Betty Thomason Owens

I started to write because I had a story and it would not be quiet. I was a stay-at-home mom raising three rambunctious boys. Writing provided an outlet for the overflowing joy in my life. As I studied to improve my skill, I learned how freeing it was to live life through words on paper. […]

Casey Doran

I began to write because writing told me to. I grew up scrawling short stories in notebooks at cafeterias and coffee shop and beaches, my backpack at my feet and heavy with copies of my literary idols like King and Bukowski and Hughes. Staying up late at night and hammering away drafts on my typewriter, […]

Jennifer Bowen

What does a 34 year-old-woman do after she’s written a Young Adult novel? She has doubts. That was the state I found myself in. I’m what we’d call ‘yold.’ That’s young and old, people. Young enough that I can still remember being seventeen as not some foreign state. But old enough that I worried my novel wouldn’t resonate with an […]

Lee-Ann Mayimele

You see, I used to be a selfish girl. I wrote stories but I did not share them. In 2009, Lady Fate – in all her wisdom – decided to change that. I suffered a major concussion that resulted in me losing my senses of smell and taste. During the reflective days after that curveball, […]

Joshua Isard

I began writing because of a compulsion. That’s it. I’m not sure I would have phrased it that way when I was 21 and really started to take my writing seriously, but now I know that’s why I started writing, why I continue writing. I’m compelled by something in my make up to write stories. […]

Jeannie Palmer

There’s never been a time when writing wasn’t part of my existence. As a child, writing was my catharsis, my chosen outlet for self-expression, a means of reaching others the best way I knew how. By my young twenties, I’d completed my first novel, a historical romance. My book was an extension of me, of […]

Michelle Lim

As a girl, I wrote songs and sold them to my grandmother for a dime. Little did I know that was the beginning of a great love; the love of words and how they played together on the page. As a tween, I challenged my sister to read more books than me in a summer. […]