2025 Faculty: A through F
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.
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.
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
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.
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.