Lourdes R. Florido was born in Havana, Cuba, but spent her childhood in Kansas City, Missouri, where her family became part of a community of refugee families known as the "Kansas City Cubans." Florido worked as a print journalist and has been published in a number of newspapers and magazines.

She received a First Place Award of Merit from The Writer's Network of South Florida for her non-fiction piece, "The Cuban Me." White Trees received an Honorable Mention in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Currently, Florido works as an English professor and freelance writer. She resides in Florida with her husband, two children, and dog.

Robert S. Goldsmith was anthologized in the 1990 North of Wakulla publication and was the recipient of the 2000 Sullivan Creative Writing Award endowed by Stetson University. He taught English at Daytona Beach Community College.

A native of Georgia, Nathan Smith Hipps was raised in Tallahassee, Florida, where he graduated from Florida State University with a degree in communications and creative writing.

He has contributed articles to national and regional magazines on Southern life and people. Nathan has three siblings and is the proud uncle of two nieces and two nephews.

Called Barb as often as Barbara, Mrs. Kiger was born in Michigan but moved south with her husband and most of their six children in 1979.

A nurse by profession, she began writing seriously after losing her sight in 1985.

Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies, the most recent being William B. Toulouse’s Amazingly Simple Lessons Learned After Fifty. “Beginnings,” a short story, received Honorable Mention in the Tallahassee Writers’ Association 2002 Seven Hills Contest, and appeared in that year’s Fiction Review.

Payback is Mrs. Kiger's first published book.

Regina N. Lewis (Ms. Regina) has been writing children’s stories, fiction, and health-related articles for several years. The Smallest Schoolhouse is the first in a series of children’s books to be published from her collection. Ms. Regina’s children’s stories focus on social awareness such as homelessness at a gentle level that a young reader can understand. Ms. Regina believes that most children can learn the lessons of life by relating to fantasy stories and characters.

Much of Ms. Regina’s inspiration to write about social concerns comes from her nursing/medical experiences. Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, Ms. Regina loves the South with its beautiful magnolia and oak trees, Spanish moss, brilliant flowers, butterflies, birds, lakes, oceans, and wildlife. She practices as a Nurse Practitioner in Women’s Health Care and resides in Havana, Florida, with her husband, Tom, and family.

Phyllis M. Moore was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and remained in the South Boston and Dorchester areas until the age of eighteen. She joined the US Navy after a year of college and served for twenty years. She received a Masters of Science from Eastern Illinois University in 1996 and is presently working as a computer lab instructor in Illinois.

Phyllis has a daughter who often serves as the inspiration for her drawings. She loves the sea and all animals—-whether they walk, swim, or fly and have one leg, many, or none at all. She also loves reading, snowy days, and old movies. Phyllis and her sister, Regina N. Lewis, first collaborated on writing projects during their teenage years.

Juanita S. Raymond has been an amateur astronomer since 1985, introducing people young and not-so-young to the wonders of the night sky through classroom lectures, planetarium shows, star gazes, and the publication of monthly star charts (see www.stargazers.org). She has been a member of the Tallahassee Astronomical Society since 1985, and has served as Education Chair and Vice-President; she has also been a member of The Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science--"The Brogan"--(formerly known as the ODYSSEY Science Center) since 1990, presenting STARLAB portable planetarium shows at schools throughout the Florida Big Bend, as well as monthly presentations at The Brogan. She has studied the mythology of many cultures in order to expand the learning experiences of young people as they study Astronomy and is The Brogan's 2000 Education Volunteer of the Year .

Leland F. Raymond has been writing and editing professionally since 1983. His publication credits include personality profiles, business profiles, newspaper features, essays and numerous articles on the subjects of writing and editing. He has been a member of the Tallahassee Writers’ Association since its inception in 1985 and served as the editor of Markings, the association’s monthly newsletter, from April 1994 to June 2005. He has also provided publishing services for this organization’s annual poetry competition chapbooks since 1995 and for many of the fiction competition chapbooks.

As the publisher behind CyPress Publications, he provides all production work for the titles published.

Kermit Rose keeps very busy these days after he retired in 1998. If he's not tutoring students in math or statistics, then he's probably doing computer consulting, dancing, email, visiting friends, or working on his novel.   

Kathie Lynn Chambers-Underwood was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1959. At the age of 18, she left Texas to work and live in the New Orleans French Quarter. Two years later, in 1979, she joined the Navy and left to see the world. Her first duty station landed her in Panama, where she met and married her husband, Tim Underwood, in 1982. Eleven years later, after tours of duty in Italy, Virginia and South Korea, they retired from Navy life and settled in Tallahassee, Florida.

Mrs. Underwood's professional career has been as varied as the places she has lived. She has enjoyed working as a Navy Cryptologic Technician, a motivational speaker, an outplacement program manager for transitioning military personnel, a volunteer corps recruiter and coordinator, a Fund Raiser and Executive Director for several non-profit health organizations, a technical writer for a software development company, a marketing coordinator and contract administrator. In 2002 she received the entrepreneurial spirit and started her own company, Proposal Management Services.

Late one October evening in 2003, Mrs. Underwood was compelled to get out of bed and write the story of her experience catching a live sand dollar. Three hours later Sarah and the Sand Dollar was completed. Three days after that she was put in contact with Dr. David Bradford, an educator in Merritt Island, Florida, who agreed to edit the book. By January of 2004, CyPress Publications began contract negotiations with Mrs. Underwood. Within six months of conception, the first edition of Sarah and the Sand Dollar was in print.

Mrs. Underwood, a believer in Jesus Christ, and His abiding love for us, declares that it is the work of His hand and His divine intercession moving this book. He has a simple but important message to deliver; it is that He loves us so much and that all things are possible in Him.

Sarah and the Sand Dollar is Mrs. Underwood's first book.

One of the authors of Prelude to a Journey (William Venable) pursued a multi-faceted career as a physicist: first, in teaching at Stillman College and The George Washington University; second in research at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST); and third in industry at Hunter Associates Laboratory in Reston, Virginia. Through all this pursuing, he became strongly aware that industry, science, and technology not only can bestow great blessings on humanity, but also can get it into a great deal of trouble. The latter awareness led to the writing of Prelude to a Journey.

Dr. Venable, a native of Lakeland, Florida—1934 model, was living in retirement in Woodville, Florida, until his death on July 12, 2002.

The background of the other author (Smart) is amply presented throughout the text of Prelude to a Journey. He strongly recommends reading about him there.

Elizabeth Kinzer O’Farrell is a retired Nurse/Physical Therapist who lives with her husband in Tallahassee, Florida. She is a writer and member of the local chapter of the World War II Historical Society and the Tallahassee Writers’ Association.

Elizabeth grew up with six brothers, four of whom were also World War II veterans, and two sisters in a rural community ninety miles southwest of Chicago. She graduated from a local high school, LaSalle-Peru-Ogelsby Junior College in LaSalle, Illinois, and The Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing in Chicago. After graduating from the School of Nursing in the fall of 1942, she joined the United States Navy Nurse Corps in 1943.

Elizabeth’s first duty assignment was at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Waukegan, Illinois. In 1944 she was transferred to the naval dispensary at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Glenview, Illinois. There she says she began to see what war was all about and what it meant to the eager young men preparing to fly planes that would be taking off and landing on a ship in unfriendly seas.

In 1945 Elizabeth was transferred to the U.S. Navy Hospital in St. Albans, New York, where she first learned to care for badly disabled young men being flown in from hospital ships and overseas treatment centers to stateside naval hospitals nearest to their homes.

In 1946 the Navy assigned Elizabeth and fifteen other Navy nurses to the Baruch Center of Physical Medicine in Richmond, Virginia, for instruction and training as physical therapists. The program at the Baruch Center was a six-month crash course followed immediately by a six-month internship at a naval hospital under the supervision of a physiatrist.

Elizabeth graduated from the Physical Therapy course at the Baruch Center and took her internship at the Corona Naval Hospital in California. She says of her duty there, both as intern and graduate physical therapist, that she never worked harder or enjoyed her work more than she did the eighteen months she worked with the paralytic patients at the Corona Naval Hospital.

In May 1948 she received orders to report for duty once again at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital, this time for duty as physio-therapist. Duty at Great Lakes proved not very challenging for Elizabeth, and she decided to resign her commission in 1950.

Elizabeth experimented in a variety of jobs that led her finally to a job reviewing and writing copy for textbook ads in a nursing journal published by the Medical Division of McGraw-Hill Book Company in New York City. Eventually she became Managing Editor for the Journal of Nursing Education published by the Medical Division of McGraw-Hill Book Company, and later as Editor for the Journal of Nursing Administration published by Contemporary Publishing, Inc. in Wakefield, Massachusetts.

In his prior life, Ted Simmons enjoyed a career as an oil company technology manager. Most of this time was spent in international producing operations, providing him with the opportunity to live and work in some of the world’s most fascinating places. He developed a keen interest in the cultures and beliefs of other people and thinks many Americans would benefit from some of his insights.

Ted and his family lived in the jungles of Sumatra, Indonesia, the suburbs of London, and the desert region known as the “Neutral Zone” between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. He has trod the ancient Silk Road in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan), stood in the columned halls of the Temple of Karnak in Egypt, jostled with crowds atop the Great Wall of China, crawled through tunnels dug by the North Vietnamese during the war, and hunted butterflies with his teenage son in the mountains of Taiwan.

Ted Simmons is active in the writing community. He was Chairman of the Houston Writers’ Conference in 2000, is currently Past-President of the Tallahassee Writers’ Association, and chaired the association’s nationwide Seven Hills Contest for Writers.

Ted’s first novel, Sandstorm, also from CyPress Publications, was a 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award nominee.to stay alive.

The novel, Diablo Creek, was derived from events in the news during Ted’s time living in one of the suburbs of Houston, Texas. The story is fictional; the conditions that inspired it are, unfortunately, very real.

Norma J. Sundberg has been writing on and off for nearly fifty years. Off during pregnancies, on between those events. Those ten little souls offered much grist for the writing mill: for instance, a weekly column, “Nidbits from Norma’s Nook,” in an Ohio newspaper, The Free Enterprise, for ten years; editor of Tower Bell, the newsletter of First Congregational United Church of Christ, Jefferson, Ohio, for ten years, which included a monthly essay and a poem. Norma has had poetry and articles in a wide range of publications, including Writer’s Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and little and literary magazines, as well as feature articles in the Tallahassee Democrat.

Attending college in the late 1970s, Norma found the WRITE English and Creative Writing professor. She is listed (as poet) with Claudia Greenwood, Ph.D., in a manual, Go For It!, for non-traditional women returning to school. Following college she taught creative writing/poetry classes at College for Kids at her alma mater, Kent State University, Ashtabula, Ohio Campus.

Along with her youngest daughter, Norma left Ohio in 1991 to live with an older daughter already living in Tallahassee, Florida. Again, the writing kept pace with the transition. In 2004 and again in 2006, Norma attended the Erma Bombeck HumorWriters Workshop in Dayton, Ohio. An article about the friendship with Erma Bombeck can be found on the humor writers web site: www.humorwriters.org/sundberg.html

Building a network of writer friends across the country, some of them she’s never seen, Norma connected with Esther Leiper in the late 1980s when Esther was poetry editor of The Inkling. In recent years this magazine became Writers’ Journal. Norma has had a number of poems in Esther’s poetry columns. Esther edited an early version of An Odd Fable and asked to do the illustrations.

An Odd Fable was first published in a collection of children’s stories from Linden Hill Publishing titled Beyond Time and Place: www.lindenhill.net

An Odd Fable is Norma’s first children’s book. A volume of poetry is the next scheduled project.

Esther M. Leiper drew as soon as she could hold a pencil, and wrote when she could print. Her mom was a magazine illustrator; her dad, a reporter on the Philadelphia Inquirer for thirty-five years.

Small publications began in high school; poetry, essays, stories appeared in college magazines. Esther likes contest disciplines and has won over a thousand awards. She has served as Poet in the Schools, and has written a cookbook. She wrote a humor column, “Esther’s Country Corner” in the North Country Weekly from 1982–1995.

Esther’s “Every Day With Poetry” and “Esther Comments” are the two columns begun in Writers’ Journal in 1983 (was first The Inkling). Writers’ Journal has used her art since 2000. Besides illustrating her own books, like the 2006, WIN! Poetry Contests!, Esther’s color pictures adorn An Odd Fable.

Esther is presently Poet Laureate of The White Mountains Region of New Hampshire.

Esther and husband Peter Estabrooks live in Jefferson, New Hampshire, have two grown children, Hannah and Tom Estabrooks, who own a home and teach snowboarding in Bozeman, Montana.

Barbara A. Thompson is a native of Tallahassee, Florida, with degrees from Florida A&M University (B.S., M.Ed.) and Florida State University (Ph.D.) in Physical Education. She has been teaching for more than twenty-five years at the university level with experience in the areas of health, physical education, and sports management. She is a professor, president of her university’s chapter of United Faculty of Florida, a graduate of the National Education Association’s Emerging Leader Academy, and a two-time recipient of Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers Award.

Fixin’ FAMU: The Last Supper Concoction of Cast Steel Bryant, her first published work of fiction, was born out of the events and activities surrounding the administrative and governance structure in her workplace. Even though the tale may be satirical in nature, its intent is to send the powerful message that no one person is more important than the organization; therefore, governing bodies must gather all relevant information and make thoughtful, reasoned, principled, and sound decisions based on the merits of the issues, and what is in the best interest of any organization they represent. Thus, administrative personnel become a means to the governing body’s end and are expendable.

Barbara enjoys spending quiet weekends, evenings, and holidays at home with her husband of over thirty years.