2025 Faculty: A through F
Traci Hunter Abramson
Former CIA officer Traci Hunter Abramson was born in Arizona, where she lived until moving to Venezuela for a study abroad program. After graduating from Brigham Young University, she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, eventually resigning in order to raise her family. She credits the CIA with giving her a wealth of ideas as well as the skills needed to survive her children’s teenage years. She loves to travel and recently retired after twenty-six years coaching her local high school swim team. She has written fifty best-selling novels and is a ten-time Whitney Award winner, including 2017 and 2019 Best Novel of the Year. You can find out more about Traci and her books at www.traciabramson.com, on her various social media pages, and in her Facebook group, Traci’s Friends.
A.M. Adair
Multi-award-winning author of the Elle Anderson series, screenwriter, and retired Navy Chief Warrant Officer. Her screenplay version of her best-selling novella, Origin Story, was a semifinalist for “The Table Read My Screenplay – Cannes 2025” contest and is currently on The Black List’s Top Lists. Before becoming a writer, she served for twenty-one years in the Naval intelligence community, where she specialized in counterintelligence (CI), human intelligence (HUMINT), interrogation, and analysis. As the first woman to graduate from the MAGTF CI/HUMINT Course, she spent over sixteen years, including seven deployments, utilizing those skills and was a highly sought-after subject matter expert within the Naval Special Warfare and Navy Expeditionary communities.
Carmen Amato
Carmen Amato is the award-winning author of 18 mysteries and thrillers, including the Detective Emilia Cruz mystery series pitting the first female police detective in Acapulco against Mexico's cartels, corruption, and social inequality. Starting with Cliff Diver, the series is a back-to-back winner of the Poison Cup Award for Outstanding Series from CrimeMasters of America. Optioned for television, National Public Radio hailed it as “A thrilling series.”
Her Galliano Club historical fiction thrillers include Murder at the Galliano Club, which won the 2023 Silver Falchion Award for Best Historical.
Her standalone thrillers include The Hidden Light of Mexico City, which was longlisted for the 2020 Millennium Book Award.
A 30-year veteran of the CIA where she focused on technical collection and counterdrug issues, Carmen is a recipient of both the National Intelligence Award and the Career Intelligence Medal. A judge for the Book Life Prize and Killer Nashville’s Claymore Award, her essays have appeared in Criminal Element, Publishers Weekly, and other national publications. She writes the popular Mystery Ahead newsletter on Substack.
Originally from upstate New York, after years of globe-trotting she and her husband enjoy life in Tennessee.
Patrick Balester
Patrick Balester is a crime writer and tax professional. His first novel was published by Avalon Books in 2008 and reissued on Kindle by Thomas and Mercer in 2012.
For the past three years he has worked as a Tax Examiner with the IRS, where he assists small business owners with navigating complex tax law. Before that he was a Tax Specialist with H&R Block from 2010 to 2022. He currently resides in Kansas City, where the barbeque is hot, and the taxes are low.
Chris Berg
Chris Berg is an award-winning author who crafts crime thrillers inspired by true events. A retired police detective, Chris co-authors with his former detective partner and lifelong friend Paul James Smith. Their partnership has yielded critical acclaim, including a Claymore Award and recognition as a Pageturner Award finalist.
THE NIGHT POLICE, BEYOND THE LINE OF DUTY debuted in 2020, the first of the Night Police series. Currently, they have another manuscript on submission and two more in development. More at https://www.nightpolice.com/
Alicia Brooks
Alicia Brooks began her publishing career over twenty five years ago as an editorial assistant at Penguin USA (Dutton/Plume). She advanced to an assistant editor position at Nan A. Talese/Doubleday where she worked with groundbreaking authors, including Margaret Atwood, Pat Conroy, and Ian McEwan. She then became an editor at Picador/St. Martin's Press where she edited over 40 hardcover titles and several trade paper original titles, including Good Morning America Book Club Pick Noelle Howey's Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods--My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine, Nega Mezlekia's award-winning Notes from the Hyena's Belly, and Jaclyn Moriarty’s FEELING SORRY FOR CELIA, an ALA Best Book of the Year and YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers.
She became a literary agent at The Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency in 2019. Her client list included categories such as Memoir, Narrative Nonfiction from writers with diverse backgrounds, Self-Help, Pop Culture, Literary Fiction, Fantasy, Book Club Fiction, YA Fiction, Horror, and Historical Fiction.She represented Boyah J. Farah, author of the earth-shattering memoir AMERICA MADE ME A BLACK MAN (Harper/Nominated for the NAACP Image Award and NPR Best Book of the Year), Kathleen S. Allen, author of the YA Gothic Horror novel THE RESURRECTIONIST (Roaring Brook) Jennifer Sherman Roberts' THE VILLAGE HEALER'S BOOK OF CURES: A Novel (Lake Union/Named an Editors' Choice by the Historical Novel Society and Named a First Reads Editors' Pick by Amazon) and Sofia Romero, author of the linked story collection WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WHO WE ARE (Blackstone/Shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction).
Her wishlist for Martin Literary Management includes the following:
• Narrative Nonfiction from writers with diverse voices
• Memoir with big concepts
• Self-Help
• Pop Culture
• Social Justice
• Literary Fiction
• Book Club Fiction
• Jewish Fiction and Nonfiction
• Historical Fiction
• Horror
• Romance
• YA Fiction and Nonfiction
• Thrillers
Alicia graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a B.A. in English and Philosophy. She has a Master’s Degree from Columbia University in the Teaching of English Grades 7-12. She was raised in Los Angeles and now lives in Manhattan with her writer husband Michael Londra and their cat Tut Baby.
Bruce Robert Coffin
Bruce Robert Coffin is an international bestselling novelist. A retired detective sergeant, Bruce is the author of the Detective Byron Mysteries, the forthcoming Detective Justice Mysteries, and coauthor of The Turner and Mosley Files. His Anthony Award nominated short fiction has been published in more than a fifteen anthologies.
Kimberly Dana
Kimberly Dana is an award-winning author and literacy specialist whose work spans both the classroom and the page. She is the founder of Nashville’s Thrills and Chills Book Club, a fast-growing community of over 400 suspense and horror enthusiasts. Her most recent award-winning picture book, Millie and Mina, was published this year by Picklefish Press. A passionate advocate for young readers and writers, Kimberly travels nationwide giving author talks to children and teens. She lives in Nashville with her husband and their opinionated Maltese, Clementine—surrounded by more books (and cowboy boots) than she’ll ever admit.
Miranda Darrow / Editor
Miranda Darrow is a freelance fiction editor and #RevPit online revision contest board member and contributing editor. She's a frequent presenter at writing groups, conferences, and online writing events. Miranda’s Concise Fiction Academy series of writing craft books and courses combines her experience as a freelance editor and a corporate attorney into an executive summary of complex writing topics with an overview, key recommendations, and sources for more information, all with a dash of humor. Miranda is doing a slow tour of the upper Midwest: she grew up in Wisconsin in a county with six times as many cows as people, attended college in Iowa surrounded by tall corn, and now lives in the great north woods of Minnesota with her husband, teen sons, and a bossy little dog.
John DeDakis
Writing Coach, Manuscript Editor, and Award-winning Novelist John DeDakis is a former Senior Copy Editor on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." DeDakis is the author of six novels in the Lark Chadwick mystery-suspense-thriller series. In his most recent novel, Enemies Domestic, Lark is a pregnant White House press secretary forced to make an abort-or-not-to-abort decision in a highly toxic public fishbowl while dealing with an attack on the presidency. DeDakis, a former White House correspondent, regularly teaches novel writing at literary centers and writers’ conferences. He is also a podcaster and a rank amateur jazz drummer. www.johndedakis.com
Sonja Dewing
Sonja Dewing is an accomplished thriller author and seasoned writing mentor who specializes in creating stories with strong female protagonists, aiming to amplify women’s voices in the adventure and thriller genres. With a degree in journalism and professional writing from the University of New Mexico, Sonja has a rich background in storytelling. From a full-time job to a full-time author it took lots of hustle!
Frank DiBianca
Frank DiBianca is a retired physicist, bioengineer, and former Dean of the UTenn College of Health Science Engineering. His love of experimentation shines through his award-winning suspense novel, Laser Trap. His next work, God and the Helix, promises to be another exciting journey of the mind for readers.
Kay DiBianca
Kay DiBianca is a former software developer and IT manager who retired to a life of mystery. Her love of creative problem-solving manifests itself in her award-winning mystery novels, and her stories consistently illustrate the value of persistence in the search for truth, even in difficult circumstances.
Kemper Donovan
Kemper Donovan has lived in California almost his entire adult life. He attended Stanford University, where he double majored in English and economics. The econ was his attempt to learn something “useful,” but the joke was on him because his English honors thesis about mystery/suspense author Wilkie Collins turned out to be much more relevant to his future career. It took him many years to get there, however. First, he went to Harvard Law School, where he experienced one of Boston’s coldest winters on record. Is it any wonder he returned to California three years later, doubling down on the weather by moving to Los Angeles? (Much to the chagrin of his parents, he ended up using his law degree as much as his econ major. Technically, he is a retired lawyer, which means that after passing the bar he immediately switched to “retired” status to avoid registration fees and continuing education requirements.)
Out in L.A., Kemper worked for twelve years at a company called Circle of Confusion—no, really—representing screenwriters and comic books. His very first client wrote the feature film Hanna, released by Focus Features. (If you haven’t seen it, do; you won’t be sorry.) He began writing his first novel, The Decent Proposal, when he was still a manager. The story follows a man and woman, complete strangers who are approached by a lawyer representing a mysterious benefactor offering to pay them a significant amount of money to date each other for a year. They have no idea why, but eventually they agree to this outlandish proposition, and the story unspools from there…. Kemper didn’t realize it at the time, but what he was actually trying to write was a mystery.
By the time The Decent Proposal was published in 2016, Kemper was writing full time, and had begun a side project with his dear friend, Catherine Brobeck, who was one of the few people he knew whose lifelong obsession with Agatha Christie ran as deep as his. Together, they created the podcast All About Agatha, devoted to the one and only Queen of Crime, Dame Agatha Christie. Tragically, Catherine passed away at the end of 2021. Since then, Kemper has continued the podcast solo. It was his work on All About Agatha that inspired him to write a mystery series of his own, which is currently being published by Kensington Books. Despite their contemporary setting, tone, and preoccupations, the Ghostwriter Mysteries are very much written in homage to Christie and other writers of the golden age of detective fiction.
Kemper is married to a television writer. He and his husband have two young daughters. When he’s not with his family, or podcasting, or writing, he enjoys activities with a more tangible payoff, such as running and attempting to play the violin (alas, the emphasis is very much on the attempt). You can visit Kemper at www.KemperDonovan.com.
Lynette Eason
Lynette Eason is the best-selling, award-winning author of over sixty-five books with over 3,000,000 copies sold. Her novels have appeared on the USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly, CBA, ECPA, and Parable bestseller lists. She has won numerous awards including the Carol Award, the Selah, the Golden Scroll and more. Her novel, Her Stolen Past was made into a movie for the Lifetime Movie Network. Lynette teaches and speaks at writing conferences all over the country. She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW), Mystery Writers of America (MWA), International Thriller Writers (ITW), Advanced Writers and Speakers Association (AWSA) and Faith, Hope, and Love. She lives in SC with her husband. They have two grown children and a terribly spoiled American Eskimo pup. Lynette can be found online at www.lynetteeason.com and www.facebook.com/lynette.eason and @lynetteeason on Twitter.
Pamela Ebel
Pamela Ebel is the author of over 400 short stories, a number of which have appeared, in Shotgun Honey, YELLOW MAMA EZINE, Kings River Life Magazine, The BOULD AWARDS 2020 and 2021 Anthology, Tomorrow and Tomorrow 2021 Anthology, The Yard Crime Blog and other venues. Her poetry has appeared in the Delta Poetry Review and The Five – Two Poetry Crime weekly. She teaches ‘How to Write and Market Short Fiction’ and “The Legal Impact of Generative AI on Intellectual Property Rights” and speaks at various conferences. A native of California, she concentrates on tales from her home state and tales from the highways of the South. She knows, like the Ancient Greeks and the Irish, that as a southern writer you can’t outrun your blood.
She lives in Metairie, Louisiana, with her husband and her cats The Blues Brothers.
Jen Seibert Evans
Jen Seibert Evans, MD, is a board-certified family physician, hospice and palliative medicine physician, and has worked as a clinical professor of medicine at multiple programs, including the Ohio State College of Medicine and Public Health and the University of Colorado School of Medicine. With over two decades of experience in death and dying, she has witnessed hundreds of deaths and completed many hundreds of death certificates, often collaborating with coroners to determine the cause of death. Jen writes literary thrillers populated by strong women behaving badly, and is currently agented and on submission with her debut thriller about a heist gone wrong in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport.
Find her online at: jlevanswriter.com and on her Substack, Mayhem Ensues
Mike Faricy
Mike Faricy writes crime fiction with a sense of humor. At present he has written 90 books. He currently has three ongoing series, Dev Haskell Mysteries, Jack Dillon Dublin Tales, and Yucky Yates. His Hot Shot series and Corridor Man series have been completed. All books available on Amazon.