Kelley J. P. Lindberg writes award-winning YA and adult fiction, magazine articles, essays, and how-to books. She’s also a contract medical, technical, and business writer. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Baltimore Review, The Citron Review, 99 Pine Street, In Layman’s Terms, Frontier Tales, Chicken Soup for the Wine Lover’s Soul, and others, and in the Tellables app for the Amazon Alexa platform. She has spoken at many writing conferences and workshops; she loves to leave her audiences with take-away information and tips they can use the very next day. When she isn’t writing, she’s traveling as far and as often as she can. Visit her and read her writer’s blog at www.KelleyLindberg.com or follow her on Twitter at @KelleyLindberg1.
Rachel Dempsey has written and directed over a dozen plays for numerous acclaimed theater organizations such as Imagination Stage and ArtStream. Her prose won first prize in The Colorado Gold Rush Literary Awards and also won the Denver Women’s Press Club Emerging Writers Contest. She holds a BFA in Drama and English from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a Master’s degree in Journalism from Georgetown University. She lives in Denver where she currently writes and waits for live theater to be a thing again.
Ann Gordon is a former English and Computer Science teacher, technical writer, copy editor and instructional designer. She has a B.A. in English and a Masters in Computer Science. She’s currently semi-retired and trying to complete a YA novel. She has written and published short stories and lots of articles, along with plenty of technical docs. She has also co-authored and/or copyedited six historical fiction books, self-published on Amazon, and is a webmaster for five websites. She’s won writing awards in most categories, including flash fiction. She wrote her first stories in elementary school and continued writing fiction until she was twenty, when she had to stop writing to make a living and raise a family. She’s been a member of RMFW for years and attends the Western Slope meetings when she can. She is president of the online chapter of the League of Utah Writers; her chapter has a large critique group. She lives in a tourist town in SE Utah.
A Colorado native, Rainey Hall (writing as L. Treloar) has been an RMFW member since 2012 and is happy to belong to one of the best critique groups ever: The 93rd Street Irregulars. She has self-published The Frozen Moose, a short story available on Barnes and Noble in e-book. In her spare time, she enjoys organizing anything from closets to military family retreats to rodeos and parades. Along with teaching her cat to retrieve, she volunteers at church and The Horse Protection League. With an Associate degree in Applied Science/Land Surveying, she learned she far prefers words over math.
Hilary Linnertz is a romance author who has one completed contemporary romance novel and several works in progress. Born and raised in Colorado, she currently lives in Eaton with her family. Hilary enjoys reading, writing, and traveling and never grows tired of learning as much as possible about the craft of writing.
Laurie Marr Wasmund is the author of My Heart Lies Here, a novel of the Ludlow Massacre; Clean Cut, A Romance of the Western Heart; and the White Winter Trilogy, which is set in Colorado during the Great War and the 1920s. The third book of the Trilogy, To Walk Humbly, was a 2020 finalist for the Mainstream/Literary book award from the Colorado Authors League. It also received a 2020 EVVY third place award in Historical Fiction from the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. She is the current Vice President and Membership Chair of Colorado Authors League. Visit her website at https://lostranchbooks.com/ or her Amazon Author Central page at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Laurie-Marr-Wasmund/author/B00IVTLMCM
Maggie Smith’s debut novel, TRUTH AND OTHER LIES, is out on submission and tells the story of a young investigative reporter faced with an impossible choice—if she saves her famous mentor’s reputation, she’ll destroy her own mother’s political career. Maggie’s first short story, THE DEVIL YOU KNOW, appeared in the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writer’s 2018 anthology False Faces. She hosts the podcast Hear Us Roar, where she interviews debut women’s fiction novelists, and she serves as Managing Editor for CWA’s Write City Magazine. Learn more at www.maggiesmithwriter.com.
Mark Stevens writes the Allison Coil Mystery Series—Antler Dust, Buried by the Roan, Trapline, Lake of Fire and The Melancholy Howl. Trapline won the Colorado Book Award and The Colorado Authors League Award in 2016. Buried by the Roan and Lake of Fire were finalists for the same award. Kirkus Reviews called Lake of Fire “irresistible” and The Melancholy Howl “smart and indelible.” Mark was the 2016 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Writer of the Year. He lives in Mancos, Colorado.
Past Contributors
Donald Paul Benjamin is an American cartoonist, photographer, and mystery novelist. He was born in Greeley, a mid-sized settlement on Colorado’s eastern plains. He grew up writing stories about local characters and sketching animals on his family’s small acreage. As a teen, he worked on his high school newspaper. Upon graduation in 1963, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving three years as a military journalist, including a stint in Korea from 1965-66. Honorably discharged, he returned to Greeley to earn his teaching degree from the University of Northern Colorado (UNC). He taught first grade, then returned to campus to serve as UNC’s first campus ombudsman. In 1982, he earned a master’s degree in college student services administration at Oregon State University. From 1982-2014, he lived in Arizona and worked in higher education, most recently as an e-advisor for Phoenix College. In 2014, he retired to the wild Western Slope of Colorado, where he lives in the small town of Cedaredge. He works as a contributing writer for the Delta County Independent Newspaper, and fishes and hikes in the surrounding wilderness. He recently married Donna Marie, his publishing collaborator, who’s a graphic designer and production artist. According to the Ancestry.com saliva test, he is a combination of Welsh and Dutch with a little German and Martian on the side. Visit Don at https://benjaminauthor.com/, or follow him on Facebook or Instagram.
Mary Gillgannon began writing historical romance soon after she discovered the genre. She loves how these stories allow her to portray the excitement and high stakes of past eras, yet focus on relationships and create a happy ending. She’s written seventeen novels, including romances set in the dark ages, medieval and Regency time periods, time travel, and historical fantasy. Her books have been translated into Russian, Chinese, Dutch and German. She’s worked at the local public library for over twenty-five years and acquires adult fiction as part of her job.
Kendra Griffin has a passion for writing about underdogs, family relationships, social inequality, and teenage characters who develop strong identities despite all social pressure to the contrary. She recently self-published The Pox Ward, the first novel in her dystopian, post-plague YA series. The sequel, Apocalypse Thoughts, arrives this March. Kendra is also a singer-songwriter and occasional poet whose poetry appears in the recent release of Fresh Starts, a Pikes Peak Writers publication. Kendra loves to encourage others in their creative process. She teaches writing at Aims Community College, frequently hosts creative writing workshops in her community, and was the winner of the 2020 NOCO Jerry Eckert Scholarship.
Mandy Miller is a lawyer and editor at Literary Wanderlust. Her debut novel, States of Grace, A Grace Locke Mystery, will be published on April 1, 2021.