Meet The Miami Book Fair 2017 Authors: Part 2

We are continuing on with our author biographies from the 2017 Miami Book Fair. Enjoy!

 

Nicholas Reynolds has worked in the fields of modern military history and intelligence off and on for forty years, with some unusual detours. Freshly minted Ph.D. from Oxford University in hand, he joined the United States Marine Corps in the 1970s. He served as a CIA officer at home and abroad. Most recently, he was the historian for the CIA Museum. He currently teaches as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. The London Review of Books writes that Reynolds’s latest book, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy (William Morrow), “looks among the shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before,” revealing for the first time the stunning untold story of Ernest Hemingway’s dangerous secret life — including his role as a Soviet agent code-named “Argo” — that fueled his art and his undoing. A literary biography with the soul of an espionage thriller, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy is an essential contribution to our understanding of the life, work, and fate of one of America’s most legendary authors.

Michel Fiffe is the creator of two critically acclaimed titles: the action series Copra published by Bergen Street Press and the quasi-neorealistic Zegas, recently collected by Fantagraphics. He’s written and drawn for Marvel, Valiant, IDW, Boom! Studios, and Dynamite Entertainment. On top of continuing the serialization of Copra, Fiffe recently launched a new title Negativeland and is working on a 3-issue mini-series Bloodstrike: Brutalists for Image Comics.

 

Dr. Steve Leibowitz had a twenty-seven-year career as a human resource developer with Miami-Dade County Government, during which he kept active in the South Florida community. Among those to have recognized Dr. Liebowitz for excellence are: Junior Achievement Inc., International Society for General Semantics, Leadership South Dade, the M.E.E.D. Program, the National Association of Counties, the Bass Museum of Art and the Children’s Museum of South Florida. He is also the author of the biblical series published by Harmony-Quest Publications, The Covenant, and The Scrolls, consisting of Devorah, Saul: First King, and David the Usurper, in which Dr. Leibowitz provides a fresh perspective on classic biblical tales.

 

Elizabeth Rosner is a bestselling novelist, poet, and essayist Her previous books include three novels, Electric City, named one of the best books of 2014 by National Public Radio; Blue Nude; Speed of Light; and Gravity, a collection of poetry. Rosner’s essays have appeared in the NY Times magazine, Elle, Hadassah magazine, the Huffington Post, and numerous anthologies. She frequently writes book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle. Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory (Counterpoint) is her most recent book. As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century’s most monumental events―the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the Killing Fields―begin to pass away, Survivor Caféaddresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten? Elizabeth Rosner explores the echoes of legacies among descendants of African American slaves, descendants of Cambodian survivors of the Killing Fields, descendants of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the effects of 9/11 on the general population. Examining current brain research, Rosner depicts the efforts to understand the intergenerational inheritance of trauma, as well as the intricacies of remembrance in the aftermath of atrocity. Survivor Café becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memory―from museums and commemorative sites to national reconciliation projects to small-group cross-cultural encounters.

Ben Blum holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was awarded the New York Times Foundation Fellowship. Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime (Doubleday) tells the story of his cousin Alex, a good kid, a popular high school hockey star from a tight-knit Colorado family, who had achieved his dream to become a U.S. Army Ranger only to commit armed robbery on the eve of his deployment to Iraq. Bloom seeks to answer the question that haunted his family—why would his cousin ruin his life in such a spectacularly foolish way? Anthony Swofford, the author of Jarhead, writes, “Ben Blum’s search for truth leads him down many paths into an inner turmoil and boil about family, fidelity, identity, good and evil, and military service. Once you start reading you won’t put it down.”

 

Jack E. Davis is the author of the award-winning An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century. A professor of environmental history at the University of Florida, he grew up on the Gulf coast.  Davis’s The Gulf : The Making of an American Sea (Liverlight) colorfully reinstates this region within the American narrative, arguing that its sinuous contours, bountiful waters, and warm currents have long seduced and tricked the human species—from the age of Spanish conquistadors to the present day—into a disastrous pattern of exploitation.

Laddee Hubbard is the winner of the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for the Short Story. Hubbard’s debut novel is The Talented Ribkins (Melville House), in which Johnny Ribkins must draw on his family’s unusual collection of superpowers to save himself from the mobster whose money he’s stolen. Toni Morrison writes, “For sheer reading pleasure Ladee Hubbard’s original and wildly inventive novel is in a class by itself.”

Thank you for your attention!