many graduate programs, including American University and Johns Hopkins University, and was the first writer-in-residence at St. Albans School for Boys. She lives in Washington, DC. Click to view Ms. Zuravleff’s website.

Amin Ahmad

Moderator - Amin Ahmad grew up in India, was educated at MIT, and worked for many years as an international architect before taking up writing full time. His short stories and essays on immigrant life have been published in the Missouri Review, the Harvard Review, the New England Review, Narrative Magazine, and the Good Men Project. He's been a finalist for Glimmertrain's Short Story Award, and been listed in Best American Essays. His first thriller, The Caretaker, will be published in May 2013, and the second, Bollywood Taxi, in 2014. Both feature the adventures of illegal immigrant Ranjit Singh. He currently teaches the ‘Master Novel’ class at The Bethesda Writer’s Center and lives in Washington, DC.

Kwame Alexander

Kwame Alexander is the author of fourteen books including the children’s books Indigo Blume and the Garden City and Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band, both of which received NAACP Image Award Nominations for Outstanding Children’s Literature. His Book-in-a-Day writing and publishing program has helped create more than 2,500 student authors in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean. Mr. Alexander has led delegations of writers to Brazil, Tuscany and Ghana. Most recently, he co-founded the L.E.A.P. for Ghana initiative, which provides literacy, school improvement and girls’ empowerment programming in the community of Konko Village, located in the Eastern Region of Ghana, West Africa. Click to view Mr. Alexander’s website.

Artie Bennett

Artie Bennett is the author of four children’s books and the executive copy editor for a children’s book publisher. The Brooklyn, New York native is hailed as “the Dr. Seuss of your caboose.” He earned this title after writing The Butt Book which was published in 2010. The book was honored with the prestigious Reuben Award for book illustration. Mr. Bennett’s latest release is Poopendous!, which is receiving national accolades. The Huffington Post says, “There is no topic Mr. Bennett can’t make funny and educational.”  At age thirteen, he was the youngest person to sell a crossword puzzle to the New York Times.  Mr. Bennett lives with his wife in Brooklyn, NY. Click to view Mr. Bennett’s website. He is featured in an article in Eye on Annapolis.

Photo by Kay Klubertanz

Kathleen Ernst

Kathleen Ernst is a historical novelist, social historian and educator. She has written six bestselling books about Caroline Abbott, American Girl’s newest historical character. Her newest, Traitor in the Shipyard, is due out in March. Ms. Ernst’s fiction for children and young adults also includes nine American Girl mysteries set between 1732 and 1945, five novels set during the American Civil War, and a contemporary novel. She has served as curator of interpretation and collections at an outdoor living history museum called Old World Wisconsin. Ms. Ernst has received Edgar and Agatha Award nominations and an Emmy Award for a video scripted for public television. She has a master’s degree in history education and writing from Antioch University, where her self-designed program included a strong focus on historical fiction. Ms. Ernst lives and writes in Middleton, WI. Click to view Ms. Ernst's website

Anne Hambleton

Anne Hambleton is a retired amateur steeplechase jockey and the author of Raja: Story of a Racehorse, a touching and realistic young reader fiction story about. Learn how her horses and racing career inspired the writing of the book, which tells of the tragedies and triumphs that befall a thoroughbred racehorse—from the horse's point of view.

David A. Kelly

David A. Kelly is an established children's book author, travel writer and technology analyst. He's the author of the Ballpark Mysteries series from Random House, in which cousins Kate and Mike solve mysteries at different major league ballparks. Mr. Kelly is also the author of the early reader, Babe Ruth and the Baseball Curse and the new picture book Miracle Mud: Lena Blackburne and Secret Mud that Changed Baseball. He has written about travel and technology for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun Times, and many other publications. He's currently the business travel guide for About.com. Mr. Kelly lives in Newton, MA, with his wife and two teenage boys. Click to view Mr. Kelly's website.