Contemporary romance novelist Deborah Smith is a former newspaper editor. She writes under her own name as well as under the pseudonyms Jackie Leigh and Jacqueline Lennox. She has written around forty novels indcluding A Place to Call Home and When Venus Fell, which both received awards from Romantic Times magazine. She also won a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times magazine. She is a founding partner of BelleBooks, which is a small southern press known for feel good southern fiction including the Mossy Creek Hometown series and the Sweet Tea story collections.
Anne Bishop is a fantasy writer, born in 1955. Her most noted work is the Black Jewels series. She won the Crawford Award in 2000 for the first three Black Jewels books, sometimes called the Black Jewels trilogy: Daughter of the Blood, Heir to the Shadows, and Queen of the Darkness. She started her writing career by publishing short stories. She went on to create several series. The Tir Alainn Trilogy and her third series The Landscapes of Ephemera. She is working on her next series The Others which contains the first three books, Written in Red, Murder of Crows, and Vision in Silver. In 2015, Vision in Silver made The New York Times Best Seller List.