Christine Adams has just completed a collection of poems entitled Setting the Table in the Age of Reason, and is currently in the research phase of a piece of creative non-fiction, highlighting the restoration of a beloved 18th-Century cottage.  She also writes for the local press and not-for-profts on a free-lance basis, and is a certified grant writer. Chris studied English and Creative Writing at Gettysburg College.  The mother of three children, she is the former Legal Recruitment Manager of the New York office of Cravath Swaine and Moore, and lived in Paris, France from 2002 – 2006, where she studied the French language and ate a lot of cheese.

Joanne Childs-Ashe is a mother, ex-wife, spoken word artist/poet, author, grandmother, perpetual volunteer, educator and stand-up comic who currently teaches in the Montclair Public Schools and has volunteered for decades as a tutor, mentor and poetry instructor. Childs-Ashe also directed, produced and performed as a member of the steering committee for “The Gathering”, a women’s writers group, founded by the Oscar winning actress, Olympia Dukakis. As a spoken-word artist, Joanne (also known as, N’Jie) has performed from San Francisco to Senegal, and more locally, in New York City, at the famed Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe, The Knitting Factory, The Schomberg Institute, etc.

Bestselling author of Missing Pages, Out Of My Life, Elijah M. Brown hails from Newark, NJ. He is a Motivational Speaker, Educator, Actor & Director of manUP The Play, Curator for Planet Hip Hop at NJPAC, Producer, Publisher, Creative Writing Instructor and Mentor. He also authored It Takes a Child to Raise a Village, In Two Weeks, and his first children book Letters Make Words, where alphabets are given human characteristics. He will be releasing Missing Pages, Out My Life Special Edition 10 Years Later.

Alicia Cook is an established essayist and poet, aspiring songwriter, and award-winning advocate for families affected by drug addiction. She has been featured in and has contributed to popular media outlets including the HuffPost, Thrive, USA Today, the NY Post, CNN, the Asbury Park Press, Teen Vogue, Bustle, American Songwriter Magazine, the LA Times, and on PBS. Her best-selling book of poetry, Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately, was a finalist in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. Her second poetry collection, I Hope My Voice Doesn’t Skip, was released by Andrews McMeel Publishing in June of 2018. She lives in Newark, NJ and works at Bloomfield College.

Claudia Cortese is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer and the author of the following books: Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), winner of the Devil's Kitchen Award in Emerging Poetry from Southern Illinois University; Blood Medals (Thrush Press, 2015); and The Red Essay and Other Histories (Horse Less Press, 2015). She has published work in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, and The Offing, among others. Cortese writes book reviews for Muzzle Magazine and is an associate editor at Tupelo Quarterly. Cortese grew up in Ohio and lives in New Jersey where she teaches at Montclair State University. claudia-cortese.com

Abby Clements was a second grade teacher at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut, for 11 years. She and her students survived the shooting on December 14, 2012, which took the lives of 20 first graders and six educators. Since the shooting, Abbey has been a gun violence prevention activist and volunteer leader with Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety in America. She is now teaching fourth grade at another Newtown elementary school.

Brian Clements is co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence and author or editor of over a dozen other collections of poetry. He is Professor of Writing, Linguistics, and Creative Process at Western Connecticut State University and lives in Newtown, CT with his wife, Abbey, a teacher and survivor of the Sandy Hook School shooting.

Gretchen Gomez is a Puerto Rican poet from The Bronx. When home you will find her watching crime shows, cuddling with her dog, or writing--trying to make sense of things. Gretchen is a full-time lover of words. She is also the author of love, and you and welcome to ghost town.

Johnny Lorenz is the son of Brazilian immigrants to the U.S., and he received his doctorate in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. He is an associate professor at Montclair State University. His poems have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Quiddity, Rattapallax and the anthology Luso-American Literature.  In 2013, he was a finalist for Best Translated Book for his translation of A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector (New Directions), and his translation of Lispector's The Besieged City will appear in April 2019.  His book of poems, Education by Windows, was published by Poets & Traitors Press in the summer of 2018.

Growing up a word-devourer & avid fairytale lover, it was only natural that Amanda Lovelace began writing books of her own. When she isn’t reading or writing, she can be found waiting for pumpkin spice coffee to come back into season and binge-watching Gilmore girls (before you ask: Team Jess all the way). The lifelong poetess and storyteller currently lives in New Jersey with her spouse, their bunnycat, and a combined book collection so large it will soon need its own home. She has her B.A. in English literature with a minor in sociology. Winner of two Goodreads choice awards for best poetry and a USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestseller.

Meghan Privitello is the author of A New Language for Falling out of Love (YesYes Books, 2015), Notes on the End of the World, winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), and One God at a Time (forthcoming, YesYes Books, 2019). Poems have appeared in Guernica, Gulf Coast, A Public Space, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a New Jersey State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and winner of the 2018 NJ Poets Prize.

Frank Rubino’s poetry has been published in Vending Machine, DMQ Review, The Cape Rock, Caliban Online, Caveat Lector, Inscape, The Oleander Review, The World, and Little Light, among others. His poem, I'm Alive was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Carbon Culture Review. He’s performed his poetry since 1982, reading at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, The Ear Inn, The Cornelia Street Cafe, and numerous other locations in and around NYC. Like most other poets he knows, Rubino has a job— in a tech startup. He Instagrams as @xmlnovelist and lives in New Jersey.

Vincent Toro is the author of Stereo.Island.Mosaic., which was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of a Poet's House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile de Jongh Poetry Prize, and the MetLife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. He teaches English at Bronx Community College, is poet in the schools for Dreamyard and the Dodge Poetry Foundation, is writing liaison for Cooper Union’s Saturday Program, and is a contributing editor at Kweli Literary Journal.

John J. Trause, the Director of Oradell Public Library, is the author of Why Sing?, Picture This: For Your Eyes and Ears, Exercises in High Treason, Eye Candy for Andy, Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round, Seriously Serial,  and Latter-Day Litany, the latter staged Off Broadway.  His translations, poetry, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, including Rabbit Ears: TV Poems.  Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets.  He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, N. J., and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series.

Jaime Bedrin teaches in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. She is also an advisor in the student internship program and coordinates the school’s weekly colloquium series. She started the local (Essex County) chapter of Moms Demand Action six years ago, immediately following the Sandy Hook School shooting. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two sons.

Larry Dark is the director of The Story Prize, an annual book award for short story collections established in 2004. Before that, he served as series editor of the annual Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards volumes for six years. He has published four other anthologies, including The Literary Ghost and Literary Outtakes.He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, author Alice Elliott Dark.

Larry Engelstein is the Executive Vice-President of Local 32BJ, Service Employees International Union, a 170,000 member Local Union representing janitors, apartment house workers, security officers, airport workers, food service workers and other property service workers in eleven states along the east coast. Prior to joining Local 32BJ in 1999, he was an Associate General Counsel of the SEIU, and the AFL-CIO, represented local unions, and workers in New England, and Illinois, and worked as a community organizer in Chicago.

Daniel Greenberg is a principal at Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency, where he has worked for the last 25 years. He represents many New York Times bestselling authors.

Tracy Higgins is a law professor at Fordham Law School where she teaches U.S. constitutional law and international human rights. She is also the founder of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, which seeks to promote respect for international human rights at home and abroad through training, advocacy, and legal scholarship. She has conducted research on international human rights compliance in the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia, with a particular focus on issues of gender equality and traditional legal systems.

Gretchen Koss started her publishing career in 1990 in the publicity department of Bantam Books where she spent a lot of time opening mail submissions for The Guinness Book of World Records and trying to figure out her word processor. After this stunning debut she would go on to work in the publicity departments at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Alfred A. Knopf, Delacorte, Viking, Penguin and Spiegel & Grau before starting Tandem Literary with Meg Walker in May, 2009. Some of the bestselling authors she’s worked with over the past 29 years include: Robert Pirsig, Elmore Leonard, Dr. Andrew Weil, Carl Hiaasen, Nathaniel Philbrick, Terry McMillan, Mary Karr, Peggy Noonan, Jane Green, Matt Taibbi, Sharon Olds, A.M Homes, Suze Orman, Megan Abbott, Dottie Frank and Adriana Trigiani. She lives in Glen Ridge, NJ and has a teen, a tween, a Shetland Sheepdog and a hilarious cat named Ferris Mueller.

Jazmine Hughes is a story editor for the New York Times Magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine and the New Republic, among others. She was named to Forbes Magazine's 30 under 30 in 2017. 

Charles McGrath is a writer at large at the New York Times, and was formerly editor of the New York Times Book Review and deputy editor of the New Yorker. He is the coauthor of The Ultimate Golf Book and a frequent contributor to Golf Digest. McGrath lives in New Jersey.

Sarah McGrath is Vice President and Editor in Chief of Riverhead Books, where she acquires and edits a range of fiction and nonfiction. Among the many critically acclaimed, prize-winning, and New York Times-bestselling authors she currently works with are: Brit Bennett, Elizabeth Gilbert, Lauren Groff, Paula Hawkins, Khaled Hosseini, Chang-rae Lee, Maile Meloy, Sigrid Nunez, Helen Oyeyemi, Emma Straub, Gabriel Tallent, and Meg Wolitzer. Ms. McGrath began her career in publishing at Knopf in 1997 and spent seven years as an editor at Scribner, before coming to Riverhead in 2006.

Dr. Jim Nicosia is a writer, scholar and children's literacy advocate. He teaches English, American literature, Grammars of English and Young Adult Literature at Montclair State University. He is a reviewer for Voice of Youth Advocates, and, though a self-professed reluctant reader, he has rarely met a book that was worth nothing. He is the author of Reading Mark Strand and runs the BoyBookoftheMonth.com website for reluctant readers.

Laura Nicosia, PhD, is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University, New Jersey, where she teaches all things American literature, Young Adult/Children’s Literatures, and literary theory. She serves as the NJ State Representative to the Assembly on Literature of Adolescents (ALAN) and is Past-President of the NJ Council of Teachers of English (NJCTE). Nicosia is the author of Educators Online: Preparing Today’s Educators for Tomorrow’s Digital Literacies (Peter Lang, 2013), co-editor of Through a Distorted Lens: Media as Curricula and Pedagogy in the 21st Century (Sense 2017), and co-editor of Dear Secretary DeVos: What We Want You To Know About Education.

Darin Patterson is a stand-up comedian, writer, and proud Queens, New York native. He’s performed in various comedy festivals including the Boston Comedy Arts Festival in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Park Slope Comedy Festival. He’s also the co-host of the Saturday Night Live-themed podcast "SNL Nerds" and the "Virgin Chronicles" podcast, where comedians and storytellers share their “first time” stories. Darin currently lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey with his lovely wife and he’s an all-around swell guy!

Hilary Redmon edits literary non-fiction--memoir, reportage, history, science, philosophy, and biography. She began her career at Viking Penguin where she edited Norman Doidge’s New York Times bestseller The Brain that Changes Itself. At Free Press she brought on NYT bestsellers Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan and The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins; At Ecco/HarperCollins, she published NYT Bestsellers Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance and I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong. In 2015 she joined Random House where she recently published NYT Bestsellers Educated by Tara Westover and Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler. Upcoming is Lost and Found by Kathryn Schulz and An Immense World by Ed Yong.

Michael Reynolds (Editor in chief, Europa Editions) is the recipient of the 2016 Golden Colophon Award for Superlative Achievement & Leadership in Independent Literary Publishing, awarded by the Community of Literary and Magazine Presses, and a 2017 Epiphany Magazine Honoree for Publishing Excellence. He has served on juries for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators, and the Strega Prize. He is a member of the Independent Publisher Caucus Steering Committee, and the founder of Bookselling Without Borders. Authors Reynolds has worked with include Alina Bronsky, Amelie Nothomb, Elena Ferrante, Chantel Acevedo, and Domenico Starnone.

Dalton Ross joined Entertainment Weekly in 1999 as a writer for the Television section. Since then he has steadily moved up the masthead by becoming a Senior Editor, Assistant Managing Editor, Editor at Large and most recently Executive Editor at Large. Ross is also the host of EW Morning Live, a daily morning radio show on SiriusXM’s Entertainment Weekly Radio. He has served as a TV expert on CBS This Morning, NBC’s TODAY, ABC’s Good Morning America, The View, CNBC, MTV, ESPN, VH1, Bravo, AMC, and cbs.com. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Ross currently resides in New Jersey with his wife and two children.

Kate Tuttle is currently serving as President of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews and articles about books have appeared in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Salon, Atlantic.com and elsewhere. She is a Native Kansan and longtime Cantabrigian, now living in Montclair, N.J.

Prior to opening Tandem Literary in 2009, Meghan Walker spent 17 years in book publishing, all in marketing roles at major New York houses. From 2005-2008 she was Director of Marketing at Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, where she crafted national campaigns for bestselling authors like Suze Orman, Artie Lange, and Matt Taibbi. Meg spent the previous nine years at Penguin working on the Putnam, Riverhead, Tarcher, and Avery imprints including books by authors Patricia Cornwell, Tom Clancy, and Nora Roberts. She got her start at Prentice Hall in 1992 in college textbook publishing. Born, raised, and again residing at the Jersey Shore, Meg is the mother of two teenagers and two unruly hounds, and serves on the Board of Education.