Book Signing Info: TBA

Image Credit: Colson Whitehead © Chris Close

Author Bio:
Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad (an Oprah’s Book Club selection and winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize), The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. He was named New York’s 11th State Author in 2018. His most recent book, New York Times bestseller The Nickel Boys, was published in May 2019 and was one of TIME Magazine’s ten best fiction books of the decade, winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Colson Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Granta.

He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for John Henry Days.

He has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, New York University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming. He lives in New York City.

For more information on this speaker, please visit www.prhspeakers.com.

Book Signing Info: TBA

Image Credit: Photo by Marty Umans

Scieszka is best known for his bestselling picture books including The True Story of the Three Little Pigs! and The Stinky Cheese Man. He is also the founder of www.guysread.com and a champion force behind www.guyslisten.com. He was also the first U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2008.

Author Bio from www.jsworldwide.com

Jon Scieszka was born in Flint, Michigan on September 8, 1954. It was a Wednesday. Right around lunchtime. He is the second-oldest, and nicest, of six Scieszka boys. No girls. His mother, Shirley, worked as a registered nurse. His dad, Louis, was an elementary school principal at Freeman Elementary. His dad's parents, Michael and Anna, came to America from Poland. "Scieszka" is a word in Polish. It means "path."

Jon went to Culver Military Academy for high school. He had some spectacular teachers there, and became Lieutenant Scieszka. Jon thought about being a doctor and studied both Science and English at Albion College in Albion, Michigan. He graduated in 1976, lived in Detroit, then moved to Brooklyn, NY to write instead. He earned his MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in New York in 1980, then painted apartments.

Not knowing what he was getting into, Jon applied for a teaching job at an elementary school called The Day School in New York City. He started as a 1st grade Assistant Teacher, graduated to teaching 2nd grade, taught 3rd and 4th grade Math, 5th grade History, and then some 6th, 7th and 8th grade.

Teaching school, Jon re-discovered how smart kids are, and found the best audience for the weird and funny stories he had always liked to read and write. He took a year off from teaching to write stories for kids. He sent these stories around to many publishers, and got rejected by all of them. He kept painting apartments and writing stories.

Through his wife Jeri, who was working in NY as a magazine art director, he met a funny guy named Lane Smith. Lane was painting illustrations for magazine articles, and working on his first children's book. Jon gave Lane his story: A. Wolf's Tale. Lane loved it. Lane drew a few illustrations for the story and took it to show many publishers. He got rejected by all of them. "Too dark," they said. "Too sophisticated," they said. "Don't ever come back here, okay?" they said.

Jon and Lane liked A. Wolf's Tale. They kept showing it around. They kept getting rejected. Finally, Regina Hayes, an editor at Viking Books said she thought the story and the illustrations were funny. She said she would publish the book. And she did, in 1989, with the title changed to: The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!.

Pigs! has now sold over 3 million copies and has been translated into 14 different languages. Over the last 19 years, Jon and Lane have worked together on 8 picture books and 8 Time Warps. Lane's wife Molly Leach has designed all of their picture books.

Jon's books have won a whole mess of awards, and sold over 11 million copies all around the world.

Jon is now working on a giant pre-school publishing program called Trucktown. It's a world where all of the characters are trucks. And all of the trucks act like real preschoolers - loud and crazy and wild and funny.

Jon still lives in Brooklyn with his wife Jeri. They have two children: a daughter Casey, and son Jake.

Book Signing Info: TBA

Author Bio:
Josh Malerman is the mastermind behind the 2018 hit Netflix thriller, Bird Box. He is an author of short stories and novels, and he is also the singer/songwriter of the Detroit rock band The High Strung.

While on tour with his band, Josh wrote novels in the passenger seat between cities. Bird Box wasn’t the first novel he wrote, but it was the first one published; it was published in 2014 to much critical acclaim. Author Hugh Howey calls Bird Box, “A book that demands to be read,” and Kirkus Reviews writes, “Malerman ... keeps us tinglingly on edge with his cool, merciless storytelling [and] douses his tale in poetic gloom ... an unsettling thriller.” In 2018, Netflix released a film adaptation of Bird Box, starring Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich, and Trevante Rhodes.

Josh’s latest book, Malorie, is the stunning sequel to Bird Box and was released in 2020. Other Malerman novels include Black Mad Wheel, Unbury Carol, Goblin, and Inspection. Josh’s writing has been compared to that of Stephen King and Jonathan Carroll, but with a voice uniquely his own. His books have been nominated for the Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the James Herbert Award.

Josh lives in Michigan with his fiancé, artist/musician, Allison Laakko. Aside from writing, he is currently working on a new album with his band.

Book Signing Info: TBA

Author Bio:

Eric Eyre is an investigative reporter at Mountain State Spotlight, a nonprofit news outlet, and is a former statehouse reporter for the Charleston Gazette-Mail newspaper. In 2017, his investigation into massive shipments of opioids to West Virginia’s southern coalfields was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Eyre is the author of the national-bestselling Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic. New York Times book critic Dwight Garner named Death in Mud Lick one of the “10 best books of 2020.” The book also is one of five finalists for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for true-crime writing.

Eyre lives in Charleston, West Virginia, with his wife and son.

Book Signing Info: TBA

Author Bio:

Denise Giardina grew up in a coal camp in McDowell County, West Virginia. She is the author of six novels: Good King Harry, Storming Heaven, The Unquiet Earth, Saints and Villains, Fallam’s Secret, and Emily’s Ghost. Her journalism has appeared in The Nation, The Village Voice, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Giardina is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an American Book Award, the Lillian Smith Award, and the Boston Book Review’s Fisk Fiction Prize. She is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College and Virginia Theological Seminary and is a deacon in the Episcopal Church.

Heeding the Call by William Jolliff is a literary analysis of Giardina's novels and will be published in May by West Virginia University Press.