Authors
Lindsay G. Arthur, Jr.
Lindsay G. Arthur Jr. is a well-known lawyer who has tried over 150 cases during his 35-year career, specializing in products liability lawsuits. In 1974 he founded his current law firm, Arthur, Chapman, Kettering, Smetak, and Pikala, a highly regarded litigation firm in Minneapolis. He is also an entrepreneur. In 1985 he founded a biotech company that uses genetic engineering to develop microorganisms to degrade toxic waste.
Arthur has lectured and published extensively on a variety of legal topics. The Litigators, his first novel, combines his legal background with a bold critique of a myopic judicial system where lawyers focus on victory at all costs rather than addressing the human problems of their clients.
Arthur is also a keen sportsman who plays a mean game of tennis, and an outdoorsman who likes to spend time paddling through Minnesota’s beautiful Boundary Waters Canoe Area. He is married with two sons and resides in the Minneapolis area.
Leonard Borman
Leonard Borman is a Detroit, Michigan native where he resides as an accountant, husband, father of seven, and grandfather of fourteen. He received his bachelor’s degree in accounting from Wayne State University and his master’s degree in history and literature from the University of Michigan. Our Jewish Robot Future is Leonard’s first book, which he wrote as a legacy for his family and to ensure his own robotic future.
Mike Ferrell
As founder and president of The Pinecrest Group, Mike Ferrell has worked with many companies in hiring, training and managing sales forces as well as creating and implementing business and marketing plans for over 20 years. He has been involved in start-ups and worked with companies ranging from one to 500 employees. He has presented workshops and seminars all over the country, with thousands of professionals learning his unique approach. Clients include Ameriprise, Transamerica, Conseco and Piper Jaffray. Contact Mike Ferrell at www.ultimatebreakthroughplanning.com.
Helen Electrie Lindsay
Helen Electrie Lindsay was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. She graduated from Anatolia College in Thessaloniki and came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship to study physics. She worked for Dayton Hudson and as an engineering product manager at MTS Systems in the Twin Cities. She is married with two children and lives in Wayzata, Minnesota.
Visit Helen's web site at www.helindsay.com.
Charles Locks
Charles Locks was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, including fifteen months of service in Vietnam, he majored in English literature at Macalester College. Locks lived for several years on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He owned and operated Lucy’s Restaurant, a popular establishment where he met the characters that populate his tropical novel, Great Trouble in the Lesser Antilles.
He was also a co-contributor to Cass Gilbert, Life and Work: Architect of the Public Domain, published by W.W. Norton in 2001. Charles Locks lives in Wisconsin. Contact Charles Locks at chasman@grantsburgtelcom.net.
Philip Martin
Philip Martin is editor of The New Writer’s Handbook, offering practical advice for writers at all levels. He directs Great Lakes Literary, a consulting firm that helps authors and small organizations get their best work published, and is a writer, editor and publisher. He has produced books that have won the Benjamin Franklin and Banta awards and Small Press Award for Fiction, and is the author himself of several books on traditional culture and literary studies, including a book on speculative fiction, A Guide to Fantasy Literature. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His web site is www.greatlakeslit.com.
Ignacio Solares
Ignacio Solares, born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1945, is a novelist, playwright and essayist, as well as the editor-in-chief of the Revista de la Universidad de México and the past director of the Division of Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Solares is a prolific writer with over twenty published books, including the novels No hay tal lugar (2003; English translation There Is No Such Place, 2008), Columbus (1996), Nen, la inutile (1994), and Madero, el otro (1989). He has won numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Anthony Signorelli
Anthony Signorelli is a businessman, concerned citizen, and cofounder and Executive Director of The Center for Thoughtful Democracy, which works to encourage civic engagement and dynamic political discourse. His previous publications include serving as editor of a collection of poems and essays entitled Rooster Crows at Light from the Bombing: Echoes from the Gulf War, nominated for a Minnesota Book Award in 1993. For five years, he co-edited a literary journal, Inroads: Journal of the Male Soul. He has run organic farms and an independent bookstore.
Signorelli lives in Stillwater, Minnesota, and operates a performance-improvement consulting practice in the St. Paul area. His editorials can be found on his blog at www.calltoliberty.net.
Cathy Sultan
Cathy Sultan, a native of Washington D.C., moved in 1969 with her Lebanese husband and two small children to Beirut, Lebanon—a city known for its welcoming residents, lovely Mediterranean climate and exotic blend of Arab and Western culture. For six years she led the life of her dreams, her home a rooftop apartment with a terrace full of flowers and a breathtaking view of the city. Her husband had a successful medical practice and her children were growing up speaking English, French and Arabic.
In April 1975 the Phalange militia attacked the Palestinians in East Beirut. Sultan’s tranquil tree-lined street, two blocks from the National Museum, became a deadly divide: the infamous Green Line, separating East from West Beirut. Despite the danger, she and her family remained, hoping for peace. A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War—a memoir about her experience as wife and mother living through the bloody Lebanese civil war—is her second book. Her first, Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides, was reissued by Scarletta Press in 2006. Tragedy in South Lebanon: The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006 will be released in May 2008.
Sultan and her husband now reside in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. She sits on the Executive Board of the National Peace Foundation, where she directs Middle East educational projects and co-leads delegations to Israel and Palestine though Interfaith Peace Builders. She is also involved with “Women in Black”—a group that stands in silent vigil to protest war, ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses. Her web site is www.cathysultan.com/cms.
James Peter Taylor & Kathleen Murphy-Taylor
James Peter Taylor and Kathleen Murphy-Taylor have been married for 11 years. Jim Taylor’s dangerous, confused and at times remarkable life is the subject of the memoir Willow in a Storm. As a young boy, Jim suffered from continuous abuse. As a young man he turned to crime, until during a botched robbery in 1955, he unintentionally killed a community banker, a family man with young children. Sentenced to life, Taylor faced the horrors of more than four decades of prison life, as disturbed inmates and sadistic officers threatened his very existence. He managed to survive, matured spiritually, and eventually was released at age 70, partially blind.
Kathleen received her MSW from the University of Michigan and practiced social work for 32 years in the areas of child welfare, juvenile delinquency, mental health and senior citizen services. In her retirement, she gives full time care to Jim, who since 2002 has suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. They live in Minneapolis. Kathy can be reached at kcmurphytaylor@aol.com.
Bill Watkins
Bill Watkins was born in Birmingham in 1950 into a Welsh/Irish family. His bilingual parents were notable traditional singers. As a teenager he tramped the roads of the British Isles and Europe in the wake of his heroes, W. H. Davies, Welsh poet and author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, and Eric “Burton” Blair, who later rose to fame as the English writer and socialist George Orwell. Having learned to play the tin whistle, fiddle, guitar, banjo and mandolin at an early age, Watkins is also an accomplished singer/songwriter whose most famous ditty, “The Errant Apprentice,” has been recorded worldwide. Watkins lives in Minneapolis, where he builds pubs in the British Isles style and serves as a cultural ambassador at Merlins Rest Pub. He’s currently working on his next book, The Fiasco Society. Find him at www.merlinsrest.com/bill-watkins/.