Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025

Bestselling authors. Writing professors. Publishing industry professionals. Medical, firearms and investigative experts. And for the first time ever, a Young Writers' Track for students ages 12-20.

Here's a deeper look at our distinguished speakers.

Keynote Speaker: Bestselling Author Catriona McPherson

Catriona (she/her) was born in Scotland and lived there until 2010, then immigrated to California where she lives on Patwin ancestral land. A former academic linguist, she now writes full-time. Her multi-award-winning and national best-selling work includes: the DANDY GILVER historical detective stories, the LAST DITCH mysteries, set in California, and a strand of contemporary standalone novels including Edgar-finalist THE DAY SHE DIED and Mary Higgins Clark finalist STRANGERS AT THE GATE. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, The Crimewriters’ Association, The Society of Authors and Sisters in Crime, of which she is a former national president. www.catrionamcpherson.com

SPEAKERS WILL INCLUDE: 

A USA TODAY bestselling author, Simon Wood is a California transplant from England. He's a former competitive racecar driver, a licensed pilot, an endurance cyclist, an animal rescuer and an occasional PI. He shares his world with his American wife, Julie. Their lives are dominated by a long-haired dachshund and five cats. He's the Anthony Award winning author of The One That Got Away, Paying the Piper, Terminated, Deceptive Practices and the Sacramento-set Accidents Waiting To Happen. His current book is Saving Grace. Curious people can learn more at www.simonwood.net. 

Laurie McLean spent 20 years as the CEO of a multi-million-dollar marketing agency and 8 years as an agent/senior agent at Larsen Pomada Literary Agents before co-founding Fuse Literary in 2013 with her business partner Gordon Warnock. Laurie specializes in middle-grade, young- adult and adult genre fiction including romance, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, suspense, thrillers, and US westerns. Laurie was on the management team of the San Francisco Writers Conference for 20 years, and co-founded two ePublishing companies that she eventually sold: Joyride Books for romance, and Ambush Books for tween and teen books. Find out more at FuseLiterary.com or on Instagram @fuseliterary, and on X @FuseLiterary and @AgentSavant.

Eileen Rendahl is a freelance editor and national-bestselling award-winning author and ghostwriter of mystery, thriller, urban fantasy, science fiction, and romance.  She has also written as Kristi Abbott, Lillian Bell, and Eileen Carr. If you think you’re confused, imagine what it’s like inside her head. She has had many jobs and lived in many cities and feels unbelievably lucky to be where she is now and to be doing what she's doing. www.EileenRendahl.com.

Michelle Chouinard is the Edgar-nominated, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon Charts bestselling author behind The Serial-Killer Guide to San Francisco mysteries, The Vacation, and the Detective Jo Fournier series (featuring The Dancing Girls, Taken to the Grave, Her Daughter’s Cry, and The Other Mothers). Her first fiction story was published in her local paper when she was eight, and she fell in love with Agatha Christie novels not long after. The stories kept rattling around her skull while she pursued a Ph.D. in psychology and while she helped to found the first US research university of the new millennium, University of California, Merced. For sanity’s sake, she finally decided to release them. www.mmchouinard.com

Karl Henwood, is a U.S. Army Iraq veteran who worked briefly as a police officer and received his college degree in history. He has much experience with small arms and their use, both past and present. To branch out into something really practical, he also went above and beyond what the Army decided he needed to know about tanks, because big arms are cool too. Besides the Army stuff, he’s worked in coffee logistics, and writes science fiction/fantasy novels for fun but as yet no profit. He lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife, son, daughter and two dogs who are more interesting and better people than he is. He can be reached at his website: https://site-2052674-9062-4196.mystrikingly.com/ or X (Twitter): @manglerofprose. He also puts on a twice-yearly range day event north of Sacramento for writers to get hands-on experience with firearms. Go to www.writersandguns.com for information about his Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025, event. 

A former sheriff deputy/missing persons investigator on how a person disappears, and how to find them.

An emergency medicine physician on what different kinds of injuries do to the body and how to write realistic scenes.

Bryan Patrick Avery, is an award-winning poet and author of more than twenty books for children including two chapter book series, MR. GRIZLEY’S CLASS, illustrated by Arief Putra, and MILO GRAY’S IMAGINATION ADVENTURES, illustrated by Sabrina Filieri. He is also the author of the bestselling middle grade collective biography, BLACK MEN IN SCIENCE, illustrated by Nikita Leanne. He is a past recipient of the SCBWI Work in Progress Award for his chapter book mystery THE ROBOT IN THE LIBRARY and was a fellow in the inaugural Amplify Black Stories Cohort. Bryan serves on the Board of Directors of the Northern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Bryan lives in Northern California with his family. bryanpatrickavery.com

Dale Berry, a San Francisco-based writer, illustrator and commercial artist, has produced independent comics since 1986. His graphic novels (the Tales of the Moonlight Cutter series, currently in its third printing; The Be-Bop Barbarians with author Gary Phillips) have been published in the mainstream, and by his own imprint (www.myriadpubs.com). 

His graphic short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, the first comics creator to do so. “Dead Air,” his second story for Alfred Hitchcock’s, was submitted for Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination. Dale and Gary Phillips contributed the ‘Graphic Novels’ chapter to the Anthony, Macavity, and Agatha Christie Award-winning How to Write a Mystery: A Mystery Writers of America Handbook (Simon & Schuster, edited by Lee Child and Laurie R. King). 

Dale’s life has included stints as a carnival barker, Pinkerton’s guard, professional theater and concert stagehand, radio disc jockey and California State University fencing instructor. His work has been optioned for film and animation development. Currently, he serves as Board Member At-Large for the Northern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and has just completed a new nonfiction book, Bullets & Balloons: Crime, Culture and Comic Book History.

Dorothy Rice is the author of two memoirs published by small presses, Gray is the New Black: A Memoir of Self-Acceptance, and The Reluctant Artist, a hybrid art book/memoir. She also edited the anthology, Twenty Twenty: 43 Stories from a Year Like No Other (Stories on Stage Sacramento, 2021).

Her essays, stories, reviews and interviews have been published in literary journals and magazines, including The Rumpus, Hippocampus, the Brevity Blog, the Saturday Evening Post, Sacramento Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, and most recently, The Woven Tale Press. She is currently working on a memoir in fragments, a sequel to her memoir, Gray is the New Black.

Dorothy is the Managing Editor at Under the Gum Tree, a reader supported, quarterly literary arts magazine, publishing creative nonfiction and visual art. She is also a Board Member with the Sacramento area youth literacy nonprofit 916 Ink and a certified Amherst Writers and Authors (AWA) affiliate. Check out her new Substack, Young Writers Salon.

Shea Robinson is the author of several novels, including her debut novel, Dance With Me, published in 2022. Playlist for the Apocalypse, the first novel in her adult speculative fiction trilogy, and Turn the Page: A Collection of Short Stories, is publication forthcoming. With Robinson’s conversational, artistic, and naturalist style, readers are invited to explore what makes us human, both in our care for each other and our vengeance at those who have hurt us, whether real or imagined. She doesn’t know what to do when you ask her, “What do you do when you’re not writing?”