R.L. Stine is one of the best-selling children's authors in history. In July 1992, Scholastic introduced his Goosebumps book series with Welcome to Dead House. These many years later, Goosebumps is now one of the best-selling children’s series of all-time—with more than 350 million English language books in print, plus an additional 50+ million international copies in print in 32 languages. The Goosebumps series made R.L. Stine a worldwide publishing celebrity (and Jeopardy answer). His other popular children’s book series include Fear Street, (recently revived with all new books), Mostly Ghostly, The Nightmare Room, and Rotten School. Other titles include: It's The First Day of School Forever, A Midsummer Night's Scream, Young Scrooge, and his first picture book, with Marc Brown — The Little Shop of Monsters.

The Goosebumps TV show was the number-one children's show in America for three years. The episodes can still be seen on Netflix. More recently, R.L.’s anthology TV series, R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour, won the Emmy Award three years in a row as Best Children's Show. A Goosebumps feature film starring Jack Black was released from Sony/Columbia Pictures & Scholastic Media on October 16, 2015, and became the #1 film in America.

R.L. Stine lives in New York City with his wife Jane, an editor and publisher. Connect with him on Twitter: @RL_Stine and also Facebook. For more information, visit http://rlstine.com and www.scholastic.com/goosebumps.

Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of The Fireman, NOS4A2, Heart-Shaped Box, and Horns (which was made into a feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe). His book of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, won the Bram Stoker Award and British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. He earned the Eisner Award for Best Writer for his long-running comic book series, Locke & Key, featuring the eye-popping art of Gabriel Rodriguez. Learn more at www.joehillfiction.com.

Henry Winkler is an award-winning stage and screen actor, author, director and producer. His portrayal of The Fonz for 10 seasons on Happy Days made him one of the most recognized actors in the world.

In 2003, Winkler began writing a series of children’s novels with his partner, Lin Oliver, entitled, Hank Zipzer: The World’s Greatest Under-Achiever. The books are inspired by Winkler’s struggle throughout his education due to his learning challenges and have appeared on several Best Seller lists including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, among others. His passion for supporting others is the result of a lifetime struggle with undiagnosed dyslexia. Winkler has worked tirelessly to bring awareness and support to children who learn differently by advocating for changes in the educational system and informing parents and teachers about learning challenges.

In 2011, he published a collection of anecdotes and heartfelt observations I Never Met an Idiot on the River. The book is a collection of the lessons and photos Winkler gathered while fly fishing in Montana. Continuing his love for children’s books, Winkler released the first installment of a new series in January 2012 entitled Ghost Buddy #1: Zero to Hero.

Winkler executive produces the reality series, Better Late Than Never, featuring Winkler, Terry Bradshaw, William Shatner and George Foreman as they trek across Asia in search of new adventures and life-changing experiences. The second season of the critically-acclaimed show will be airing soon. In 2018, Winkler will be featured alongside Bill Hader in HBO’s comedy series Barry, about a hitman-turned-actor.

In addition to his busy television, film, stage and writing career, Winkler makes time to be active in numerous children’s and arts philanthropic organizations. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Stacey and two dogs, Charlotte and Linus. They have three children; Jed, Zoë and Max and three grandchildren.

Nicola Yoon is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything, which is now a major motion picture, and The Sun Is Also a Star, a National Book Award finalist, Michael L. Printz Honor Book and Coretta Scott King New Talent Award winner.

Yoon is a Team Member for We Need Diverse Books, an organization dedicated to putting more books featuring diverse characters into the hands of all children. She grew up in Jamaica and Brooklyn, and lives in Los Angeles with her family. For more information, visit www.nicolayoon.com.

McCreight Lecture speaker Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which electrified its readers with a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students. The book has spent more than 117 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, has been translated in 32 languages and has won diverse literary awards. In 2009, Reading Lolita in Tehran was named as one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade” by The Times (London).

Nafisi is currently a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, where she was a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and taught courses on the relation between culture and politics. She conducted workshops in Iran for women students on the relationship between culture and human rights; the material culled from these workshops formed the basis of a new human rights education curriculum.

She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by the policy makers and various human rights organizations in the US and elsewhere. She is also involved in the promotion of not just literacy, but of reading books with universal literary value. In 2011, she was awarded the Cristóbal Gabarrón Foundation International Thought and Humanities Award for her “determined and courageous defense of human values in Iran and her efforts to create awareness through literature about the situation women face in Islamic society.”

Anna Egan Smucker is the author of seven books. Her picture book, No Star Nights, published by Knopf, won the International Reading Association's Children's Book Award. Her two most recent books,Golden Delicious: A Cinderella Apple Story and Brother Giovanni's Little Reward: How the Pretzel Was Born, were chosen to represent West Virginia at the National Book Festival. Fallingwater, a picture book about Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic house, co-authored with Marc Harshman, is forthcoming in mid-October 2017 from Roaring Brook/Macmillan.

Recipient of a WV Arts Commission Artist Fellowship Award, Smucker's poems have been published in several anthologies. Her website can be found at www.annasmucker.com

Candace Nelson authors a food column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail where she explores the Appalachian food community and works to help tell West Virginia's story. Her work has appeared in publications across West Virginia, in addition to NPR, Food & Wine, and more. She writes a blog that focuses on food culture in West Virginia, Candace Lately, which can be found at www.CandaceLately.com.

Nelson is also an active board member for the Morgantown Farmers Market, where she oversees all marketing promotions of the markets. Her first book, The West Virginia Pepperoni Roll, documents the history of the regional West Virginia snack.

Carter Taylor Seaton is the author of two novels, Father’s Troubles (2003) and amo, amas, amat…an unconventional love story (2013), numerous magazine articles, essays, short stories and two non-fiction books including Hippie Homesteaders (2014.) Her latest book is The Rebel in the Red Jeep, the biography of Ken Hechler, which was released this year by West Virginia University Press.

She holds a Tamarack Foundation Fellowship Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. The West Virginia Library Association honored her with the 2014 WVLA Literary Merit Award and in 2015, Marshall Univirsity’s College of Liberal Arts honored her with its Alumni Award of Distinction. In 2016 she received the Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

She graduated from Marshall University in 1982 with a Regent's BA degree in English and Business and worked as a marketing professional in West Virginia and Georgia for over thirty years. Now, also a practicing ceramic sculptor, she lives in Huntington, West Virginia with her husband Richard Cobb.

Marc Harshman’s latest collection of poems, Believe What You Can, was recently published by West Virginia University Press, his thirteenth children’s book, One Big Family, was published last year by Eerdmans. His newest children’s book, Fallingwater, co-authored with Anna Egan Smucker, is scheduled for release by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in October.

Harshman's poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. His monthly show for West Virginia Public Radio, The Poetry Break, began airing in 2016. He was also an invited reader at the 2016 Greenwich Book Festival in London, and is currently the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia.

Sharyn McCrumb is an award-winning Southern writer, best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains, including the New York Times Best Sellers: The Ballad of Tom Dooley, She Walks These Hills and The Rosewood Casket. In September 2017, Simon & Schuster will publish her latest novel, The Unquiet Grave, a well-researched history of West Virginia’s Greenbrier Ghost.