Local Authors

When Laraine Herring is diagnosed with colon cancer, her deceased father returns to her as a raven, leading her on a magical journey through grief, trauma, and ancestral healing. As she copes with her diagnosis, she delves deeper into her family’s history, ultimately deciding what to carry forward and what to leave behind.

Author of - A Mermaid Tail A Mermaid Tail is a rhyming photo book written by Kassandra Holmes that documents her journey into mermaiding. The book recounts her challenges of feeling like an outsider and the initial lack of respect for her unconventional dream....

Karen Solt, an eighteen-year-old nonconformist with an alcohol problem, gets manipulated by a Navy recruiter into joining the military. She finds herself on a ship in the Deep South, struggling to adapt to a world very different from her small Northern Arizona hometown. During this time, she also discovers that she’s gay. However, being gay in the Navy in 1984 is considered a crime, and the Navy Criminal Investigative Service regularly pursues gay Sailors. This puts Karen in a difficult position, as she is committed to the uniform and to staying with her first girlfriend, who is also enlisted. To avoid being exposed and discharged, she hides her true identity, leading to serious consequences.

Love is the last thing either of them wants. But it might be the only thing that can save them both.

June Cartwright, an event planner, dreams of escaping the family business to start her own. When her friend Callie asks her to help plan a fundraiser to save her fiancé’s family ranch, June is thrilled. Especially when she discovers that Callie’s brother-in-law happens to be Sterling Wilder, the scowling-but-gorgeous hero who stepped in during her disastrous airport incident.

Maternal healthcare is in crisis; women are dying at increasing rates, yet 4 out of 5 of these deaths could be prevented. Postpartum women are more likely to be diagnosed with a chronic mental health or cardiometabolic condition like diabetes, heart disease, or metabolic syndrome up to 20 years after their pregnancy.

Karen J. Keim has been writing stories since she was 13 years old, following her father’s spare-time nightly and weekend compulsion. She attended UCSB in California and UH at Manoa in Hawaii and received her teaching credential. She spent many happy years in second and third-grade classrooms. Her fiction book, The Bison, released in May.

Barchelle (“Chelly”) Bolger Wathen has always loved dogs, her own as well as shelter dogs. Her world changed forever when Chelly and her husband adopted a very special dog, Shayla, from Ukraine. This remarkable shepherd/wolfdog, abandoned as a puppy, learned to love and trust those who raised her at the Christian orphanage Otchiy Dim (Father’s House), before she came to America.

Author of: Pain, Power & Promise: 19 Ways to Turn Setbacks into Comebacks Nannette Oatley Johnson is a wife, mother, nana, author, speaker, resiliency coach, and the 2001 U.S. Open Wheelchair Tennis Singles and Doubles champion. For nearly 40 years, Nannette’s...

Growing up, Jessica Lynn MacLean rode dirt bikes around the Bradshaws where her relatives once built cabins. Now she writes and watches wildlife from a small Prescott deck with her husband and rescue dog. Jessica expanded on letters and articles to create her first book, Arizona Rain: Adventures in Life, Love, and Loss that Span Generations (1922-1974), which features 101 photographs.

Acclaimed author Michaela Carter moved to Prescott nineteen years ago, drawn to the stranger side of our town. She was attracted to the thriving community of artists who were embracing the woods and the creeks in their work. Drum circles, fire dancers, stilt walkers, and the summer solstice festival Tsunami On the Square, as well as the javelinas trotting down the street and the coyotes howling into the starry nights, fed her creative spirit.

Before Sherry Rossman found the awesomeness of writing in the YA realm she dabbled in children’s stories. Her first YA novel became an Amazon bestseller shortly before her publisher closed its doors. But she forged on, exploring fantastical ideas and discovering that our world is more magical than we give it credit for. In her experience working with young adults and, more recently, the elderly, she has learned that our individual lives are beautiful stories forged from adversity and perseverance.

Mercedes Ogden spends her days on her family’s hobby farm, raising her free-spirited daughter and writing all things creepy and kooky. She enjoys researching her family history and letting her imagination weave wild tales with what he uncovers. She believes that her bet fictional tales are made through real-life experiences. Her debut novel, The Gathering of the Clouds, was a labor of love consisting of many years of research and work.

Lynn Kaylor jokes that she wrote her first romance in junior high. It was a short, sweet historical story of two twelve-year-olds—the boy Native American and the girl a white settler.

Then real life took over, and she had a long career as a software developer for companies such as IBM, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Beech Aircraft.

From the cornfields of Minnesota to the hiking trails of Prescott by way of Silicon Valley, this mild-mannered, high-tech-CEO-by-day morphs into a classic rock singer by night with raspy tones reminiscent of Janis Joplin. Author…well, that was an accident.

Hilary Dartt loves great adventures, whether she’s writing, reading, or living them. The author of nine women’s fiction novels, Hilary lives in Arizona’s high desert with her husband, their three children, her Weimaraner and running partner, Leia, a failed barn cat, and a flock of chickens. She loves camping, exploring in the Jeep, and dance parties with her kids.