Dawn Blume Hawkes was born in Hollywood, California. She began living a bi-coastal life; parents toggling her from Boston to New York and back to California to earn her M.A. in English and Design. Her quest to travel, eat, perfect her design talents, and write for various publications, led to an appreciation of the diversity of cuisines and the skill of the chef.

Away From the Kitchen offers a glimpse into the joys and pressures of a chef’s life—satisfying the curiosity of those swept up in the wave of America’s chef-obsession. Here, selected chefs from across the nation disclose some of their most personal dreams and talents—revealing who they are inside and outside the kitchen. With its uniquely personal approach, Away From the Kitchen will appeal to foodies everywhere, as well as readers who want it all: the menus, the recipes, and the chef “scoop.”

Carol Walsh graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BFA. As a serious artist, she wrote and illustrated a hard cover book for fiber artists, Design for Weaving, published by Hastings House of New York and reprinted in paperback by Interweave Press; was a part of numerous exhibits; won international prizes; and lectured nationally. Later, Walsh graduated from Catholic University of America with an MSW and opened a private practice. As a therapist, she wrote and self-published The Art of Awakening Spirit. In addition she wrote and illustrated forty, 3000–4000 word articles for Pathways, a Washington DC publication, and subsequently consolidated her articles into a paperback book, Break Through: Coping Skills for Chaotic Times. Walsh has been happily married for twenty-two years and is the proud mother of two daughters and four grandchildren. She lives in Maryland.

When Carol Walsh pulled her fiancé from the bottom of a diving well—dead from a massive heart attack—her life was turned upside down. Even though she was a psychotherapist working with clients suffering from trauma, this personal shock felt unbearable. Nonetheless, she had to heal herself while supporting clients—and, as a single mother, her two children. Using the creative interests she’d developed during childhood in order to emotionally save herself from a difficult mother, she fully recovered from her grief and PTSD symptoms—and as she recreated her personal, artistic, and professional life, she began to thrive.

Deanna Willmon graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) with a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary social science. A Las Vegas native, she still resides in her hometown with her spouse and two children, both of whom should be finishing their university studies and leaving the nest. Any. Day. Now. Willmon’s professional career has primarily been spent in management and administration, striving to better organize and help make others’ professional lives more tolerable. Her weekends are spent playing board games, reading, writing short stories, and working on her first novel. Despite a (somewhat) irrational fear of the Internet, she can be found on her blog and lurking on most social media sites. She also occasionally creates items for the happy negativist and those who love them in the online store called Slap Happy Sundries.

Fed up with happiness gurus telling you that you can’t be happy unless you get rid of all of your negativity? Sick of all those perky Positive Pollys receiving all the happiness glory? Negatively Ever After will provide the guidance you need to find happiness without the impossible task of eradicating negativity from your life. This book debunks the popular misconception that being positive and being happy are synonymous. Using a simple “Happiness Bank” analogy, the author shares her research, experiences, and missteps in discovering that negativity is not the enemy. From achieving self-adoration and learning what gratitude truly means to determining whether sharing happiness is really a good idea, this book explains how to develop “Negativity Wisdom” in order to embrace and effectively utilize your inherent negative tendencies. Realistic and accessible, Negatively Ever After will help you harness your negativity and find your own inner happiness.

Danielle M. Wong is a travel-obsessed author of psychological thrillers. She pens the type of stories that keep her up at night, featuring gripping scenes, complex characters, and twist-filled plots. She has been published to critical acclaim, earning Independent Press, Reader’s Favorite, and International Book Awards, among others. Danielle’s writing has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, HuffPost, PopSugar, and Writer’s Digest. She is currently working on her next novel.

Amelia Cole—Lia for short—is one of the first women studying abroad at Oxford University in the 1920s. Finally free from her overbearing Brooklyn parents, she finds a welcome sense of independence in British college life—and quickly falls for Scarlett Daniels, an aspiring actress and hardheaded protester. Scarlett introduces her to an exciting gender-equality movement, but when their secret love clashes with political uprising, their relationship is one of the casualties. Years later, Lia’s only memories of Scarlett are obscured by the glossy billboards she sees advertising the actress’s new films. But when a mysterious letter surfaces, she is immediately thrown back into their unsettled romance, and she crosses oceans and continents in her search for her former lover. Lia will stop at nothing to win Scarlett back—but ultimately, spread across time and place, she begins to realize that uncovering lost love might not be attainable after all.

Christine Evelyn Volker became intrigued by foreign cultures at an early age, which propelled her to study Spanish, German, and Italian. After pursuing an MLS and an MBA, she was drawn to international banking and became a senior vice president at a global financial institution. Her career brought her to Italy, where she immersed herself in the language and made frequent visits to Venice. <em>Venetian Blood</em> marks a return to her roots in the humanities. A native New Yorker, she resides with her husband in Richmond, California, where she heads a local library non-profit organization and writes about environmental sustainability. She is currently at work on her second international mystery, this one set in the rainforest of Peru.

Struggling to forget a crumbling marriage, forty-year-old Anna Lucia Lottol comes to Venice to visit an old friend—but instead of finding solace, she is dragged into the police station and accused of murdering a money-laundering count with whom she had a brief affair. A US Treasury officer with brains and athleticism, Anna fights to clear her name in a seductive city full of watery illusions. As she works to pry information from a cast of recalcitrant characters sometimes denying what she sees and hears, she succeeds in unleashing a powerful foe bent on destroying her. Will she save herself and vanquish her enemies, including her darkest fears?

A mysterious tapestry of murder, betrayal, and family, Venetian Blood is a story of one woman’s brave quest for the truth —before it’s too late.

Deborah Brandon, PhD has been a professor in the Mathematical Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon University since 1991. She has participated nationally and internationally in dragon boating. She is a mother, a writer, and a respected textile artist, as well as a brain injury survivor.

Her essays have appeared in several publications, including the Weave A Real Peace newsletter, where she has a regular column; Dragon Boat World International, HandEye Magazine, Logan Magazine, SIAM Journal of Mathematical Analysis, and Journal of Integral Equations and Applications. Her books include Birth and Rebirth: Textile Techniques from Around the World. Brandon is an active blogger and regularly participates in social media platforms, including Facebook, where she discusses brain injury and its impact.

When Deb Brandon discovered that cavernous angiomas—tangles of malformed blood vessels in her brain—were behind the terrifying symptoms she’d been experiencing, she underwent one brain surgery. And then another. And then another. And that was just the beginning.

The book also includes an introduction by Connie Lee, founder and president of the Angioma Alliance. Unlike other memoirs that focus on injury crisis and acute recovery, But My Brain Had Other Ideas follows Brandon’s story all the way through to long-term recovery, revealing without sugarcoating or sentimentality Brandon’s struggles—and ultimate triumph.

Carol E. Anderson is a life coach and former organizational consultant. She has traveled the world extensively for work and pleasure—most recently to Kenya on a photo safari and to the Democratic Republic of the Congo on a philanthropic mission. She holds a doctorate in spiritual studies, and master’s degrees in psychology, organizational development, and creative nonfiction. She is the founder of Rebellious Dreamers, an eighteen-year-strong non-profit organization that has helped women over thirty-five realize dreams they’d deferred and women of all ages come into their own. Anderson is the author of the essay “What is it about memoir,” published in Magic of Memoir, and coauthor of “Deeper Power,” published in Enlightened Power: How Women are Transforming the Practice of Leadership. This is her first memoir. She lives with the love of her life and their sassy pup in a nature sanctuary in Ann Arbor, MI.

Carol Anderson grows up in a fundamentalist Christian home in the ’60s, a time when being gay was in opposition to all social and religious mores and against the law in most states. Fearing the rejection of her parents, she hides the truth about her love orientation, creating emotional distance from them for years, as she desperately struggles to harness her powerful attractions to women while pursuing false efforts to be with men.

The watershed point in Carol’s journey comes when she returns to graduate school and discovers the feminist movement, which emboldens her sense of personal power and the freedom to love whom she chooses. But this sense of self-possession comes too late for honesty with her father. His unexpected death before she can tell him the truth brings the full cost of Carol’s secret crashing in—compelling her to come out to her mother before it is too late. Candid and poignant, You Can’t Buy Love Like That reveals the complex invisible dynamics that arise for gay people who are forced to hide their true selves in order to survive—and celebrates the hard-won rewards of finding one’s courageous heart and achieving self-acceptance and self-love.

Carlyn Montes De Oca is an acupuncturist, plant-based nutritional consultant, and animal advocate in private practice near San Francisco. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Loyola Marymount University in communication arts and a master’s degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine from Emperor’s College. She is also certified in plant-based nutrition from the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutritional Studies at Cornell University. She was voted PETA’s Sexiest Vegetarian Over 50 in 2011, and has been a spokesperson for the Guardian Campaign at In Defense of Animals. She is also the founder of The Animal-Human Health Connection, which focuses on bringing awareness to the many powerful ways that animals enhance human health, happiness, and longevity. Montes De Oca lives in Marin County with her husband, Ken, and her beloved rescue animals.

Written for the dog and cat lover, animal advocate, and fan of natural medicine, Dog as My Doctor, Cat as My Nurse reveals how our timeless relationships with our beloved animal friends hold the keys to our optimal health. Acupuncturist, plant-based nutritional consultant, and animal advocate Carlyn Montes De Oca weaves together an insightful tapestry of prescriptive advice, personal stories about her lively “six-pack” of rescue dogs and cats, and testimonials from other dog and cat lovers, including best-selling author Jack Canfield.

In an age when most people will suffer from a preventable chronic disease, Dog as My Doctor, Cat as My Nurse opens readers eyes’ to the fact that our beloved companion animals can be some of the most powerful allies we will ever have on the journey towards a healthier, happier, and more extraordinary life.

Catherine Marshall-Smith teaches writing and history to 6th graders, runs long distance, is married to the love of her life, mother to three adult children, has two grand dogs and one dachshund with a very straight nose. In the process of writing American Family, she observed in Family Court, interviewed lawyers and a judge and read the Supreme Court ruling on grandparents’ rights with a lawyer. She has her bachelor’s degree in English from University of California at Berkeley and earned a Creative Writing Certificate from the Writing Program at UCLA where she was short listed for the James Kirkwood Award for Fiction 2012.

For fans of Roisín O’Donnell’s Nesting, an intense, suspenseful story of a young mother’s fight to save herself after the man she thought was her white knight turns out to be just as dangerous as the man he helped her escape. 

After twenty-one-year-old Emily Miller flees her ex-husband, Lee, with the exterminator she hired to kill hornets in her backyard, she finally feels safe. Jake Clayton offers Emily and her daughter a beautiful place to live where neither Lee nor her mother, who wants custody of Jenna, can find them. Unlike Lee, Jake has a steady job, doesn’t drink (she’s never met a man who doesn’t), and doesn’t hit. And he doesn’t think Emily is too much—too mouthy (Lee), too large (her mother), too extra.

Isolated in a cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains with only a three-year-old for company, Emily distracts herself from the liquor cabinet and from worrying that Lee will track her down by planning a surprise for Jake: a reunion with the sisters he hasn’t seen since foster care. But the deeper she digs into Jake’s past, the less he seems like the man she trusts—and when she learns Lee has disappeared, she suspects Jake could have done . . . something. But that’s ridiculous, right? Sure, Jake is bossy about where she goes and who she sees. Sure, he has a temper. But murder? That’s just her being dramatic—like Lee and her mother always say she is.

Right?

Richard and Michael, both three years sober, have just decided to celebrate their love by moving in together when Richard—driven by the desire to do the right thing for his ten-year-old-daughter, Brady, whom he has never met—impulsively calls his former father-in-law to connect with her. With that phone call, he jeopardizes the one good thing he has—his relationship with Michael—and also threatens the world of the fundamentalist Christian grandparents who love Brady and see her as payback from God for the alcohol-related death of her mother. Unable to reach an agreement, the two parties hire lawyers who have agendas far beyond the interests of the families—and Brady is initially trusted into Richard and Michael’s care. But when the judge learns that the young girl was present when a questionable act took place while in their custody, she returns Brady to her grandparents. Ultimately, it’s not until further tragedy strikes that both families are finally motivated to actually act in the “best interests of the child.”

Charlene Ball holds a PhD in comparative literature and has taught English and women’s studies at colleges and universities. Although she has written nonfiction, reviews, and academic articles, writing fiction has always been her first love. She has published fiction and nonfiction in The North Atlantic Review, Concho River Review, The NWSA Journal, and other journals. She has reviewed theater and written articles on the arts for Atlanta papers. She is a Fellow of the Hambidge Center for the Arts and held a residency at the Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. She attends fiction workshops by Carol Lee Lorenzo, and she belongs to a writers’ group that she helped found. She retired from the Women’s Studies Institute (now the Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) at Georgia State University in 2009 and has been busier than ever with writing and bookselling. She also volunteers with her congregation and other social justice groups. She and her wife, Libby Ware, an author and bookseller, were married in May 2016.

Emilia Bassano has four strikes against her: she is poor, beautiful, female, and intelligent in Elizabethan England. To make matters worse, she comes from a family of secret Jews. When she is raped as a teenager, she knows she probably will not be able to make a good marriage, so she becomes the mistress of a much older nobleman. During this time she falls in love with poet/player William Shakespeare, and they have a brief, passionate relationship—but when the plague comes to England, the nobleman abandons her, leaving her pregnant and without financial security.

In the years that follow, Emilia is forced to make a number of difficult decisions in her efforts to survive, and not all of them turn out well for her. But ultimately, despite the disadvantaged position she was born to, she succeeds in pursuing her dreams of becoming a writer—and even publishes a book of poetry in 1611 that makes a surprisingly modern argument for women’s equality.