Authors

A novelist and author of books for both adults and young readers, Spur Award winner Judy Alter writes most often about women and girls of the American West. Her most recent nonfiction titles are the nonfiction Extraordinary Explorers and Adventurers and Great Women of the American West. Her novel about Etta Place entitled Sundance, Butch, and Me was published in 2002. Sam Houston is My Hero, a young-adult novel about the Runaway Scrape during the Texas Revolution, was published in 2003.

Joseph A. Ventolo, Jr. is the former curator of the US Air Force Museum (now the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force), having retired on January 3, 1998. Military Service: In November 1959 Ventolo joined the 269th Comm Sqn., Ohio Air National Guard, Springfield, OH. In February 1960 entered basic training at Lackland AFB, TX, and in April, transferred to Keesler AFB, MS, completed basic training there, and attended ground radio maintenance school at Keesler Technical Training Center. After graduation in November 1960, he returned to the 269th Comm. Sqn. and served four years as a Ground Radio Equipment Repairman, attaining the rank of Senior Airman. In 1965, he received a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Ohio Air National Guard, and was assigned to Headquarters, 251st Comm. Gp., Springfield, OH, as a communications officer.

Jory Sherman (Cort Martin) began his literary career as a poet in San Francisco’s famed North Beach in the late 1950s, during the heyday of the Beat Generation. His poetry and short stories were widely published in literary journals when he began writing commercial fiction. He has won numerous awards for his poetry and prose and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Letters for his novel, Grass Kingdom. He won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America for The Medicine Horn. He has also won a number of awards from the Missouri Writers Guild, and other organizations.

Jonathan Aycliffe (aka Daniel Easterman) was born in Belfast in 1949. He studied English, Persian, Arabic and Islamic studies at the universities of Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and lectured at the universities of Fez in Morocco and Newcastle upon Tyne. The author of several successful full-length ghost stories, he lives in the north of England with his wife, homeopath and health writer, Beth MacEoin. He also writes as Daniel Easterman, under which name he has penned nine bestselling novels.

John D. Nesbitt lives in the plains country of Wyoming, where he teaches English and Spanish at Eastern Wyoming College. His literary articles, book reviews, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. In western fiction, his area of main emphasis, he has had six short story collections, two contemporary western novels, and more than fifteen traditional western novels published in various hardbound, large print, audio, and mass market paperback editions.

I’m 49 years old and going on old. And I don’t mean this in a depressing way, just a message that I understand the path that each of us must follow, that is if we are lucky enough to manage to get this far. With age, comes a bit of enlightenment, a bit of introspection, and perhaps a few humorous glances backwards at our former selves as the demanding, self-righteous and unerring young adults we all were. Or perhaps it was just I? I love to read. I read like I eat, voraciously. I collect First Edition books and have surrounded myself in a large library full of them and then I go into phases where I won’t touch a book for a month. Maybe I think I will gain knowledge by osmosis.

Before his untimely death in 2016 John McKinna was an Underwater Technical Supervisor and Operations Manager, responsible for overseeing upkeep of the main structure and support systems of the Key Largo Undersea Park home of Jules’ Undersea Lodge. A former offshore commercial diver of twenty years’ experience, he came on the Jules’/KLUP team as an adjunct to his primary line of work, that of internationally-known novelist and local musician. Like his wife Teresa, he was an avid free-diver, spearfisherman, lobster hunter, and cruising sailor. RIP John McKinna.

The son of a scientist, John Ball was born in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Milwaukee. He attended Carroll College in Wisconsin. He subsequently worked as a science staff writer on Fortune, a music critic and feature writer for the Brooklyn Eagle, a daily columnist on the New York World-Telegram & Sun, a broadcaster for a Washington radio station, and a Director of Public Relations for the Institute of Aerospace Sciences.

Journalist, Novelist, and Writing Coach John DeDakis is a former Senior Copy Editor on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.” DeDakis (pronounced deh-DAY-kiss) is the author of five novels in the Lark Chadwick mystery-suspense series. His fourth novel, Bullet in the Chamber, is the winner of Reviewers Choice, Foreword INDIES, and Feathered Quill book awards. The book deals, in part, with the death of John’s 22-year-old son Stephen in 2011. In John’s most recent novel, Fake, Lark is a White House correspondent dealing with “fake news” in the era of #MeToo. Kirkus Reviews calls Fake “A gripping, topical tale about the difficulties of discerning the truth.”

Thriller writer Ian Slater lives with his wife in Vancouver, Canada. Born in Australia in 1941, he worked for the Australian navy as a cipher clerk in that country’s Department of External Affairs, and as a defense officer in the Australian Joint Intelligence Bureau during the Cold War. After leaving Australia for further adventures he became a marine geology technician with New Zealand’s Institute of Oceanography, undertaking many voyages in the Tasman Sea, the southwest Pacific and Sub Antarctic, and later in the northeastern Pacific for the Institute of Oceanography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.