Category Archives: Childrens Authors

Her career has spanned from on-air radio personality, promotions assistant, television copy editor, camera operator, business systems liaison, to human resource professional.

Published author of short stories and a book series for middle grade readers. Her screenplays include comedy shorts, romantic-comedies, feature animation, feature family, and an animated television series for preschoolers. Past applicant for the Nickelodeon Fellowship. She’s achieved finalist rank in several national screenplay contests, including Screenwriters Expo.   UW-Madison Alumni, Writers Boot Camp Alumni, WSF Member Services Coordinator since 2007, WSF Vice President since 2010.

Ilsa J. Bick is child/adolescent and forensic psychiatrist, film scholar, surgeon wannabe, former Air Force major—and an award-winning, best-selling author of short stories, e-books and novels.  Her first published story, “A Ribbon for Rosie,” was also the Grand Prize winner in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds competition in 1998; two years later, her story, “Shadows, in the Dark” took second prize.  In the interim, her novella, “The Quality of Wetness,” placed second in the prestigious Writers of the Future contest.  Her first published novel, STAR TREK: THE LOST ERA: WELL OF SOULS, cracked the Barnes and Noble bestseller list in 2003.

Since then she has written extensively in the Star Trek, Battletech, Mechwarrior: Dark Age and Shadowrun universes, and her original stories have been featured in numerous anthologies, magazines and online venues.  Her supernatural murder-mystery, “The Key,” was selected for honorable mention in the Best American Mystery Stories, 2005 (ed. Joyce Carol Oates).  The sequel, “Second Sight,” appeared in Crime Spells (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman); Locus’s Rich Horton selected “Second Sight” as a recommended read in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010.

Her 2010 YA paranormal mystery, DRAW THE DARK, garnered starred reviews from School Library Journal and VOYA; was an ALAN Top Ten Pick; won the 2011 Westchester Fiction Award; and was also named a 2011 Bank Street College Best Book.   Under the title, Stalag Winter, the novel was also a semifinalist in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Competition.   Publisher’s Weekly called DRAW a “gripping supernatural/historical mystery . . . that demonstrates the evils of the present can be just as terrifying as those of the past.”  Kirkus Reviews wrote that DRAW is “(an) excellent mystery that might bring new life to a neglected genre (Mystery YA)” and Booklist said “Bick’s ambitious, intelligent, & relentlessly dark novel is a notable achievement . . . Gut-punch of an ending, too.”

ASHES, the first volume in Ilsa’s new YA dystopian thriller trilogy, was released in September 2011 from Egmont USA.  New York Times best-selling author Michael Grant has called ASHES “a haunting and epic story” and “a must read.”  Fellow NYT best-seller James Dashner says ASHES is “dark, creepy and suspenseful” and “gripped me from beginning to end.”  It has been nominated in the YALSA Teen’s Top Ten.

The gritty YA contemporary, DROWNING INSTINCT, was released in February 2012 from Carolrhoda Lab.

Ilsa currently lives with her family and several furry creatures in rural Wisconsin, near a Hebrew cemetery.  One thing she loves about the neighbors: They’re very quiet and only come around for sugar once in a blue moon.  Visit her at www.ilsajbick.com.

Liz Rhodebeck of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, is a freelance writer and regular contributor for Lake Country Publications in Hartland, WI.  She has published poetry in state and national journals including The Penwood Review, Margie, Verse Wisconsin, Evangel, Wisconsin Academy Review and others.  Her latest poetry chapbook is What I Learned in Kansas (2010), following Benthos (1998) and The Book of Ruth (1997).  In addition, she was the recipient of a Kansas Arts Commission Mini-Fellowship for poetry in 1997.  An advocate of bringing poetry into the community, Liz facilitates youth workshops and readings throughout the area, including a benefit reading for the local food pantry for several years.  She is a founding member of the group Grace River Poets, and co-editor of the project One Vision: A Fusion of Art and Poetry in Lake Country.

Ann & Amanda Angel

Ann Angel, a writer, editor and professor in the graduate program in writing at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, focuses her work on family and young adult sensibilities and issues. Her critically acclaimed young adult biography, Janis Joplin:Rise Up Singing, was awarded the 2011 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award by the American Library Association.  Her award winning anthology looking at the many ways teens define beauty, Such A Pretty Face, Short Stories about Beauty, received a top ranking with VOYA, the young adult librarians’ journal, was nominated as a Best Book for Young Adults 2008 list by the American Library Association, and was listed as Recommended Reading by the 2008 issue of Horn Book Guide. Angel has also written 8 other books. These include a number of biographies and her novel, Real for Sure Sister, for middle grades about cross-cultural adoption. Her articles for regional and national publications include essays on birth, adoption, family life, and middle grade and teen literature. After playing a role in her own adult children’s birth parent searches and witnessing her daughter’s adoption plans, Ann realized that birth parents and their feelings and needs are often overlooked in literature about the topic.

After earning her Masters in Counseling Psychology, Deborah Lynn Jacobs worked as a counselor at a community college in Ontario. After ten years, she and her husband and children moved to the isolated northern town of Kenora, Ontario.

There, she taught college courses in psychology as well as pre-employment and job search skills, and freelanced for three newspapers and several community magazines. She later moved to Wisconsin, and now writes full time. She lives with her husband, and two pet skinks named Frank and Tigger.

Deborah’s first attempts at writing novels constituted what she calls her “apprenticeship period.” These attempts now reside in the depths of a deep, dark drawer, where they belong.

Her published books for teen readers are Choices (Roaring Brook, 2007)  the YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, finalist for the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and Nominee, Stellar Book Awards (British Columbia’s teen choice award); Powers, Roaring Brook, 2006 (hardcover); Square Fish, 2008 (paperback)  YALSA Quick Pick nominee and Sunburst Award, Honorable Mention;  The Same Difference (Royal Fireworks, 2000) about which Midwest Book Review, 2001 said “Jacobs has painted a realistic, unusual portrait of Asperger’s syndrome.”

Deborah is currently working on a novel that she describes as a dystopia. It takes place in a future not so different from our present.

When not writing, Deborah enjoys mucking around in her perennial flowerbeds, creating unusual (and usually spicy) dishes, camping, canoeing and rambling through the woods. She is a voracious reader, and has resorted to reading toothpaste tubes or shampoo bottle ingredients if no other reading material is available!