Bill McIlwain's newspaper career has spanned more than six decades, beginning at age 17 as sports editor for the Morning Star in Wilmington, N.C., where he is now active as a consultant and advisor today. He retired as senior editor of the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group in 1992 and launched a consulting business, working as a writing coach with reporters and editors.

Miller Pope was born in South Carolina but spent most of his career during the “golden age of illustration” in the New York advertising and publishing arenas, after getting his start on the Marine Corps' legendary Leatherneck magazine. He studied figure drawing at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., at the Art Students League in New York City.

Pope's works have appeared on novel covers and in major magazines. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators in 1957. With his wife, Helen, he moved south in the 1970s and worked to develop The Winds Resort and Sea Trail Plantation on the Southeastern North Carolina coast. His original illustrations and paintings are represented at the Sea Gallery in Ocean Isle Beach.

Luleen S. Anderson was born in the small farming community of Roberta, Georgia, the eighth of nine children. First in her family to attend college, she earned her A.B. from Wesleyan College, her M.A. from Emory University, and her Ph.D. from Boston University. She practiced clinical psychology for many years in Boston, Mass., and Wilmington, N.C., where she currently lives. The author of three books and more than eighty articles in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, Dr. Anderson has lectured and taught widely. She is passionate about promoting the potential for transcendent happiness that she has experienced personally, and that she has found in friends and in hundreds of troubled clients. The Knack of a Happy Life brings together new writings with many of her essays and newspaper columns, including dozens from Wilma! Wilmington’s Magazine for Women, to which she has contributed regularly since its inception.

Frederick L. Block served as CEO of Block Industries, Inc., the apparel manufacturing firm his forebears established in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 1920s. In Tales of a Shirtmaker, which he coauthored with his wife Susan Taylor Block, he recalls not only his roles in the company—from traveling salesman just after World War II to executive leadership in a global industry decades later—but the experience of growing up Jewish in a genteel, and largely gentile, Southern city. Block served as director of the North Carolina National Bank, the Cape Fear Academy, and the Figure Eight Island Homeowners' Association. He retired from active involvement in the Block firm in 1985.

Susan Taylor Block, a native of Wilmington, is a writer and historian in her hometown. Author and researcher of more than ten books on Wilmington-area history, she was awarded the Clarendon Cup from the Lower Cape Fear Historical Society (for her history of Airlie Gardens) in 2003, as well as the organization's Society Cup in 1998 and 2002. In 1999 she was recognized by the North Carolina Society of Historians (East) as Historian of the Year. She holds the A.B. degree from the University of North Carolina.

Visit Susan's web site: www.stblock.com

Carolyn Rawls Booth was born in Bladen County, North Carolina, where she lived with her family between the Black and Cape Fear Rivers until her parents were selected to be among the first homesteaders in Penderlea, a New Deal project to stimulate economic recovery in southeastern North Carolina. After her family moved to Raleigh in the early 1940s, she returned often to visit relatives in Bladen, Pender, New Hanover, and Onslow Counties. The rich oral tradition in which she was raised provided the background for her Between the Rivers novels and the legend of Aunt Mag's Recipe Book. Carolyn lives with her husband, Dick, in Cary, North Carolina.

Visit Carolyn's web site: www.carolynbooth.com

Robert E. Kendig, a native of Virginia, is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and the George Washington University. Following twenty-one years of distinguished service in the U.S. Air Force, including combat duty in World War II, he served for two decades as an administrator at the University of Maryland. His experiences as a volunteer at the Washington National Cathedral led him to compile an anecdotal history of the cathedral¹s construction, published as The Washington National Cathedral: This Bible in Stone (EPM Publications, 1995). Now retired, Kendig lives with his wife, Jeanne, in Wilmington, N.C.

Eddie Jones is a member of the NC Writers Network, Boating Writers International, Christian Boaters Organization, American Christian Fiction Writers and the Neuse Sailing Association. He has an English degree from NC State, with an emphasis in journalism. When he's not sailing and writing, Eddie spends his time surfing the coastal Out Islands of the Carolinas and Bahamas or snowboarding in West Virginia and the Rockies.

Visit Eddie's web site: www.eddiejones.org