Our Team
With a variety of experiences as writers and editors,
we promise to make this a memorable and productive
experience for you.
Guest Author: R.A. Nelson
R.A. Nelson lives in north Alabama, works at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and loves poetry, quantum physics, old movies like It Happened One Night (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert), spelunking, history, traveling, astronomy, archeology, basketball, exploring, and just plain old walking in the woods.
Nelson has been writing stories since the second grade. He now works as a NASA tech writer. Nelson's work with the space program won one of NASA's most prestigious honors, the NASA Silver Snoopy Award.
His novel Teach Me (Razorbill/Penguin Young Readers Group) won the 2004 Dona Vaughn SCBWI Work-In-Progress Grant, and has been selected for numerous honors, including the Booksense Fall 2005 Kid Picks, Miami Herald Best Teen Novel of the Year 2005, Teenreads.com Best Books of the Year 2005, YALSA BBYA 2006 Best Books for Young Adults (nominated), Best Books for the Teen Age (2006) selected by the New York Public Library, Romance Times Best Books of 2005, Michigan Library Association 2006 Thumbs Up! Award (Top Twenty, voting ongoing), and the Horn Book Magazine 2005 Newcomers List.
His second book, Breathe My Name, was released through Razorbill in Fall 2007. The paperback version of Teach Me has been out in bookstores since Spring 2007.
Lee Ann Ward, author and senior editor/acquiring editor for Champagne Books
Lee Ann Ward is a full-time fiction writer and editor as well as a former journalist. Her writing credentials include Dying Twice, a Young Adult novel pub'd in 1992 and The Spider in the Well, an adult novel pub'd in 2003. Her latest YA novel, The Gift of the Sun: Book One--Hamet's Awakening, pub'd in 2006, won first place and the Judge's Choice Award in the general fiction category in the Writers Weekend Writing Contest in Seattle, WA.
Lee Ann's first romance book, More Than Angels, will be released in April, 2008. Lee Ann is also a senior acquisitions editor for Champaign Books, an e-book/paperback romance company. She is an avid reader and loves to meet writers at conferences.
Lee Ann holds a journalism degree from Faulkner university and has written many articles for everything from newspapers to business magalogs. Her articles have won awards and even earned her a "Key to the City" for Bayou La Batre, Alabama. She has worked in public relations, communications and also graphic arts for many years. She now edits and writes from home and devotes many hours a day to her craft.
Creative and Life Coach: Lisa Gates
I am absolutely passionate about livelihood. Your livelihood--that perfect resonance that occurs when you align your intention with your word, and your word with your actions in service of the life you are meant to live.
You've heard it a million times: do what you love and the money will follow. What would be possible if you believed that statement to be true? What if your livelihood creates such aliveness that you generate a wake of leadership and peace everywhere you go? I am committed to that--for you. In fact, I'm the crazy glue on the soles of your sneakers that keeps your book, your project, your big life in focus, and I have three words for all you dreamers, leaders and creatives: Someday is now. Really.
With a background in theatre, journalism and public relations, my practice reveals a skill for helping you improvise, brainstorm, develop and organize projects and put heart into your actions. An avid hiker and NIA practitioner, I currently balance my life as a coach, writer and mother. I'm a graduate of UC Santa Barbara and received my coaching training from Coaches Training Institute.
Your Host and Writer: Cicily Janus
Cicily Janus is a free thinker and writer living in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her work has appeared in or is scheduled to appear in Underground Voices, Aesthetica, Del Sol Review, Writers Post Journal, Red Fez, Whirligigzine ,Hecale, Tuesday Shorts and Perspectives Magazine to name a few.
She is on staff for reviews and interviews for Eclectica, Art Nouveau Magazine and The Guild of the Outsider Writers. Cicily is also an assistant editor for Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens: A Literary Magazine of the Absurd and Surreal.
Check out her popular blog, Writing about You When You’re Not Paying Attention, with over 15,000 hits at Myspace She's been featured in an interview regarding her writing life on Design Your Writing Life and on a podcast with author Paul A.Toth at Toth World with over 70,000 subscribers. Two novels, working titles:Burden of Betrayal and Awaiting Exile are in progress. A chapbook, The Pencil Pusher's Prose, will be coming out in 2008 from Scintillating Publications. Her personal website is now open for business.