Broadleaf Writers Association Founder & Executive Director Zachary Steele is the author of four novels, including The Weight of Ashes, nominated for Georgia Author of the Year in 2021, and Perfectly Normal (April 2024). He has been featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Publisher’s Weekly, Writer’s Magazine, Shelf Awareness and City Lights with Lois Reitzes on NPR. Currently, he is hard at work on The Fallen Hero, the first in a series of fantasy novels. You can follow his ramblings on writing and life at http://zacharysteele.com/.
Jessica Bowers brings a deep love of storytelling and a drive to help writers amplify their voice. Her day job revolves around social media marketing, content creation, and performance management coaching for organizations throughout North America. She graduated from Kennesaw State University with a Bachelor’s in Sociology with a concentration on Social and Organizational Change.
Jeff Clemmons has a degree in business administration from Reinhardt University and a degree in creative writing and theater from Georgia State University. He created and conducts walking tours for the Atlanta Preservation Center, serves on the board of the East Point Historical Society, and is a cofounder of Marthasville, an Atlanta-based writing salon. In addition to writing two books – Rich’s: A Southern Institution and Atlanta’s Historic Westview Cemetery – and a screenplay, Jeff, along with three others, was nominated for an Emmy Award for producing Georgia Public Television’s “Rich’s Remembered.” He is currently at work on his third book, a biography of forgotten Atlanta avant-garde novelist Frances Newman, who gained national attention alongside Hemingway and others in the 1920s.
C. O. Davidson’s fiction has appeared on PseudoPod and in Vastarien, Cemetery Gates, and the anthologies Georgia Gothic and Generation X-ed. She also co-edited Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable, a collection of scholarly essays. A founding member of the Atlanta Chapter of the Horror Writers Association, she also teaches Gothic lit., slasher films, and comic books as an English Professor at Middle Georgia State University. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @colearydavidson.
A graduate of Florida State University, Robert Gwaltney presently resides in Atlanta, Georgia. By day, he serves as Vice President of Easter Seals North Georgia, Inc., a non-profit organization that strengthens children and their families during the most critical times in their development. Through his non-profit work, he is a champion of early childhood literacy. Robert also serves as contributing editor for The Blue Mountain Review. In all the hours between, he writes. The Cicada Tree is his debut novel.
At age 51, Ann Hite became a published novelist. Hite’s debut novel, “Ghost On Black Mountain”, won Georgia Author Of The Year and was a Townsend Prize Finalist in 2012. She is the author of the following books, The Storycatcher 2013 Simon & Schuster, Where The Souls Go 2015 Mercer University Press, Sleeping above Chaos 2016 Mercer University Press, a novella Lowcountry Spirit 2013 Pocket Book, Going to the Water Firefly Southern Fiction 2021, Haints on Black Mountain: a haunted short story collection 2022 Mercer University Press, and a memoir, Roll The Stone Away 2020 Mercer University Press. Her books have been finalists in IndieFab and Georgia Author of the Year Awards. She has been nominated for two Pushcarts. Being a city girl most of her life, Ann now writes each day in her home office that looks out on a decent clutter of trees, where she is hard at work on a biography of Lucille Selig Frank, Leo Frank’s wife.
Even though she majored in English at Florida State University, Maryann Lozano didn’t start writing until later in life. After spending many years noodling around with NaNoWriMo, books about writing, and writing prompts, she decided to get serious and enrolled in the Masters of Professional Writing program at Kennesaw State University. She graduated with honors in December 2019.
Eliot Parker is the author of five novels, most recently A Final Call, recipient of an Eric Hoffer Book Award – Finalist The da Vinci Eye for best cover design, Southern California Book Festival Award – Best General Fiction, London Book Festival Award, National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist – Thrillers and a Los Angeles Book Festival Award. A Knife’s Edge, which was an Honorable Mention in Thriller Writing at the London Book Festival, and is the sequel to the award-winning novel Fragile Brilliance. His novel Code for Murder was named a 2018 Finalist for Genre Fiction by American Book Fest. He is a recipient of the West Virginia Literary Merit Award and Fragile Brilliance was a finalist for the Southern Book Prize in Thriller Writing. He recently received with the Thriller Writing Award by the National Association of Book Editors (NABE) for his novels.
Carmen Tanner Slaughter was the chairperson for the Canton Festival of the Arts Literary Celebration for seven years and has been emcee for GospelFest, an ecumenical service celebrating Black History Month, since 2009. Carmen has also been a featured storyteller at many of Atlanta’s literary events including Carapace, Stories on the Square, and the Peach State Storytelling Festival. In addition, Carmen has served as emcee and presenter at the reading series, A Novel Idea, and she has been a panelist at Berry College’s Southern Women Writers Conference. She was recently selected as co-moderator for the Southern Region of the online community What Would Virginia Woolf Do? She lives in Canton, GA.
Vania Stoyanova is a writer and co-founder of young adult talk show YATL Live, part of the monthly programming of Georgia Center for the Book. She’s worked with authors and publishers creating social media content and social media strategies. She has a passion for innovative and diverse story telling, she’s an idea person and looks for creative ways to tell stories. She’s hard at work on her YA sci-fi Graphic Novel.