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biographies 10TH ANNUAL
WHIDBEY WRITERS CONFERENCE

Step to one side, Sherlock:
A Special Event of the Whidbey Island Writers Conference

Elizabeth George was born Susan Elizabeth George in Warren, Ohio . When she was eighteen months old, her family relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area where they lived in what's now part of Silicon Valley but was then the small town of Mountain View . There, she was educated at St. Joseph 's Grammar School and Holy Cross High School by the Sisters of the Holy Cross.

She began her university education at Foothill Community College in Los Altos Hills, and from there she transferred to and graduated from the University of California in Riverside, California , picking up units along the way at UC Berkeley as well. She also attended California State University at Fullerton , where she was awarded a master's degree in Counseling/Psychology and UC Riverside again where she received a lifetime secondary teaching credential. In 2004, she was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by California State University at Fullerton .

Professionally, she started out as a teacher. She was employed at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana initially, but there she gave in to her bent for organized labor and was summarily fired along with ten other teachers for union activity. When the courts ordered the school to rehire all of the teachers, she was unavailable as she had quickly moved on to El Toro High School in El Toro, California (now called Lake Forest, California), where she remained for the rest of her career as an English teacher. While employed there, she was selected Orange County Teacher of the Year, a tribute in part to the work she'd done with remedial students for nearly a decade. She left education after thirteen and a half years when she sold her first novel, A Great Deliverance, to her longtime publisher Bantam Books.

After eighteen months outside of the classroom, she returned to teaching at the community college level, where she taught creative writing at Coastline Community College for several years before the calls of her career as a writer made it too difficult for her to be at home for the eighteen-week periods that the Coastline course required of her. At that point, she branched out into teaching an intensive writing seminar that she offered first at the University of Oklahoma and, since then, at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California . She has also taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, at the University of California in Irvine, at Irvine Valley College, and through Edinboro University 's summer program at Exeter College in Oxford University .

She has won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, and France 's Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her novel A Great Deliverance, for which she was also nominated for the Edgar and the Macavity Awards. She has also been awarded Germany 's MIMI for her novel Well-Schooled in Murder.

Most of her novels have been filmed by for television by the BBC and have been broadcast in the US on PBS's MYSTERY.

Elizabeth George currently lives on Whidbey Island, making frequent trips to London where she has a flat in South Kensington . She has two disobedient but nonetheless adorable miniature dachshunds: a long-haired named Titch (nicknamed the Burger) and a wire-haired named Lucy (nicknamed Lucy Bean the Drama Queen). She is married to Tom McCabe, a retired fire fighter.

For additional information, please visit Ms. George's WEBSITE.

Bob Mayer is the NY Times Best-Selling author of over 35 books, both fiction and non-fiction. He grew up in New York City . He is a West Point graduate, served in the Infantry and Special Forces (Green Berets), including commanding an A-Team and as an instructor at the JFK Special Warfare Center & School. He’s successfully applied what he learned in Special Operations to the civilian world for both organizations and individuals.

Bob earned an MA in Education after graduating West Point . His books have hit the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, USA Today and other best-seller lists. He has over 3 million books in print. He’s the author of The Novel Writers Toolkit: A Guide to Writing Great Fiction and Getting It Published; and Who Dares Wins: Special Operations Tactics for Building Your Winning A-Team. His books have covered the spectrum of covert operations and possible terrorism situations.

He is an honor graduate of: The US Army Combined Arms Services Staff School, the Infantry Office Basic & Advanced courses, the Special Forces Qualification Course, the Special Warfare Center Instructor Training Course and the Danish Royal Navy Fromandkorpset School . He is Master Parachutist/Jumpmaster Qualified and holds a Black Belt in Taekwondo, certified in Seoul .

He has been a speaker for over 500 groups/organizations, ranging from Boston SWAT, the University of Georgia, the CIA, the Maui Writers Conference, the US Army, the Royal Danish Navy Frogman Corps and numerous others on a variety of topics, but mainly writing, publishing and using Special Operations Theory and Tactics in the civilian world, primarily in team-building and leadership under the auspices of his WHO DARES WINS concept. He can tailor his presentations to specific organizations and goals.

He lives on a barrier island in the low-country of South Carolina .

Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D. has published twenty-five books. She holds graduate degrees in forensic psychology, clinical psychology, and philosophy. Currently she teaches forensic psychology at DeSales University in Pennsylvania . After publishing two books in psychology, Engaging the Immediate and The Art of Learning, she wrote Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. At that time, she had a cover story in Psychology Today on our culture's fascination with vampires. Then she wrote guidebooks to Anne Rice's fictional worlds: The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, The Witches' Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches, The Roquelaure Reader: A Companion to Anne Rice's Erotica, and The Anne Rice Reader. Her next book was Dean Koontz: A Writer's Biography, and then she ventured into journalism with a two-year investigation of the vampire subculture, to write Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today. Following that was Ghost, Cemetery Stories, and The Science of Vampires. She has also written for The New York Times Book Review, The Writer, The Newark Star Ledger, Publishers Weekly, and The Trenton Times.

Her background in forensic studies positioned her to assist former FBI profiler John Douglas on his book, The Cases that Haunt Us, and to co-write a book with former FBI profiler, Gregg McCrary, The Unknown Darkness. She has also written The Forensic Science of CSI, The Criminal Mind: A Writer's Guide to Forensic Psychology, The Science of Cold Case Files, and Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers and she pens editorials on breaking forensic cases for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Recently, she co-wrote A Voice for the Dead with James E. Starrs on his exhumation projects, and became part of the team. She also contributes regularly to Court TV's Crime Library and has written nearly three hundred articles about serial killers, forensic psychology, and forensic science. Her latest book is The Human Predator: A Historical Chronicle of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation.

For additional information, please visit Dr. Ramsland's WEBSITE.

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