Every author has a story beyond the page.

Michael Shook Jr. is an ordained minister, motivational speaker, mentor, and coach from Sturgis, Michigan. He spent more than ten years in meth addiction and has been sober for over five years. He has coached youth football to a championship. He is the author of Faithful Strength for The Relentless Man: A Christian Man's Path to Purpose, Grit, and Resilience.

Jerome Michael "Jerry" Austry is an accomplished business executive, manufacturing leader, and author. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, he attended Western Michigan University on a baseball scholarship, where he served as team captain and earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. He went on to build a distinguished career in manufacturing and executive leadership, eventually becoming President of the Ben Hogan Golf Company. During his time with the company, Austry played an important role in navigating corporate challenges, strengthening its market position, and advancing golf equipment innovation, including the development of the groundbreaking Edge forged cavity-back iron. Drawing on his firsthand experience working alongside legendary golfer Ben Hogan, Austry authored *The Hogan Edge: How the Hogan Company Found and Lost Its Edge*, offering readers an insider's account of the company's history, leadership decisions, business transformation, innovation, and lasting legacy. His work connects the worlds of golf, business, and executive leadership through lessons on building, protecting, and sustaining an iconic brand.

Massimo Lorusso is an Italian author and journalist based in Milan. He has been writing since 1993. At seventeen, a dive into the sea in Rimini radically changed his physical condition and he has lived with tetraplegia ever since. His work focuses on the long life after a defining event: family, fatherhood, marriage, dependence on assistance, autonomy, travel, grief, writing and ordinary choices. He writes through voice dictation and assistive technology and is the author of the autobiographical book "The Voice of Silence – What Words Do Not Say."

Tommy Stedham is a retired Medicaid administrator with approximately 29 years of experience in Alabama Medicaid operations and administration. Over the course of his career, he served in roles ranging from eligibility worker to office manager to associate director-level operational leadership responsibilities, gaining firsthand experience with eligibility systems, policy implementation, hearings and dispute resolution, field operations, verification requirements, and the real-world challenges of administering large public programs. He is the author of Medicaid Made Simple, an Amazon #1 New Release that explains Medicaid operations, incentives, administrative realities, and systems-level tradeoffs in plain English for ordinary readers, providers, attorneys, policymakers, and healthcare professionals. His writing focuses on translating complex government and healthcare systems into clear, practical language without partisan rhetoric or academic jargon. Tommy is also a contributing author to the Amazon #1 bestselling anthology The Success Playbook and holds an MIT certificate in AI and Machine Learning: Leading Business Growth. He lives in Alabama.

Raymond C. Marra is the author of Finding My Way in Westport: A Memoir of Discipline, Rebellion and Resilience. In this deeply personal memoir, he reflects on growing up in Westport, Connecticut, during the 1960s and 1970s, and the experiences that shaped his identity and his understanding of family, relationships, and resilience. Through memories of his parents, lifelong friends, influential teachers, and the community around him, Marra explores the lasting impact of childhood and the journey toward forgiveness, understanding, and personal growth. His story offers readers a thoughtful and compassionate reflection on the ways our early experiences continue to influence who we become.

Glen Oglaza is an award-winning television news reporter and political correspondent whose career has given him a firsthand perspective on some of the most significant events in modern history. Throughout his journalism career, he has covered major political developments, national tragedies, and international events that have shaped public consciousness, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf War to the Good Friday Agreement and the September 11 attacks. In his book, When I Stories, Oglaza takes readers beyond the headlines, sharing his perspective on the defining moments he witnessed and the stories that became part of our collective history. Drawing on his experience in broadcast journalism and political reporting, he offers readers a compelling look at the events, people, and circumstances behind the news. Through his work, Oglaza highlights the importance of journalism in documenting history and preserving the stories that help us understand our world. When I Stories invites readers interested in modern history, politics, and journalism to revisit pivotal events through the eyes of a reporter who was there.

Florian Grönsel is a German writer and the founder and editor of CREATION Magazin, an independent publication exploring philosophy, consciousness, psychology and symbolic traditions. His work draws on over twenty years of personal study, bringing questions from hermetic thought and classical philosophy into conversation with ordinary human experiences. In his English book When Eagles Drink Lion's Milk, he reflects on courage, anger, grief, self-knowledge and the difficult work of changing the way we see.

Eikyo Matsunaga is a Japanese fiction writer pursuing the world's most advanced literary expression as a creative ambition. By asking AI to write and comparing its work with his own, he searched for a style that AI could not reproduce and arrived at his current voice. For Matsunaga, the act of a human writing is itself a form of resistance in the age of AI. His short fiction turns familiar routines into absurd situations, using humour and unexpected human responses.

Lena R. Halden is a pen name used by a psychologist who writes psychological suspense and dark satire. Her fiction explores difficult choices, unreliable truths, self-deception, and the quiet systems people build around themselves. She is the author of The Choice Was Yours and Who Will Bear the Cross?, with the darkly satirical novella The Human Advantage coming in December 2026.

Jonathan Finch was born in London in 1951. His mother was from Ireland, while his father was first-generation English, with grandparents from Austria and Poland. Jonathan has been writing for many years. His poetry has been widely published and has won prizes, while some of his short stories have also appeared in print. Outposts published a small collection of his poems.

De' Ashia Wallace, known artistically as AJ P.R., is an author, poet, spoken-word performer, and founder of My Pen Still Has Ink LLC. Her work explores grief, family, healing, identity, relationships, resilience, and the experiences people often struggle to put into words. A longtime writer and performer, Wallace previously competed nationally as part of a spoken-word team that placed third in the nation. Through poetry, performance, and community programming, she uses language as a bridge between lived experience, reflection, and connection.

Lisa Lacriola is an author whose work explores personal experience, relationships, identity, self-discovery, and the complex ways life experiences shape who we become. Her memoir, Scenes from a Not-So-Ordinary Life: A Journey About Reflection and Acceptance, draws from more than fifteen years of personal experiences following her estrangement from her biological family. Through her writing, Lisa reflects on love, identity, chosen family, personal freedom, and the journey toward accepting oneself authentically.