Brina Patel is a freelance content writer and copywriter. Her bylines have appeared in several outlets, including Business Insider, Metro, and Well+Good. Her creative nonfiction has also been published in Heartwood Literary Magazine and LEVITATE Magazine. Brina is passionate about using storytelling to connect, heal, and delve deeper into the more difficult questions in life. She enjoys mentoring fellow creatives so that they can share their talents with the world and leave a legacy through their words. When she isn’t writing, Brina enjoys getting lost in new cities, diving into page-turning memoirs, and spoiling her sassy Maltese. You can learn more about her at www.brinapatelwriter.com.

Andrew Laufer retired after a 25-year career with the California Department of Education. He is currently a gentleman farmer, storyteller, poet, and author. In 2021 he published Papa Laufer’s Stories: Positive reflections of life in America, a collection of single page vignettes describing his life experiences. These stories will make you laugh, and they will make you cry. They will make you think about life, and they will elicit similar memories of your own. A few are sad, most are humorous, all are thought provoking to either lighten your heart, or to move you to deeper conversations.

Eric Wiesenthal is a former newspaper reporter and served as press secretary and a legislative aide to one of the Latino members of the CA State Assembly. He later served as a policy analyst in California state government for more than 20 years.

Since retiring, Eric has been writing short stories and poetry. His stories have ranged from a spy thriller to the account of a Canadian railway conductor on his last transcontinental run, to a recent story about a former Marine Corps medic serving as a UN refugee aide struggling to survive and reunite with her medical unit in war-torn Gaza. Eric’s poetry is mostly free verse and ranges from celebrating joy and triumph to observations about current events. His poem, “Detroit Versus Everybody” was published the CWC Sacramento Branch’s 2022 literary anthology.

Lally has lived in Sri Lanka, Ghana, Wales, England, Pennsylvania, and California.

She is a member of the Davis Writers Salon, the California Writers Club (Sacramento, Fresno) and the Elk Grove Writers Guild.  Her writing has been published in anthologies for the California Literary Review and the Sacramento branch of the California Writers’ Club in 2022. 

She received Honorable Mention from Writers Digest in 2022 and in October 2022 she was a finalist in a nationwide talent search for America’s Next Great Author, a TV pilot.

Her article about her recovery from a stroke was published in the Davis Enterprise in May, 2023 and she is an author for Doximity’s Op-Med (an online networking service for medical professionals).

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Her interview about a day in the life of a psychiatrist has received over 66,000 online views from pre-med students who are considering a career as a doctor or wish to specialize in the field of psychiatry.

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MP Smith is a lifelong lover of the English language. She served as a technical writer/editor for 35 years and marveled that she was paid to read, being the kid with the flashlight under the blanket who read anything she could get her hands on! MP retired in 2021 and published her first cozy mystery novella a month later (Ho, Ho, Homicide, in the anthology Clues, Christmas Trees and Corpses (Clues@@ Christmas Trees and Corpses: A Cozy Mystery Christmas Anthology (Aye Alba Anthologies)