Discover writers through their published books and Forum work.
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William Bernhardt is the author of over sixty books, including the Daniel Pike legal thriller series (#1 best-selling novel The Last Chance Lawyer). His previous works include the bestselling Ben Kincaid series, the historical novels Challengers of the Dust and The Florentine Poet, three books of poetry, and the Red Sneaker books on fiction writing. In addition, Bernhardt founded WriterCon Programs to mentor aspiring writers. WriterCon hosts an annual writers conference, an annual cruise, small-group writing retreats, a magazine, plus free bi-weekly e-newsletters and podcasts. More than three dozen of Bernhardt’s students have subsequently published with major houses. He is also the president/owner of Bernhardt Books, which publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. In addition to his novels and poetry, Bernhardt has written plays, a musical (book and score), humor, children stories, biography, and puzzles. He has edited two anthologies (Legal Briefs and Natural Suspect) as fundraisers for The Nature Conservancy and the Children’s Legal Defense Fund. In his spare time, he has enjoyed surfing, digging for dinosaurs, trekking through the Himalayas, paragliding, scuba diving, caving, zip-lining over the canopy of the Costa Rican rainforest, and jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. In 2013, he became a Jeopardy! champion. OSU has called Bernhardt “Oklahoma’s Renaissance Man.” In 2017, when Bernhardt delivered the keynote address at the San Francisco Writers Conference, chairman Michael Larsen noted that in addition to penning novels, Bernhardt can “write a sonnet, play a sonata, plant a garden, try a lawsuit, teach a class, cook a gourmet meal, beat you at Scrabble, and work the New York Times crossword in under five minutes.”
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Erin Brown has worked as a museum curator, teacher, and is currently employed as a research administrator at Oklahoma State University. Her poetry has appeared in Oklahoma Today, Big River Review, This Land, and the Red River Review. She lives with her family in Pawnee, Oklahoma at the Pawnee Bill Ranch and Museum, a historic site dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of Pawnee Bill, a Wild West Showman.
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Clay Cantrell's poetry has recently appeared in or is forthcoming in Birdfeast, Sycamore Review, The Journal, New South, Red Truck Review, and elsewhere. His full-length collection, Hermit, Wraith, was recently a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award. He holds an MFA from University of Memphis.
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Bruce Craven is an Academic Director at Columbia Business School, where he has leadership and teaching roles in executive education programs. He also teaches the MBA and EMBA management division elective: Leadership through Fiction. His non-fiction book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was republished by Codhill Press in 2023. The book was first published by St. Martin’s Press (Macmillan) in March 2019. His most recent novel, set in NYC in the Nineties – Sweet Ride – was published by Codhill Press in 2021. He published a collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter, in 2019 with Red Dirt Press in Oklahoma. He adapted his first novel, Fast Sofa, to film. The movie starred Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. Bruce’s writing has been translated into Turkish, Serbian, Russian, German and Japanese. Bruce received his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He has two BA degrees in Politics (with Honors) and English from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He lives with his wife and son in the Coachella Valley in California.
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Big Ivy poet Nancy Dillingham is a sixth-generation Dillingham from the same-named community in western North Carolina. She is the author of nine books of poetry and short fiction and a fictionalized memoir. She and her co-editor Celia Miles have published four anthologies of WNC women writers. Her volume of poems Home was nominated for a Southern Independent Booksellers' Alliance award (SIBA). She lives in Asheville, NC.
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Kasey Jones is a poet, lyricist, and librettist rooted in the red soil of rural Oklahoma. Her work has appeared across film, theater, and print, earning a World Soundtrack Award nomination. The poem “She Must Go” serves as the title track of a recently released jazz album featuring Grammy, Tony, and Oscar-winning artists. Her poetry is included in What is All This Sweet Work?. Her debut poetry collection, Tiny Night Parade: Poems from the Prairie, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.
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J. M. Jordan is a Georgia native and a resident of the Old Dominion. His work has appeared in Arion, Carolina Quarterly, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Louisiana Literature, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
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James Kimbrell is the author of Smote, The Gatehouse Heaven, and My Psychic and the co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-Seon, and Choi Young Mi. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Whiting Award, the John and Renee Grisham Fellowship, the Florida Book Award, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry Magazine, and two fellowships from the NEA. A native of Mississippi, he serves as distinguished research professor at Florida State University.
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Julia Nunnally Duncan is a Western North Carolina freelance writer, whose ten books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry explore life in a small Southern town. Her 1960s upbringing in a working class family plays a prominent role in her work. She has essays and poems appearing in current issues of Smoky Mountain Living Magazine, WNC Magazine, The Backwoodsman Magazine, World War One Illustrated, blazeVOX Journal, and Arlington Literary Journal. A new collection of essays All We Have Loved is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in November 2023. Julia lives in Marion, NC, with her husband, Steve, a mountain woodcarver. They enjoy spending time outdoors and with their daughter, Annie.
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Philip Raisor is the author of eight books of poetry, nonfiction, and criticism, as well as numerous scholarly articles, essays, reviews, and interviews in such journals as The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, The Writer's Chronicle, Studies in English Literature, and Contemporary Literature. In his teen years, he played on the losing team in the state championship game in Indiana that inspired Hoosiers, and was a freshman on the team with Wilt Chamberlain that lost a national championship in triple-overtime. Raisor received his B.A and M.A from Louisiana State University and a Ph.D. from Kent State, where he was active in the protest movements of the 60's. He taught at various universities and is now professor emeritus of English at Old Dominion University, where he initiated the creative writing program, a visiting writers series, and the annual literary festival.
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Larry D. Thomas, the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, has published twenty-five print poetry books and numerous poetry chapbooks both in print and online. Buttonhook Press and Hot Button Press (Open: Journal of Arts & Letters) have published online three of his recent chapbooks and four of his pamphlets, the most recent of which is his chapbook, Singing a Hymn to the Sea: Poems of the Gulf Coast.
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Abdelrehim Youssef is an Egyptian poet and translator. Born in 1975 in Alexandria, he graduated from Alexandria University in 1997. He worked as a teacher of English for twenty years before retiring in 2018 and devoting his time to translation work. He has published seven books of poetry in Egyptian Arabic and has translated over twenty books. He received the Encouragement Award of the Egyptian State for translation in 2017 for his translation of Three Studies about Morals and Virtue by Bernard Mandeville. He is married to the Egyptian writer Omayma Abdelshafy and they have one son, Yehia, who is 16 years old.
