Book Profiles - Authors & Artists Magazine

It's 1962, a year after the death of Sam's father--he was a war hero--and Sam and her mother must move, along with their very liberal views, to Jackson, Mississippi, her father's conservative hometown. Needless to say, they don't quite fit in.

People like the McLemores fear that Sam, her mother, and her mother's artist friend, Perry, are in the South to "agitate" and to shake up the dividing lines between black and white and blur it all to grey. As racial injustices ensue--sit-ins and run-ins with secret white supremacists--Sam learns to focus with her camera lens to bring forth the social injustice out of the darkness and into the light.

Margaret McMullan is the author of five novels including In My Mother's House,

Cashay, and When I Crossed No-Bob, a 2008 Parents' Choice Silver Honor, a 2007 School Library Journal Best Book, a 2008 finalist for the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction, and a 2008 Horace Mann Upstander Honor book. Both When I Crossed No-Bob and How I Found the Strong won the Mississippi Arts and Letters Award for Best Fiction (in 2004 and 2008) and the Indiana Best Young Adult Book (in 2005 and 2008). How I Found the Strong also won the 2006 Award for Fiction from the Mississippi Library Association, was named an ALA 2005 Notable Social Studies Book, and a Booklist's Top Ten First Novel for Youth. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Glamour, the Chicago Tribune, Southern Accents, the Indianapolis Star, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, The Southern California Anthology, Mississippi Magazine, Other Voices, Boulevard, Ploughshares, The Pinch, and The Sun among several other journals and anthologies. She received a Special Mention in the 2005 Pushcart Prize collection and twice she received the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was the 2007 Eudora Welty Visiting Writer at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and she received her M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She is currently a board member of the New Harmony Project and a professor of English at the University of Evansville, in Evansville, Indiana, where she's working on a collection of stories and a new young adult novel for Houghton Mifflin due out in 2010. She lives with her husband, Patrick O'Connor and their son, James.

Coming Together is a love story. A story of foreign intrigue. A story of the coming together of cultures, of passion, and, most of all, of unbelievable hope in the face of staggering odds. This is also a story of choices, hard choices, where life and death are constant reminders of making the wrong decisions. Lives are at stake when Daisy, Luis, and Isabella take on the Brazilian dictatorship in order to bring freedom and a future to those who matter most. It was written for the heart and spirit in all of us. You will not soon forget this book.

I knew I wanted to be a writer as soon as I learned what a book was. Getting a library card, for me, was as exciting as going to Disneyland – maybe better. Reading was fun but then I discovered writing! Ah, that was where the magic happened. Creating my own world and having total control over it – it was the stuff any shy awkward little kid dreamed of. In grammar school, I wrote stories about kittens and puppies. In high school, I wrote about unrequited love. With a fellow classmate, I rewrote Pride and Prejudice as a stage play and even talked one of the nuns into letting us perform it for our class. READ MORE

Stuart Adams, a moderately successful novelist, wants to write the big book that will make him rich. A serendipitous encounter with aging eccentric Wes Barnes may provide a ticket to the wealth he seeks. Barnes has been on a decades-long search for an ancient scroll believed to contain knowledge that could have a profound impact on global consciousness. He hires Adams to chronicle the expedition and publicize the scroll's contents—if they can find it.

The assignment sets Adams and Dr. Niki Mikos, a fiery Greek archeologist, on a perilous journey to the Mediterranean and an exploding volcano that may hold the prize they seek. Along the way he is dogged by strong memories of a place he has never been. His confusion grows when a Pialigarian priestess tells him it is his destiny to undergo a ritual involving a deadly labyrinth. If he succeeds, she says, the planet will become "sweet with the fragrance of peace." If he fails, he will lose his life. Her suggestion is nonsense, of course—superstitious mumbo jumbo that has nothing to do with his destiny.

J Douglas Bottorff is the author of A Practical Guide to Prosperous Living, A Practical Guide to Meditation and Prayer and The Whisper of Pialigos. He is currently working on his forth book, to be published by Unity House.

Ordained in 1981, he has for nearly three decades served as minister in churches in Michigan, Missouri and Colorado. He has written extensively for Unity Magazine and is a contributing author to other spiritually-based books and periodicals. He has written and recorded two musical CDs, One World and Vision of Hope. Doug and his wife Elizabeth are the parents of two grown children.
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