Josh Conviser grew up in Aspen, Colorado, went to high school in Santa Barbara, California and graduated from Princeton University in 1996. He has lived in Europe, Asia and Australia. An avid mountaineer, he climbed in ranges around the world, including the Himalayas, before giving up the mountains for the jungles of Hollywood where he pursued a career in screenwriting. He is the Executive Consultant on HBO's series, Rome, and has several films in development. Random House published his first novel, ECHELON, in 2006. EMPYRE, his second book, came out a year later. Josh lives with his wife and daughter in Santa Barbara.

A graduate of Princeton and Stanford, Selden Edwards is a former English teacher and was headmaster of several prestigious private schools during his career in education. He lives near Santa Barbara, California. The Little Book is his first novel.

Josh Conviser grew up in Aspen, Colorado, went to high school in Santa Barbara, California and graduated from Princeton University in 1996. He has lived in Europe, Asia and Australia. An avid mountaineer, he climbed in ranges around the world, including the Himalayas, before giving up the mountains for the jungles of Hollywood where he pursued a career in screenwriting. He is the Executive Consultant on HBO's series, Rome, and has several films in development. Random House published his first novel, ECHELON, in 2006. EMPYRE, his second book, came out a year later. Josh lives with his wife and daughter in Santa Barbara.

Mara Purl is the award-winning author of The Milford-Haven Novels. Book One, What the Heart Knows, won the Silver Benjamin Franklin Award. Book Two, Closer Than You Think, won the Gold Evvy Award. Her short-story collection Christmas Angels won the CIPA Merit Book Award. Book Three, Child Secrets, will be published in Fall 2007.
Her novels are based on her successful radio drama Milford-Haven, U.S.A.,the first environmental radio soap opera, and the only American radio soap ever licensed and broadcast by the BBC, where the show reached an audience of 4.5 million listeners throughout the U.K. “Milford-Haven” won the Finalist Award at the 1994 New York Festivals International Radio Competition, which included 1,298 entries from 32 countries. New York’s Museum of Television & Radio and Chicago's
Museum of Broadcast Communications have placed all broadcast episodes of "Milford-Haven" into their permanent archive collection. “Milford-Haven” has its own web site at www.milfordhaven.com.

Before writing Octopus Rex, admitted wordaholic, Barbara Hart, was a Grammy-nominated songwriter writer in Nashville and an Emmy-nominated writer of the questions, or answers, for the TV game show Jeopardy! She feels she has found her niche with musical stories and plans two more Rex sequels. She has just finished writing a non- octopus musical, The Rose Bowl Queens. She is delighted to be a panelist at the Santa Barbara Book Festival.

Co-founder of the award-winning Comicraft studio, John Roshell has lettered thousands of top-selling comic books -- from Spider-Man, Batman and The X-Men to comic tie-ins for the hit TV show Heroes -- and created hundreds of comic-themed typefaces. Most recently, Roshell designed and co-published the childrens' storybook Captain Stoneheart and the Truth Fairy.

Lynn Montgomery won a Los Angeles area Emmy for writing and producing a documentary on Child Abuse. She won a Writer’s Guild Award for her Showtime Television adaptation of the beloved Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. She created the NBC and Disney Channel series, The Torkelsons. She has worked for Disney Feature Animation, developing classic children’s literature for motion pictures. She has written for television, radio, and newspapers.

Mary Hershey is an author for children and young adults. Her latest book entitled Ten Lucky Things that Have Happened to Me Since I Nearly Got Hit by Lightning was released by Random House in July 2008. Kirkus Reviews described her novel as “hilarious.” Ms. Hershey lives, works and dreams in Santa Barbara.

Evan Handler is an actor beloved by millions as Harry Goldenblatt, husband of Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), from HBO’s landmark television series Sex and the City. Handler is also the critically acclaimed author of the memoir Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors, which chronicled his triumph over a supposedly incurable form of leukemia in his twenties. It was called “suspenseful and harrowing, moving and admirable” by The New York Times Book Review, and was described as “a wildly humorous, keenly observed journey” by the San Francisco Review of Books.

On May 1, Handler returned to print with IT’S ONLY TEMPORARY: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive, his wit-filled, razor-sharp account of how he moved past anger and regret to find love and contentment. IT’S ONLY TEMPORARY charts Handler’s two-decade struggle to embrace his life fully after almost losing it, the grudging acceptance of middle age by someone who wasn’t even supposed to make it out of his 20s, and the morphing of a classic commitment-phobe into a man who delights in finding love and happiness. In examining his own shifts in perspective over the years he never thought he’d have, Handler laughs at and celebrates the conundrums shared by all humans.

W. Bruce Cameron is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, which was the basis for the television show 8 Simple Rules on ABC, now syndicated nightly on ABC Family. He is also the author of How to Remodel a Man and is the two-time winner of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists Award for best humor columnist and the winner of the 2006 Robert Benchley Award.

Diana M. Raab, MFA is a memoirist, essayist and poet. She teaches memoir, journaling and poetry in the UCLA Writers Program and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. She also narrates and teaches workshops around the country.
She writes a monthly column called, "My Muse" for Inkbyte.com, an online magazine for writers. She is also an active Friend of Poets and Writers.
Diana has been writing from an early age. As an only child of two working parents, she spent a lot of time crafting letters and keeping a daily journal. In university she studied journalism, health administration and nursing, all serving as platforms for her years as a medical and self-help writer.
Raab's book, Getting Pregnant and Staying Pregnant: Overcoming Infertility and High-Risk Pregnancy (Hunter House, 1988) won the Benjamin Franklin Book Award for Best Health and Wellness Book in 1992. The book has been translated into French and Spanish and was also published in England. The 20th anniversary edition will be released in 2009.
Raab's memoir, Regina's Closet: Finding My Grandmother's Secret Journal (2007) won the National Indie Excellence Award for Memoir and was the recipient of many other honors.
Raab's work has been published in numerous literary magazines and has been widely anthologized. She has one poetry chapbook, My Muse Undresses Me and one poetry collection, Dear Anais: My Life in Poems for You (Fall, 2008). She's editor of a forthcoming anthology, Writers and Their Notebooks which is a collection of essays written by well-known writers who journal, including Sue Grafton, Kim Stafford, Dorianne Laux, John DuFresne, James Brown and Michael Steinberg, to name a few. The foreword is written by the world-renowned personal essayist, Phillip Lopate.

Reyna Grande is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Across A Hundred Mountains (Atria 2006) , for which she has received an American Book Award and El Premio Aztlan Literary Award . She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing and Film and Video from the University of California, Santa Cruz . She was born in Mexico and was raised by her grandparents after her parents left her behind while they worked in the U.S. She came to the U.S. at the age of ten as an undocumented immigrant. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. She is a sought-after speaker and lecturer at middle/high schools, colleges and universities across the nation. Her second novel, Dancing with Butterflies, will be published in 2009 by Atria Books.

Alex Espinoza, a graduate of UC Irvine’s MFA Program in Writing, is an Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Fresno. He has written for Salon, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. His first novel Still Water Saints (Random House) was published in 2007.

S. Ramos O’Briant’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals, and has been anthologized in Best Lesbian Love Stories of 2004, and What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest (University of Texas Press, Spring 2007) and Latinos in Lotus Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, (Bilingual Press, 2008). Her book reviews have been published on La Bloga and Moorishgirl. Please visit her at www.sramosobriant.com or www.bloodmother.com

Melinda Palacio is a 2007 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellow. She grew up in South-Central Los Angeles and now lives in Santa Barbara where she is a web developer and an editor for Ink Byte. Her poems, short stories, and articles have appeared in a variety of publications including BorderSenses, Maple Leaf Rag III: An Anthology of Poems, Sage Trail Poetry Magazine, the East Valley and Scottsdale Tribune, and Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature. She recently completed her first novel, Ocotillo Dreams. More of her work can be viewed at http://www.melindapalacio.com.

Steve Beisner is a writer, musician, and computer scientist. He has published short stories and poems, and was recognized for his short fiction by the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in 2005 and 2006. He is currently writing a novel. Steve is an editor at Ink Byte Press and co-edits Ink Byte, a magazine for writers at http://inkbyte.com. Steve's long involvement as a developer and teacher of technology has led to a quest to make technology more accessible to writers more interested in magnifying their creativity than playing with gadgets. Steve lives in Santa Barbara, CA, and in New Orleans, LA.

New York Times bestseller Gayle Lynds is the award-winning author of eight international espionage novels, including THE LAST SPYMASTER, THE COIL, MASQUERADE, and MESMERIZED, which are published in some 20 countries. Her books have won such awards as "Novel of the Year" (THE LAST SPYMASTER) given by the Military Writers Society of America, and have been People magazine "Page-Turner of the Week" and "Beach Read of the Week."Publishers Weekly lists her work among the top ten spy novels of all time. BookPage concurs: "Gayle Lynds has joined the deified ranks of spy thriller authors like Robert Ludlum and John le Carre." A member of the Association for Intelligence Operatives, she is co-founder and co-president (with David Morrell) of International Thriller Writers, Inc., and is listed in Who’s Who in the World.  She lives in Southern California.

Michael Mehas is a writer and attorney living on California’s Central Coast. His first novel, Stolen Boy, has garnered a prestigious IPPY Gold Medal for fiction, the 2007 Book of the Year Award from Books-And-Authors.net, and first place from the Public Safety Writers Association for best novel. Stolen Boy has also been selected as one of two national finalists by the Indie Excellence Awards and Honorable Mention for best fiction by both the New York Book Festival and the Hollywood Book Festival.
Michael practices family law, working with troubled youth and their families. He works as a screenwriter and freelance journalist. In 2003, he co-founded an international news and feature Internet magazine called The Inquisitor. Later that year he teamed with writer/director Nick Cassavetes as associate producer of Alpha Dog, a major motion picture, starring Justin Timberlake, Bruce Willis, and Sharon Stone.
Michael now speaks publicly and writes about pressing social issues including teen rights and the abolition of the death penalty.

Peter Balaskas fiction and poetry have been published internationally. His gothic horror novella, The Chameleon's Addiction, was a semi-finalist in the 2004 Glacier Press Writing Contest and is now published online by Bards and Sages Publishing, who also published his short novel, The Grandmaster, a supernatural thriller that takes place during the Holocaust. He has just completed his first short story collection, In His House. After finishing In Our House, Peter is beginning his second short story collection, Out Through the Exit Door, which he hopes to finish by Winter of 2008.

Award-winning screenwriter, Robert Gregory Browne, writes thrillers with a supernatural twist for St. Martin's Press, including KISS HER GOODBYE (now available), WHISPER IN THE DARK, and KILL HER AGAIN (both due in 2009). Browne's books have been published in the UK, Russia, Germany, Bulgaria and the Netherlands.

Brian Fagan, UCSB Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and former Guggenheim Fellow, will discuss his most recent book, The Great Warming – Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, the final installment in a quartet about the history of climate change that journeys back 1,000 years to the Medieval Warm Period. “A riveting work that will take your breath away,” (Christian Science Monitor), The Great Warming argues that the warm centuries brought savage drought to much of humanity, from China to Peru, and that drought is the hidden, most dangerous element in today’s humanly created global warming. Fagan has written or co-authored eight text books. The first written in 1972, In the Beginning has been in print through eleven editions. In 1974, he wrote his first general market book titled The Rape of the Nile which Time Magazine called a “brisk and knowledgeable history of the plunder of Egypt.” The now classic work was translated into nine languages and re-released in 2004 with updated excavations and discoveries. over? Fagan considers his breakthrough book to be The Adventure of Archaeology, an account of archaeological discovery published by National Geographic in 1985, which exposed his writing to a very large audience. The following year, the London publishers Thames and Hudson, asked him to write The Great Journey (1987), an account of the first settlement of the Americas. This received wide attention and was followed by The Journey from Eden, the story of the origin and spread of modern humans. In recent years, Fagan has written five books on historical climate change and related topics, including Floods, Famines, and Emperors (2000), The Little Ice Age (2002), and The Long Summer (2004). Each discusses major climatic change and short-term extreme weather events over the past 15,000 years, providing a historical background to current debates on global warming. Climate change also plays an important role in his book Fish on Friday – Feasting, Fasting and the Discovery of the New World (2006), a journey into the little-known world of medieval fishing and how Christian doctrine played a major role in the growth of Atlantic fisheries.

Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at UCSB, Professor Mark Juergensmeyer is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics who has published more that 200 articles and 20 books. He will discuss his recently-released book Global Rebellion – Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qaeda. Juergensmeyer’s widely read Terror in the Mind of God – based on interviews with violent religious activists around the world including individuals convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States – was listed by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. The Los Angeles Times called it “…unsettling...but also courageous...Juergensmeyer...insists on shedding light on the darker corners of human belief and human conduct.” A previous book, The New Cold War: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (1994) covers the rise of religious activism and its confrontation with secular modernity. It was named by The New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. Juergensmeyer’s book on Gandhian conflict resolution has recently been reprinted as Gandhi’s Way (2003), and was selected as Community Book of the Year at the University of California, Davis. Juergensmeyer has received research fellowships from the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the 2003 recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for contributions to the study of religion, and is the 2004 recipient of the Silver Award of the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Spain. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Lehigh University in 2004. Since the events of September 11, 2001, he has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, Fox News, ABC’s “Politically Incorrect,” and CNBC’s “The Dennis Miller Show.”

This panel will discuss the life and legacy of Father Virgil Cordano, O.F.M., a fixture in Santa Barbara for over 60 years until his recent death. Since his years as a Franciscan seminarian, Father Virgil served the Santa Barbara Mission and the community well as he reached out to all people of different faiths or no faith. This panel will reflect on Father Virgil's importance to Santa Barbara by referencing Mario T. Garcia's book "Padre: The Spiritual Journey of Father Virgil Cordano."