Moderator Karen K. Ford, SBWC workshop leader, is an award-winning author of short fiction whose honors include top prizes from Narrative and bosque. Her work has been shortlisted for the Tobias Wolff Fiction Award and the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize and anthologized in Ginosko. Karen lives in Southern California, with her rescue mutt, Dude, where she is a freelance editor and writing coach.

Max Talley has had 70 stories and essays published since 2015. His writing has appeared in Vol.1 Brooklyn, Atticus Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Litro, and The Saturday Evening Post. He won the 2021 best fiction contest in Jerry Jazz Musician for “Celestial Vagabonds,” later nominated for a Pushcart. Talley has two published novels and 2 story collections, My Secret Place, and the most recent, When the Night Breathes Electric, which debuted in 2023 from Borda Books.

Matthew J. Pallamary is an award-winning writer, musician, and sound healer who’s been studying shamanism all his life. He has books covering several genres. His latest story collection is The Thinning Veil: 13 Twisted Tales. He explores how art imitates life and reflects our human condition. The veil between the worlds is thinning and the boundaries have become blurred, bringing more weight to the question; what or where are the boundaries between what we believe to be real and what we imagine?

Melodie Johnson Howe, while acting in movies, went to UCLA Extension to learn writing. Her mystery novel, The Mother Shadow was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allen Poe Award. Her second, Beauty Dies, soon followed. She created a new character, Diana Poole, an actress verging on middle age, for her short stories. They’re now collected into one book, Shooting Hollywood: The Diana Poole Stories. Howe’s latest novel is City of Mirrors, also featuring Diana Poole.

Catherine Ann Jones who is an actor, the playwright of 11 award-winning productions, and an Emmy-nominated Hollywood screenwriter, wrote her latest book, East and West, from a personal place. This collection of stories reveals her lifelong relationship to India, including her marriage to Raja Rao, the renowned Indian novelist. The preface pays tribute to India’s timeless interweaving of the spiritual and the worldly, the light and dark, the personal and the universal. These stories speak to a place within each of our souls.

Lisa Cupolo has been a paparazzi photographer in London, an aid worker in Kenya, a script doctor in LA, and a literary publicist at HarperCollins in Toronto. Have Mercy on Us, her debut book, won the W.S. Porter Prize for short story collections. Her work has been published in many prestigious journals. She holds multiple degrees in a range of areas. She’s lived all over the world, but currently resides in Southern California, where she taught fiction writing at Chapman University.

The Art of the Query

Trey Dowell is a novelist and a short story aficionado. His expertise in writing effective query letters has helped numerous writers get their projects reviewed by agents and publishers.

In this presentation Trey focused on sparking curiosity and building anticipation. Proven query strategies and methods were discussed. Attendees brought their in-progress queries which were read and received feedback.

Be Your Own Best Publicist

Melinda Palacio & Lida Sideris

This session offers wisdom from the trenches from award-winning authors on promoting your project. You’ll get practical marketing advice on aspects of building an author platform and putting yourself and your book out there.

Melinda Palacio is an award-winning poet, author, and speaker. She’s the current Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, she holds 2 degrees in Comparative Literature, a BA from the UC Berkeley and an MA from UC Santa Cruz. She’s a 2007 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2009 poetry alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her latest poetry collection is Bird Forgiveness, 2018. She is a master of author self-promotion.

Lida Sideris writes soft-boiled mysteries and was a winner of the Helen McCloy Mystery Writers of America scholarship award. The third installment in her Southern California Mystery series, Murder: Double or Nothing will be released in June by Level Best Books. She’s also wrote The Cookie Eating Fire Dog, a picture book for ages 4-8. She lives in the northern tip of SoCal with her family, rescue dogs and a flock of uppity chickens. She teaches “Be Your Own Best Publicist” at SBWC with Melinda Palacio.