Authors and Experts

(in alphabetical order)

   Robert Alan Black, Ph.D., CSP, is an International Creative Thinking Consultant who gives keynote speeches, leads workshops and teaches in-depth training programs in creative thinking tools, techniques and processes around the US and the world. Each year he is a presenter at several creativity conferences and works with clients on five continents. Alan has written and co-authored several books on creativity and training in the US, South Africa, Slovakia, Turkey and Japan with new ones scheduled in 2007 in the US and the UK. Alan's session on Saturday is NO MORE CREATIVE WRITING BLOCKS, a session designed to provide you tools and techniques to: 1) respark, 2) increase, 3) enrich your creativeness and 4) make your writing more creative and more fun to do (2007 class handouts).

  Evelyn Coleman’s children’s books, White Socks Only, The Glass Bottle Tree, The Foot Warmer and the Crow, The Riches of Oseola McCarty, and To Be a Drum have received praise and recognition including these honors: Parents Choice Honor Book; American Booksellers Association’s Pick of the Lists; the Smithsonian Most Outstanding Children’s Book Title; Publisher’s Weekly’s Cuffie Award; Notable Children’s Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies; selected as Children’s Book of the Year; Texas Blue Bonnet List; Society of School Librarians International Honor Book; a Carter G. Woodson Honor Book; Stepping Stones Honor Award; nominated for Children’s Crown Award and The Young Hoosier Book Award; The Horn Book recommended title and many other public school lists. The film of White Socks Only from Phoenix Films, produced by Academy Award winning Barbara Bryant and adapted by Coleman, won the Bronze Award at the Worldfest Houston Film Festival. Her children’s books are a part of the Screen Actor’s Guild’s Book Pals National Campaigns.

Her young adult & juvenile books include Shadows on Society Hill, American Girl, which just received a nomination for an Edgar Award; the newly released Freedom Train, McElderry Books; Born in Sin, Atheneum, a Junior Library Guild selection; and Circle of Fire , Mystery of the Dark Tower, both American Girl History Mysteries. Coleman’s children’s short stories have appeared in Make Me Over by Marilyn Singer and also appear in Scholastic’s Read and Rise Magazine.

Coleman’s adult short stories and essays have been included in Proverbs for the People, an anthology edited by Tracy Price Thompson & TaRessa Stovall; shades of black: Crime & Mysteries by African American Writers, edited by Eleanor Taylor Bland; and Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood, edited by Cecelie Berry. Coleman’s adult fiction and non-fiction have also appeared in Essence, Black Enterprise, Accent On Living, Jive, Southern Exposure, Catalyst Literary Magazine, The Quarterly Black Review, the Utne Reader and numerous newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal & Constitution.

What a Woman’s Gotta Do, Evelyn Coleman’s adult thriller, garnered rave reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, the Chronicle for Higher Learning, and numerous other publications. Mimi Leder, Academy award winning director of the movies Deep Impact and The Peacemaker optioned What a Woman’s Gotta Do for a feature film.

Coleman was recently the recipient of the Dekalb Public Library’s Trail Blazer Award. She is the recipient of the 38th Annual Georgia Author of the Year Award, Children/Young Adult Literature, 2002 King Baudouin /Belgium Cultural Exchange Fellowship, honored in 2003 by the Black & Latino Caucus of the NCTE, 2000 Atlanta Mayor’s Fellowship, the North Carolina’s Arts Council’s Fiction Fellowship and was honored at the AmiGals Literary Retreat as Author of the Year. Coleman is the past President of the Southeast Region, Mystery Writers of America; and a former member of Sisters in Crime, Novelists, Inc.; Author’s Guild; Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators; Children’s Literature Association. Coleman has been a past-certified instructor for the Institute of Children’s Literature, and for thirteen years, she was a psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, and stress management trainer.

Coleman resides in Atlanta with her husband, Talib Din, and her granddaughter, Taylor Parker. She has two wonderfully creative adult daughters and a mother to die for. Coleman loves black men and feels black women have focused far too long on romantic love issues with our men. We all need to exercise more agape love.

 Author Susan Dansby has received four Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy® Awards and the 2007 Writers Guild of America Award for her continuing work as a writer on the CBS daytime drama, AS THE WORLD TURNS. In addition, she is a professional television director. Her credits include GUIDING LIGHT, GHOSTWRITER, SESAME STREET and GENERAL HOSPITAL. Susan has also worked in casting Off-Broadway and Broadway productions and various television shows. She holds a BFA in Drama from Carnegie-Mellon University.

  Wally Eberhard is a free-lance writer, former newspaper and magazine writer and editor, and professor emeritus from the Grady College of Journalism, University of Georgia. He taught news and magazine writing at all levels, along with a required course in media law for journalism students. His writing has appeared in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals and the final edition of O! Georgia. He is a longtime spearbearer in the legions of Harriette Austin's students, where he is beginning to get the hang of doing good fiction. A native of Niles, Michigan, he holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Bowling Green State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His Saturday session is Protecting What you Create: Copyright Basics for Writers, covering the essentials of the law from a writer's perspective (2007 class handout).

  Andy Garrison has over 30 years of law enforcement experienceand has spent the last 23 years teaching in the police academy.  His major topics of instruction include Criminal Law, Search & Seizure Law, Crime Scene Processing,  Interviews & Interrogations, Firearms Training, Forensic Hypnosis and many more. He has worked on many major crime scene cases including the infamous T.K. Harty murder case here in Athens. His presentation on Saturday is Processing a Crime-Scene...How do they do that?

 Alex Graves is currently Primary Lead Instructor with Rolling Thunder Law Enforcement Training and is also employed as an Instructor with the Physical Techniques Division at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC). Prior to his present assignment, he served as Sr. Program Specialist for the Domestic Violence Indian Country Training Program at the Office of State and Local Training Division at FLETC. He joined FLETC after working for two years with Cangleska Inc., as a Law Enforcement Training Specialist. His responsibilities included curriculum development and implementation for law enforcement within the State of South Dakota and tribal law enforcement around the country. He was also a Special Investigator for the Oglala Lakota Attorney General. Prior to joining the staff of Cangleska, Inc, he served for twelve years as a Detective with the Hawaii County Police Department. There he supervised Area II (the West Hawaii) Criminal Investigation Section, Domestic Violence Unit.

Before joining the Hawaii County Police Department, Detective Graves served in the Unites States Marine Corps for six and one-half years. He was assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe and Marine Corps Air Station Tustin/El Toro. His investigative experience includes undercover narcotics, child and elder abuse and neglect, domestic violence, sexual assault, homicide, and other felony offenses. He is certified by the Judiciary of the State of Hawaii as a child forensic interviewer. He is certified as a DNA Recovery in Sexual Assault Investigations Instructor, and an S.T.A.R. Domestic Violence Instructor.

Graves has served as the Co-Chair for the West Hawaii Domestic Violence Interagency team, and as a Commissioner on the Hawaii County Family Advisory Commission. He has been published on the topics of forensic interviewing of children, intra-agency trainers, domestic violence and child abuse, officer involved domestic violence and has presented at seminars around the country on officer survival, firearms training, the causation of youth’s at risk, Violence Against Women’s Act, and officer involved domestic violence. He as served as consultant on response to victims for the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Department of Justice Technical Working Group on the investigation of crimes involving the Internet.

He has been an active volunteer with Special Olympics on the State and National levels. He has been a volunteer at the Hawaii Youth Correction Facility, volunteered and served as Director for the “Hawaii Youth at Risk” program. He was an active member of the American Society for Law Enforcement Trainers (ASLET), is currently an active member of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association(ILEETA). He serves as a volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for Glynn County, GA.

 Darrell Huckaby is a native of Porterdale, Georgia and has graduated from the University of Georgia twice–so far. He teaches US History at Heritage High School in Conyers where he lives with his wife of 25 years, Lisa, and their three children, Jamie, Jackson, and Jenna. In addition to his teaching duties Darrell also writes a syndicated newspaper column that appears in several papers across the South, including the Sunday Athens Banner-Herald, and also writes for several magazines. He has published eight books to date, including two– Need Two and Need Four –about University of Georgia football. He has also published three collections of his columns– Grits is Groceries and Southern is as Southern Does, and What the Huck! The Wit amd Wisdom of the Last Southerner, a biography of rock-star-turned-preacher, Lenny Stadler called Hard Rock to Solid Rock, a cookbook, Dinner on the Grounds, and All Fifty, a lighthearted look at his family's vacation odyssey which took them to all 50 US states. He also does a weekly commentary on the Moby in the Morning syndicated radio show which appears in several markets in 5 states. Above all, he is a Southerner, born and bred, and proud of it. He travels extensively across the South sharing his views on Southern life the way it is, the way it used to be, and the way he thinks it should be.

 Judy Iakovou is the author of the Nick and Julia Lambros mystery series in collaboration with her husband, Takis. Their first book, So Dear To Wicked Men debuted from St. Martin’s Press in 1996 with a Kirkus starred review. Since that time, they have published Go Close Against the Enemy, There Lies A Hidden Scorpion and, in the anthology Deadly Morsels, the novella "Another’s Curse." The couple has been featured in articles in Mary Higgins Clark’s Mystery Magazine, The Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Athens Banner Herald.

Recently, writing under the name of Ann Stamos, Judy has sold the debut novel in a historical mystery series set on Ellis Island at the turn of the century. Bitter Tide is set to come out in late 2008 or early 2009 from Five Star Mystery. With Bitter Tide, she has called upon her considerable personal experience with a very multicultural family to explore the issues of immigration and assimilation, set against the backdrop of the New York of the Gilded Age. She is currently working on the second novel in the series.

Judy is an experienced teacher, having taught The Basic Elements of Fiction through the University of Georgia Continuing Education, as well as teaching First Year Composition and Multicultural Literature in the English department at UGA. She has also been a presenter at the Harriette Austin Writers Conference several times previously. Although writing is her first love, teaching runs it a close second. She is also an academic advisor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at UGA. She has two children and two grandchildren, and resides in Athens with her husband.

  Georgia Writers Hall of Fame member Terry Kay will be presenting a Friday workshop and will host the Friday night Writer's Dinner. He was born in Hart County, Georgia, and began his career in journalism in 1959 at the Decatur-DeKalb News, a weekly newspaper in Decatur (GA) and later worked for The Atlanta Journal as a sportswriter and, for eight years, as one of America's leading film-theater critics. His first novel, published in 1976, was The Year the Lights Came On, a story inspired by his memory of the coming of electricity to his rural community.

Kay's signature novel, To Dance With the White Dog, was released in 1990, quickly taking its place among Southern literary classics and establishing Kay as one of the region's foremost writers. In 1993 it was presented as a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie for CBS television, starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. The production earned the highest television rating of the 1993 season, with more than 33 million viewers.

Kay's latest novel, The Valley of Light (Atria Books - an imprint of Simon & Schuster), tells the story of a gifted wandering fisherman following World War II. It won both the 2004 Townsend Award and the Best Fiction Award from the Georgia Writers Association for 2004, and was Kay's third novel to be selected by Hallmark for production.

Kay has been married for 49 years and has four children and eight grandchildren. He currently resides in Athens, Georgia.

 Women's fiction novelist Tanya Michna (Necessary Arrangements, NAL Accent) is also award-winning romance author Tanya Michaels. Writing as Michaels, she's sold tweny-tive books, many of which have been nominated for numerous readers' choice and reviewers' choice awards as well as Romance Writers of America's prestigious RITA. She's also the two-time recipient of the Booksellers' Best Award and a 2007 winner of the Maggie Award For Excellence, given by Georgia Romance Writers. Her stories have been translated into nearly a dozen languages for distribution around the world. Tanya is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Houston-Victoria and a lifelong compulsive reader. She lives in Georgia with her husband, two small children, and a houseful of books.  

 J.L. (Jackie Lee) Miles (www.jlmiles.com), a resident of Georgia for thirty years, hails from Wisconsin via South Dakota. She considers herself “a northern girl with a southern heart”. Her paternal grandfather was christened Grant Lee by her great-grandmother in honor of the many fallen soldiers on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

 
Ms. Miles is a former D.I.A.L. Systems Engineer for Baker/Audio Telecom, one of the premier forerunners of voice mail. In addition to systems application, she provided voice tracks for several major companies, including Delta Airlines and Frito-Lay Corporation. A former Miss Racine, Wisconsin, Ms. Miles made television, print and fashion appearances, and participated in various stage productions, including “Joan of Lorraine”, “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” and “The Miracle Worker”.

 
Ms. Miles resides in Atlanta, Georgia and Cape Canaveral, Florida along with her husband Robert, where she is a featured speaker at book clubs, local schools, and writer’s workshops. Her debut novel Roseflower Creek was Cumberland House Publishing’s lead book when it debuted in hardcover. It’s now available in trade paperback. Earl Hamner, creator of The Waltons calls it “A powerful, extraordinary novel.” The late William Diehl wrote, “The lyric prose will thrill you, the story is unforgettable, and the characters will stay with you forever.” Cold Rock River, the journey of two young women born a century apart debuted October 2006 in hardcover. N.Y. TIMES best-selling author Dorothea Benton Frank writes: “Cold Rock River by J. L. Miles is a powerful story of family, love and loss that will keep you up into the wee hours. Absolutely wonderful! Beautifully told and straight from the heart of an exquisitely talented writer.”

When not writing, Miles tours with The Dixie Divas, four nationally published book-writing belles serving up helpings of down-home humor and warmth.

 
The Dwayne Series debuts in 2008. It’s a southern anthology featuring Francine Harper, under felony assault charges for shooting at her husband Dwayne and his stripper lover Carla from the Peel 'n Squeal, who discovers her strengths and reclaims her dignity via a trial and many errors.