Mary Lou Sanelli is the author of fourteen titles of nonfiction, fiction, memoir, poetry, and a recent children’s title. A recent publication, In So Many Words, was nominated for a Pacific Northwest Book Award and a Washington State Book Award. An Island Called Bainbridge is her newest title. She has been a keynote speaker for such organizations as P.E.O. International, Soroptimist International, AAUW International, GFWC, as well as for private clubs and events, book clubs, writer’s conferences, and author/speaker venues such as Town Hall Seattle. She also works as a columnist, a choreographer and master teacher of contemporary dance. A word from Mary Lou: “Whenever I am given the opportunity to share my work with a room of interested, interesting, women, I always feel as if I’ve found my niche.”

Michelle will share this year’s favorite reads from Edmonds Bookshop.

Noelle Salazar is the international and USA Today bestselling author of four historical fiction novels including The Flight Girls and The Lies We Leave Behind, as well as one self-published romcom cheekily titled The Meet-Poop. Her lifelong love of history drew her to telling stories of women persevering during some of the world’s most tumultuous times. Noelle is a lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest and lives in Bothell with her two children, a teetering TBR stack and one semi-feral cat.

Jack O’Donnell was born and raised in Everett and taught in local schools for 39 years. Jack is a well-known historian who has written books on Everett history and is known for his long-running “Seems Like Yesterday” column in The Daily Herald. He is an active member of Historic Everett and the Everett Museum of History and is widely regarded as one of Everett’s most dedicated keepers of local history.

Alice K. Boatwright is the award-winning author of eight books and dozens of published short stories. She writes not only literary fiction but also mysteries and children’s books. Among readers, she is most widely known for her Ellie Kent mysteries, including Under an English Heaven, which won the Mystery and Mayhem Grand Prize, and the following books in the series: What Child Is This?, In the Life Ever After; and Summer’s End. Alice received an Independent Publisher Book Award for her first book, Shadows of Vietnam, which was also a finalist for the prestigious Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She has been the recipient of grants from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the University of California and has held artist residencies at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California. For many years, she taught writing for UC Berkeley Extension, as well as in informal settings ranging from a computer chip factory to a B&B in Nepal. Her “day jobs” as a writer about public health, education, and the arts took her around the world, including a decade based in France and the UK. She now makes her home in the Pacific Northwest.

Kristen Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of the novel Elita and the story collection Outer Stars, which won the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Her three previous collections of short fiction are What We Do with the Wreckage, which won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; Swimming with Strangers; and This Life She’s Chosen. Kirsten’s short fiction has been honored with a PEN/O. Henry Prize and her stories have appeared widely in journals, among them The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, One Story and McSweeney’s. She has held fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, The Jack Straw Writers Program and the Willa Cather Foundation. Kristen is the fiction editor for the literary journal Crab Creek Review and a member of the English Department faculty at Eastside Preparatory School and Whitworth University’s Low Residency MFA.

Nicola Pearson is an award-winning playwright, whose plays have been produced throughout the US and in Sydney, Australia. Her play Carried by the Current was produced twice recently in Everett by Women’s Work Productions, a theatre company dedicated to bringing untold stories from history to the stage. The true story in this play also inspired her latest novel Sanctified, a work of historical fiction. Nicola is the author of three other novels, including The Gift, four short mysteries, and three children’s picture books. During COVID lock down, she started a YouTube channel, Storytime with Nicola, to try to maintain children’s interest in books when they couldn’t go to their local libraries. Nicola is married to the potter at Sauk Mountain Pottery and divides her time between selling his work and writing. You can find her blog at nicolapearsonauthor.wordpress.com