MEET THE SPEAKERS

Kat Fitzpatrick was one of the few American dependents living in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War (1975), the daughter of a CIA operative who worked in ultra-secret propaganda. Her first experience with writing was corresponding regularly with her father while he was away on assignment. The spell of the writing life never released her and she earned two degrees—a Journalism, B.A. and a Creative Writing, M.F.A., and is the author of the 2023 narrative nonfiction book, For the Love of Vietnam:  a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard.

Robert Knightly retired from the NYPD in September of 1987 and became a lawyer trying criminal cases in Manhattan and Queens, NY for 18 years. Relocating to Albany, NY he now acts as a criminal defense attorney. He says, "I take the real events, people, and fictionalize them all. I do not write true crime. Too hard, too restrictive. Much easier to add make-believe, and in the end, depending on your skill, truer."

Frankie Y. Bailey is a “crime professor”. She is a PhD and tenured full professor in the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany (SUNY). She studies crime and justice in American culture, focusing on crime history, mass media/popular culture, and material culture. In her other career, Frankie is a mystery writer. She is the author of five mysteries featuring amateur sleuth Lizzie Stuart and two police procedurals novels featuring Albany police detective Hannah McCabe.Whether she is engaged in academic research and non-fiction writing or researching and writing crime fiction, Frankie’s mantra is “dig deeper.” She believes, “Every crime deserves context.”

David Schoorens comments: Trying to pigeonhole it into an accepted genre of fiction. Dystopian? Yes, there’s a good deal of that. I don’t end civilization in a nuclear war or with a virus that leads us to zombies, extinction or vampirism. Thriller? Check that box too. Military with a bit of spy stuff? Got it. Political? Definitely. I’ve settled on this: political horror. Without supernatural demons. We’ve managed to elect enough perfectly natural and mortal demons already. The horror of this story is that it is plausible. 

Schoorens lives in Rhode Island with Cathy, his wife of forty-two years. 

Julia McKenzie Munemo went to Bard College before earning a master’s in education at Harvard and—many years later—an MFA at Stonecoast.

Her first book, The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy (Swallow Press, 2020) was called “a carefully crafted memoir for all readers who care about family connections and legacies and about multiracial identity in an increasingly complex world” by Library Journal.

Her essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Solstice Literary Magazine, Inside Higher Education, and elsewhere. She’s hard at work on her second book, a memoir about race, mid motherhood, and mental illness.

She directs the Williams College Writing Center and splits her time between western Massachusetts, central New York, and New York City.

Thomas Henry Pope is a novelist, journalist, teacher, and actor. His thrillers, dystopian tales, and literary fiction have won the Nautilus Award, the American Legacy Book Award, and the Page Turner Award. He gives the settings in his novels as much agency to influence events as he does to his characters. And to capture the speech, dress, and humanity of the people who appear in them he travels to the countries where the stories unfold. His previous incarnations were a singer-songwriter, builder, EMT, and football coach. A lifelong Buddhist, he teaches meditation and lives in Vermont where the peepers sing.

Chard deNiord is a former poet laureate of Vermont (2015-2019) and author of seven books of poetry, including In My Unknowing (2020), The Double Truth (2011), which the Boston Globe named one of the top ten books of poetry in 2011, Night Mowing (2005), Sharp Golden Thorn (2002), and Asleep In The Fire (1900).