ABOUT THE CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
(Click on Author's name to visit their website)

James W. Bennett

James W. Bennett’s uncompromising, challenging books for teens have earned him recognition as one of the nation’s leading (and most provocative) novelists for young adults. His novels have been curriculum choices at the Junior High, Senior High, and Community College levels. The Squared Circle (1995) was named the year’s finest young adult novel by the English Journal and other publications. Many of his other books have entered “top ten” lists. Although a specialist in pleasing and educating young adult readers, Bennett knows how to reach any audience. Dakota Dream and I Can Hear the Mourning Dove are among those Bennett novels that have convinced teachers, teenagers, and reviewers that he is at the top of his field.

Susan Hubbard

This native of upstate New York worked as a journalist and free-lance writer before returning to graduate school at Syracuse University, where she studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. Hubbard is the author of two collections of short fiction, both winners of national prizes, and two novels. Her short stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, The Mississippi Review, The North American Review, America West, Kalliope, Ploughshares, and other journals. She is coeditor of 100% Pure Florida Fiction, an anthology. Currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, Hubbard has received many teaching awards as well as literary awards and prestigious residencies. A former president of Associated Writing Programs, her two “Lisa Maria” novels erase the boundary between contemporary romance and literary fiction.
 

Janina Birtolo

A graduate of Boston College and Boston University, Janina Birtolo has been a freelance writer for 20+ years, first in Massachusetts and, for the last 15 years, in Naples. Her writings have been regularly published nationally and in such local publications as N Magazine, The Phil, Gulfshore Life, Times of the Islands and Naples Illustrated. She also does considerable writing for not-for-profit organizations. In 2001, she was chosen “Writer of the Year” by the Florida Magazine Association. In addition to her print work, Birtolo serves as a field producer for Arts Edition Primetime, an art magazine show produced by WGCU-TV. Birtolo is also an accomplished playwright and actor.

Martha Jablow

Martha Jablow has worked in all of the journalistic trenches: from stringer to bureau manager to reporter. For the last 30 years, she has been a non-stop freelancer, with articles in The New York Times, Parents, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, Baltimore Sun, Better Homes & Gardens, Good Times, Working Woman, and Publishers Weekly, among others. She has also been the author, co-author, or “book doctor” on more that a dozen titles, including Understanding Your Child’s Temperament, Teenage Health Care, Loving Your Child Is Not Enough, and Cara: Growing with a Retarded Child. As her titles suggest, Martha Jablow knows the meaning of “Finding Your Niche,” about which she will speak.
 

James O. Born

The author of Shock Wave and Walking Money, James O. Born brings powerful credentials to the world of authentic mysteries. Currently a special agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), Born began his law enforcement career as a Deputy United States Marshall assigned to the Miami and West Palm Beach, Florida offices. He then spent four years with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s West Palm Beach field office, where he spent a great deal of time focusing on cocaine smuggling from Colombia at the height of the drug wars. A huge fan of renowned mystery writers such as Elmore Leonard, Born decided to write mysteries that captured the real life element of police work. His protagonist, FDLE agent Bill Tasker, exemplifies Born’s years of law-enforcement experience and the result is an award winning, fast-paced, authentic, sometimes humorous and always compelling mystery series.
 

Philip K. Jason

Phil Jason was a college English professor for 36 years, the last 29 at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. He is the author or editor of over 20 titles, many of these related to the literature of war and to the study of poetry. A founding member of The Writers Center (Washington, DC), he has brought his skills as a “poetry doctor” to Naples, where he directs the noncredit Writing Program at the Naples Center of FGCU. Jason’s own four volumes of poetry can be sampled in the 2005 publication Greatest Hits: 1970-2001 – a chapbook from Pudding House Publications. He is the co-author of the Prentice Hall Creative Writer’s Handbook, now in its 4^th edition, which has been a popular choice with teachers of university creative writing courses for over 15 years. He is also the chairperson of this conference.

Edna Buchanan

Edna Buchanan began her career as a society page reporter for a Miami tabloid. Several years later, the Miami Herald hired her, and she worked her way up to the police beat. During her 18 years with the Herald, Buchanan covered over 5,000 murders and spent time behind bars with two serial killers. In 1986, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her police beat reporting. She became a book author with the non-fiction title Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder (1979). Her first book featuring police beat reporter Britt Montero, Contents under Pressure, was published in 1992. The rest is history! The many books in the Britt Montero series have established Buchanan as one of our most popular and critically acclaimed crime novelists. She has twice been nominated for the prestigious Edgar Award. Buchanan’s “non-Montero” titles, like Cold Case Squad and the recent Shadows, are equally skillful and intriguing. Buchanan tells her own story in The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America’s Hottest Beat.
 

Jonathon King

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel with his debut mystery, The Blue Edge of Midnight, Jonathon King began his twenty-year journalism career with the Philadelphia Daily News, where he covered crime and criminal courts, before becoming an award-winning feature writer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Thus his protagonist, Max Freeman, a former Philadelphia cop who retired on a disability and moved to an isolated shack on the edge of the Everglades, is equally at home on the gritty streets of Philadelphia or canoeing through the mangrove forests of the Florida swamps. King’s subsequent mysteries, A Visible Darkness, Shadow Men and A Killing Night have cemented his place among the masters of authentic, atmospheric and literary mystery writers.

Jasmine Cresswell

Author of more than fifty works, Jasmine Cresswell’s books have covered the gamut from contemporary romance, historical romance to romantic suspense and into the world of general fiction. Cresswell has just released the final book in her new romantic suspense trilogy – Decoy, Full Pursuit and Final Justice-- featuring the covert US government agency Unit One and its star operatives Melody Beecham and Nikolai Anwar. Her most recent project, scheduled for monthly publication beginning in August of 2006, is a three-book suspense series entitled The Ravens. Born in England, after traveling and living all over the world Cresswell now currently divides her time between Sarasota, Florida and Evergreen, Colorado. There are over nine million copies of her novels in print.

Paul McElroy

Paul McElroy is president of Charter Industry Services, Inc. headquartered in Stuart, Florida. The company specializes in conducting professional maritime training courses from Alaska to the Virgin Islands. He founded the trade journal Charter Industry, which ran from 1985-1995. He has extensive writing experience in magazines and newspapers with more than one hundred published articles to his credit. In his expanding “Treasure Coast Mysteries” series, McElroy imaginatively explores the past and present of Florida’s “Treasure Coast,” the area from Jupiter north to Sebastian, where the twelve-ship Spanish “Plate Fleet” sunk in 1715. An Air Force veteran, Mr. McElroy received his B.S. in Business Administration from Florida State University. He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the National Association of and Maritime Educators. McElroy will share the secrets of self-publishing success.
 

S. V. Date

Born in India, S. V. Dáte came to the U. S. as a child. He majored in Political Science at Stanford and became a journalist upon graduation. His first novel, Final Orbit, a murder mystery set aboard NASA’s space shuttle Columbia, was published by Avon in 1997. His subsequent novels, Speed Week, Smokeout and Deep Water, are darkly comic thrillers that have been praised in the New York Times and the Washington Post and featured on NPR's “Fresh Air.” All three were published by Putnam, which also published his latest Florida satire, Black Sunshine. Dáte is at work on his sixth novel, Foul Ball, a look at a Major League Baseball team owner's murderously desperate craving for a new, half-billion dollar, retractable-domed, taxpayer-financed stadium. Dáte is now the capital bureau chief and columnist for the Palm Beach Post. Quiet Passion: A Biography of Senator Bob Graham is Daté’s most recent title.  His current biographical subject is Florida’s present governor.
 

Karla Wheeler

Quality of Life Publishing Company is the direct outgrowth of founder Karla Wheeler’s personal and professional hospice experience. Wheeler has been a hospice volunteer for 13 years, and four members of her immediate family have been blessed by hospice and palliative care. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Wheeler has been involved in many medical publishing projects and decided to launch the outreach newsletter Quality of Life Matters in 1999 after her beloved father was enrolled in hospice for only seven days. Karla now dedicates her journalistic career to easing the way for dying patients and their families. She is the author of several grief support books, including Heart-Shaped Pickles, and leads the editorial team at Quality of Life Publishing.

Carolina Garcia-Aguilera

Best-selling author of Bloody Waters, A Miracle in Paradise and Bitter Sugar, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera was born in Havana, Cuba and moved to the United States with her family one year after the Cuban revolution. Married with three children and living in the trendy South Beach section of Miami, where many of her mysteries are set, Garcia-Aguilera decided to write mysteries with a Cuban-American protagonist. But before setting pen to paper, she became a licensed private investigator in Florida in order to add authenticity to her work. Not content with that, Garcia-Aguilera then earned an MBA with a concentration in finance so that her protagonist would truly understand complex financial cases. The result was Lupe Solano, a beautiful, fast-talking, fashionably dressed, deceptively smart and humorous Cuban-American PI, one of the most endearing of mystery protagonists.

Robley Wilson

Robley Wilson taught creative writing at the University of Northern Iowa from 1963 to 1996, and from 1969 to 2000 was editor of the prestigious North American Review, which twice won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. To his several collections of poetry and five short story collections Wilson has added three novels: The Victim’s Daughter, Splendid Omens, and The World Still Melting. Several of his books have been prize-winners, including the short story collection Dancing for Men, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Wilson won a 1995-96 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for his screenplay, Land Fishers, based on his story of that title. A short film, based on his short story “Terrible Kisses,” was screened in 2004 at the Rushes Short Film Festival in London's Soho district and has been seen on Sky television in the U.K. With his wife Susan Hubbard, he edited 100% Pure Florida Fiction, a short-story anthology of Florida stories written since 1985 (University Press of Florida).
  

Robert E. Gelinas

Robert Gelinas was a published novelist ten years prior to founding ArcheBooks Publishing, having had the first of his many novels published by Simon & Schuster in 1993. He holds a degree in Electronics Systems Technology, and is a resident of Cape Coral, Florida with his wife Joanna. A decorated US Air Force veteran of 7-1/2 years service – half of it in Europe – Gelinas spent over 20 years as a senior executive in the high-tech industry, primarily in Information Security, before founding Gelinas & Wolf, Inc. with business partner Ralph Wolf in 2001. This entrepreneurial marketing services firm helps start-up companies get funded and go to market. In 2003, Gelinas & Wolf created a subsidiary venture, ArcheBooks Publishing, spun off in September 2004 as Archebooks Publishing Incorporated. As President, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Gelinas is able to both enjoy his passion for writing and books as well as apply the innovative business leadership skills that made him successful in the corporate world.