Manor Mill Writers Guild - Meet our Featured Authors
Eric D. Goodman
Eric D. Goodman is author of seven books, including Faraway Tables (Yorkshire Publishing, 2024), Wrecks and Ruins (Loyola University’s Apprentice House Press, 2022), The Color of Jadeite (Apprentice House, 2020), Setting the Family Free (Apprentice House, 2019), Womb: a novel in utero (Merge Publishing, 2017), Tracks: A Novel in Stories (Atticus Books, 2011), and Flightless Goose, (Writers Lair Books, 2008). More than a hundred of his short stories and travel stories have been published in literary journals, magazines, and periodicals. Learn more about Eric and his writing at www.EricDGoodman.com.
Michelle Brafman
Michelle Brafman is author of the novel Washing the Dead and Bertrand Court: Stories. Her writing has appeared in The Oprah Magazine, Oprah Daily, Slate, LitHub, The Forward, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction at the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program and founded the Glen Echo Workshops. A former swim mom and NCAA All-American freestyler, Brafman has never lived more than a mile away from a pool, lake, ocean, or river.
Danielle Ariano
Danielle Ariano was born and raised in the Philadelphia suburbs, but became a Baltimorean when she moved to the city for college. She was indeed charmed by Baltimore’s quirky, artsy vibe.
Ariano’s forthcoming memoir, A Requirement of Grief, is a meditation on the complexities of the sister bond and the grief that comes when that bond is broken by a sibling’s suicide.
Ariano received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Baltimore. As part of her thesis, she wrote, designed and published her first book, Getting Over the Rainbow, a memoir recounting her humorous and sometimes painful experiences coming out as a lesbian.
Ariano’s work has been published in Salon, Huff Post, Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore Fishbowl, North Dakota Quarterly, Cobalt Review, and Welter. She is a former columnist for Baltimore Gay Life, and she has been featured on WYPR’s radio show, The Signal.
When she is not writing, Ariano works as a cabinetmaker. She has great reverence for the hallowed, dusty smell of a woodshop. She finds it thrilling to see a thing take shape from scratch. She loves trees and all the beautiful patterns that can result in woodgrain from stress, insect damage, or even the loss of a limb. She believes that people are very similar to trees in this respect. She lives in Lutherville, Maryland with her wife, son, and dog. To find out more visit her website www.danielleariano.com
Kathleen Fine
Kathleen Fine received her Master’s in Reading Education from Towson University and Bachelor’s in Elementary Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a member of the Maryland Writers Association, International Thriller Writers, and Author’s Guild. When she’s not writing and selling real estate, she enjoys spending time with her family, traveling to the Outer Banks, and of course, reading anything she can get her hands on. She lives in Sparks, Maryland with her husband, three children, and Sussex Spaniel. Her short stories have been published in Litro Magazine, Pen in Hand, The Maryland Writer’s Association Anthology, and The Indignor Playhouse Anthology. Her Debut novel, Girl on Trial, was published in October 2023, with Camcat Books.
Hyeseung Song
Hyeseung Song is a first-generation Korean American painter and the author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (Simon & Schuster, 7/16/24). Her large-scale figurative works explore creativity and the life of the artist.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Song grew up in Texas and was educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities. She did her training at the Water Street Atelier, now the Grand Central Atelier, in New York City.
A devoted teacher and mentor, Song has instructed at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Queens Council on the Arts’ High School 2 Art School Program as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, during which time she was named among Baltimore Magazine’s “40 Under 40” for her work creating synergies between the science and art communities in that city. She often addresses high school and college audiences, and was a featured speaker at Princeton University at its TedX Conference in 2016 as well as at the Asian American Alumni Association of Princeton’s Leadership Conference in 2021.
She has received residencies at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists in Brittany, France, Penland School of Arts and Craft, the Vermont Studio Center as well as others, and her work resides in private collections internationally.
Song lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York. You can learn more about her at www.hyeseungsong.com or on Instagram @hyeseungs.
Turney McKnight
Turney McKnight is a retired attorney and active beef cattle farmer living a few miles north of Madonna, Maryland (Actual post office address is White Hall). His three children and four grandchildren live on adjacent farms.
He grew up in Great Falls, Virginia in a time when that area was still rural. He received a B.A. from Cornell University and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. Upon graduation from law school he took a job with a Baltimore law firm and lived near Pimlico, where he exercised racehorses before going to work in the morning., A few years after that, he moved out to the farm country of first Baltimore and then Harford County.
In addition to practicing law, Turney competed for many years as an amateur steeplechase jockey (he took a “gap year” between college and law school to ride races steeplechase races full time in Ireland and England). He owned, trained and rode steeplechasers steadily until retiring from racing in the mid 80's.
Like many lawyers, Turney eventually found a creative writing outlet – in his case a series of pieces published in the now defunct North County News. These led to longer works, some published in regional magazines.
Many of both are included in Tracks in the Sand, a broadly autographical work, at least in the sense that Turney conceived it with the idea of memorializing for his children a slice of time which they would have been too young to remember.
Richard Chizmar
Richard is a New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Amazon, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author.
He is the co-author (with Stephen King) of the bestselling novella, Gwendy’s Button Box and the founder/publisher of Cemetery Dance magazine and the Cemetery Dance Publications book imprint. He has edited more than 35 anthologies and his short fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, including multiple editions of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories. He has won two World Fantasy awards, four International Horror Guild awards, and the HWA’s Board of Trustee’s award.
Chizmar (in collaboration with Johnathon Schaech) has also written screenplays and teleplays for United Artists, Sony Screen Gems, Lions Gate, Showtime, NBC, and many other companies. He has adapted the works of many bestselling authors including Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Bentley Little.
Chizmar is also the creator/writer of the online website, Stephen King Revisited. His fourth short story collection, The Long Way Home, was published in 2019. With Brian Freeman, Chizmar is co-editor of the acclaimed Dark Screams horror anthology series published by Random House imprint, Hydra.
His latest book, The Girl on the Porch, was released in hardcover by Subterranean Press, and Widow’s Point, a chilling novella about a haunted lighthouse written with his son, W.H. Chizmar, was recently adapted into a feature film.
Jane Delury
Jane Delury is the author of the newly-released Hedge and The Balcony (Little, Brown) which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short stories have appeared in Granta, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and other publications. Her awards include a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Special Mention, and grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. A professor at the University of Baltimore, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts and directs the BA in English.
Madison Smartt Bell
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the End of the World (1985), Straight Cut (1986), The Year of Silence (1987), Doctor Sleep (1991), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), Ten Indians (1997) and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989. Bell has also published two collections of short stories: Zero db (1987) and Barking Man (1990). In 2002, the novel Doctor Sleep was adapted as a film, Close Your Eyes, starring Goran Visnjic, Paddy Considine, and Shirley Henderson. Forty Words For Fear, an album of songs co-written by Bell and Wyn Cooper and inspired by the novel Anything Goes,was released by Gaff Music in 2003; other performers include Don Dixon, Jim Brock, Mitch Easter and Chris Frank.
Bell's eighth novel, All Soul's Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. All Souls Rising, along with the second and third novels of his Haitian Revolutionary trilogy, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone That The Builder Refused, is available in a uniform edition from Vintage Contemporaries. Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, appeared in 2007. Devil's Dream, a novel based on the career of Nathan Bedford Forrest, was published by Pantheon in 2009. In 2020 he published Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone, and edited The Eye You See With: Selected Non Fiction of Robert Stone. His last novel is The Witch of Matongé, published by Concord Free Press in 2022.
Born and raised in Tennessee, he has lived in New York, Haiti, Paris and London and now lives in Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of Princeton University (A.B 1979) and Hollins College (M.A. 1981), he has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Since 1984 he has taught at Goucher College, along with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires.
Marian K. Riedy
Marian K. Riedy was born in rural Kansas. She attended local public schools, then matriculated at the University of Kansas (B.A. summa cum laude). She went on to receive her J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.B.A. from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of business.
Marian practiced law, primarily as a civil litigator, in Washington, D.C., for many years. She left the full-time practice of law for a tenured appointment teaching business law at Emporia State University and is now professor emeritus.
She is enjoying her current “occupation” writing fiction, but reserves plenty of time for travel, golf, tennis, and hanging out by any available pool or beach with a book in hand.
Marian is the author of the legal thrillers Fatal Accusation (Black Rose Writing, 2020) and Surprise Witness (Black Rose Writing, 2022), and is working on her third.
BeTSy Boyd
Betsy Boyd directs the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore and is the recipient of Maryland State Arts Council awards, an Elliot Coleman Writing Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship and residencies through Fundación Valparaíso, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Betsy’s fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, Shenandoah, at American Short Fiction, Eclectica, and elsewhere. Her short story “Scarecrow” received a Pushcart Prize.
Charles W. Mitchell
Charles W. Mitchell is the award-winning author or editor of three books: The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered, coedited with Jean H. Baker; Maryland Voices of the Civil War (winner of the Founders Award from the American Civil War Museum); and Travels Through American History in the Mid-Atlantic: A Guide for All Ages, winner of a Lowell Thomas Gold Award from the Society of American Travel Writers. He was selected as a Baltimore Historian-Scholar in 2018 for his contributions to the history of Baltimore and Maryland.
Mitchell has published widely on Civil War-era politics and slavery in Maryland; much of his research has centered on the impact of the Civil War on civilians. He has discussed his work on Maryland Public Television, C-SPAN’s American History TV, and local NPR radio programs. He has appeared at the Annapolis Book Festival and the Baltimore Book Festival. From 1995-2001, as a travel writer for The Baltimore Sun, Mitchell wrote stories about historical sites in the Mid-Atlantic region that blended history and travel.
Katie Aiken Ritter
Katie Aiken Ritter is a graduate of Swarthmore College. Following a long career in IT, she experienced a remarkable epiphany that demanded she write about Vikings. Katie’s Norse Adventure Series includes four deeply researched novels set in Iceland during the Viking era. She is a member of the Historical Novel Society, the Eastern Shore Writers Association, and she leads writing workshops.
Fun fact: Katie served a brief sailing stint as a crew member on the Viking longship Draken Harald Harfagre.
Jane Delury
Jane Delury is the author of the newly-released Hedge and The Balcony (Little, Brown) which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short stories have appeared in Granta, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and other publications. Her awards include a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Special Mention, and grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. A professor at the University of Baltimore, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts and directs the BA in English.
Past Readings
April, 2024
Erin McGill reading from one of her children’s books.
March, 2024
Susan Muaddj Darraj reading from Farah Rocks.
February, 2024
Kini Collins reading from The Singing Bowl.
January, 2024
Charles McCormack reading from Healing of a Psychotherapist: A Journey of Rebellion, Reflection, and Redemption
December, 2023
Suzanne Supplee reading from her new novel, Sweetness All Around.
November, 2023
Charley Mitchell reading from Travels Through American History in the Mid-Atlantic: A Guide for All Ages
October, 2023
Jane Delury
Reading from newly-released Hedge.
SeptEMBER, 2023
Katie Ritter
Reading from her Viking trilogy.
August, 2023
Marian K. Riedy
Reading from her novel, Surprise Witness
July, 2023
Betsy Boyd
Reading from her short story, “Adult Swim”
June, 2023
Madison Smartt Bell
Reading from his novel, The Witch of Matongé
Suzanne Supplee
Suzanne was born in Columbia, Tennessee, a town she returns to again and again in her stories and books. “Whatever the reason, longing or nostalgia, Tennessee is the setting I’m most likely to choose when writing,” she says. “My current home is beautiful Maryland, and I cherish everything about this special place. With mountains and beaches and the Chesapeake Bay, what’s not to love?” In addition to her writing, Suzanne teaches English at St. James Academy in Monkton, MD. Her new novel, Sweetness All Around, is set to be published in October 2023.
Charles McCormack
Charles McCormack holds Master’s degrees in Psychology and Clinical Social Work. He is the 1994 recipient of the Clinician of the Year Award by the Maryland Society of Clinical Social Work, and the 2023 recipient of the Emeritus Award from the University of Maryland for a lifetime of innovative contributions to the social work profession. McCormack was the Senior Social Worker of Adult Long-term Inpatient Services, supervising the clinical care of 140 patients. As managed care eroded the provision of long-term inpatient treatment, McCormack grieved its impending demise and wrote an article translating the lessons of inpatient care to an outpatient basis. This article, The Borderline/Schizoid Marriage: The Holding Environment as an Essential Treatment Construct (1989) came to the attention of the Washington School of Psychiatry which invited him to speak at their annual conference and then to join the faculty. In 2000, McCormack published the seminal work Treating Borderline States in Marriage: Dealing with Oppositionalism, Ruthless Aggression, and Severe Resistance.
Despite these successes, McCormack felt an enduring unhappiness that puzzled him. At this same time his daughter Keeley, a new mother, gave him a book of questions for grandparents to express who they were for posterity. The idea appealed, but the structure did not. Separately, his son Chandler, becoming phenomenally successful in business, asked “Is this it?” On the spur of the moment, McCormack responded, “It’s about the pursuit of happiness.” This answer was far from compelling, and Chandler didn’t seem convinced. From that day on, McCormack felt a need to make his case while trying to sort out his lingering unhappiness. He translated his adult children’s questions translated into, “Who are you?” and “What’s it all about?” In 2016 McCormack began writing his autobiography, first entitled Hatching Charlie, later morphing into the book Essence, the 2022 winner of the Montaigne Medal for the most thought-provoking book under the Eric Hoffer Book Awards umbrella. In 2023, McCormack republished the book as Healing of a Psychotherapist: A Journey of Rebellion, Reflection, and Redemption. During this process of years, the writing of the book became a journey itself, helping McCormack to better understand his lingering unhappiness, to grieve his past and, to a large extent, overcome it. Healing of a Psychotherapist is the story of that journey.
Kini Collins
Kini Collins was raised in central New Jersey in the 1960s, left the ‘burbs in 1970, and spent the next 25 years studying and teaching Japanese martial arts around the US and in Tokyo. She quit martial arts due to injuries and turned to writing fiction. In the early 1990s, wanting to be a better writer she decided to learn to draw, figuring it would make her more observant, more patient and, whoops, in a couple of years visual arts eclipsed writing. She’s had a successful visual arts studio practice since 1998. In 2016 an old manuscript was resurrected and she decided to do a re-write. Through a total “Smaltimore” coincidence she got an agent for that novel, kept writing and, thanks to that agent, her third novel, The Singing Bowl, found a publisher. (she remains ever hopeful for the other two) Kini lives in southeast Baltimore near Patterson Park with her beloved wife and a very small dog.
Erin McGill
Erin McGill is from New York, where she spent much of her childhood taking classes at the Bronx Zoo. After realizing that becoming a zoologist required too much science, she decided she rather draw the animals. She received a BFA in illustration at Pratt Institute, where she discovered her love of patterns, textiles, and collage. She is the author and illustrator of: I Do Not Like Al’s Hat, I Do Not Like That Name, Matchy Matchy, If You Want A Friend In Washington and We Also Served: True Stories of Brave Animals in the Military & other heroic tales.
If you would like to learn more about the Guild meet-ups or have any other inquiries regarding readings at Manor Mill, Please submit the form below!
Susan Keatley, Prose Night Host
Meet Guild Prose Host, Susan Keatley
Susan Keatley is a writer living in Phoenix, Maryland. While getting her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she would look longingly at copies of Science magazine and wish not to be published in the research section, but in the section upfront where someone wrote about what the research meant. Susan has written about science and other topics for the New York Times, the Simons Foundation, and the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and has been a moderator at the Newburyport Literary Festival in her hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts. She is also at work on a novel. She loves meeting and talking to writers and is thrilled to host the Manor Mill Writers Guild Prose night.