Zinta Aistars

Kelly DiPucchio writes children’s books because she can’t imagine writing anything else. She’s written twenty of them so far and is just getting started. Two of her books, Grace for President and The Sandwich Swap, were New York Times bestsellers. This month, she added a new book to the shelf: Everyone Loves Cupcake.

Michigan author Linda Sienkiewicz painted and wrote poetry. But it was a celebrity crush that inspired her to write a novel. “Years ago I had a crush on Russell Crowe,” Sienkiewicz laughs. “This was before he broke Meg Ryan’s heart. I was surfing the Internet when I stumbled across Russell Crowe fan fiction. Fan fiction is when you take characters from a movie or another book and you create a new story about them.”

Danica Davidson of Sturgis began her career as a writer when she was just three years old. That's not a typo. She couldn’t write yet but she could dictate. Her parents took down her dictated stories, and little Danica then drew pictures to illustrate them.

Feeling human again: that’s the goal of the Kalamazoo nonprofit called Humans Beyond Boxes. The grassroots storytelling collaborative helps heal people affected, directly or indirectly, by incarceration. It offers creative writing workshops, chapbook publishing, life skills training, readings and performances, as well as a supportive atmosphere for those struggling to re-enter the community after years of incarceration.

Place is yet another character in L.E. Kimball’s new book, Seasonal Roads (Wayne State University Press, 2016), a collection of connected stories about three women living in the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The three — mother, daughter, grandmother —are connected by blood but also by the wilderness in which they live.