Zinta Aistars

Patrick wasn’t an attention-seeker. He just wanted a good life. But the 15-year-old didn’t know how to climb out of the hole dug by poverty, and by a father who spent time in prison on drug charges.

Stephen Mack Jones writes award-winning poetry and plays, and he’s won a Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellowship. But one day, inspiration seemed to fall right out of thin air and he soon found himself writing his first novel, August Snow (SoHo Press, 2017), a hard-boiled detective story.

When her newborn daughter was placed in her arms, Carolyn Walker sensed right away that something was wrong. But in the next instant Walker found that she had what it took to deal with whatever "it" was. She was in love with little Jennifer. The years ahead would not be easy but they would be worthwhile. Walker is the author of Every Least Sparrow (Garn Press, 2017), a memoir about her daughter, who has Rubinstein-Taybi Syndrome.

Too often, we hear the nightmarish stories on the news about young girls who are kidnapped and held in captivity, sometimes for years. Karen Dionne has written the story of one such girl, hidden away in the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for 14 years, her daughter conceived with her abductor. The Marsh King’s Daughter (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017) is not Dionne’s first novel but it is the first that she feels has put her firmly onto her path as a writer. The book will be translated into 21 languages.

Sue Merrell chose journalism in part because she thought it would be great training to become a mystery writer. But what she thought would only be a couple years as a reporter turned into 40, working at the Joliet Herald News in Illinois and the Grand Rapids Press. It was the news stories she covered, some of them quite gruesome, that drove her back to writing mysteries.