The panel will focus on building an author platform in the digital age – with the craft portion of the presentation being on marketing. The panel speakers:

Alice Osborn’s past educational and work experience is unusually varied, and it now feeds her work as a poet/book editor and singer/songwriter on acoustic guitar. In the past decade, Alice has taught writing workshops to thousands of aspiring fiction, poetry, and memoir authors of nearly all ages from 9 to 90 both around the corner and across continents. Heroes without Capes is her most recent collection of poetry. Previous collections are After the Steaming Stops and Unfinished Projects.  Alice is also the editor of the anthologies Tatoos  and Creatures of Habitat, both from Main Street Rag. A North Carolina Writers’ Network, North Carolina Poetry Society, and North Carolina Songwriters Co-op board member and a Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in the News and Observer, the Broad River Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Soundings Review and in numerous journals and anthologies. Alice is the musician-in-residence for the Western Wake Farmers’ Market. She is also an Irish dancer who plays Celtic fiddle and bluegrass banjo. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband, two children, four birds and one messy guinea pig. Visit Alice’s website at www.aliceosborn.com and check out her music at www.reverbnation.com/aliceosborn.

Jan McCanless has been a best selling author for  15 books.  A mother of three, and grandmother to nine, she started as a high school teacher, sequed into freelance newspaper work, and from there, she moved into murder mysteries with a humorous twist.  She compiled 2 volumes of humor columns, winning the 2013 Mother Vine award for best stories for her first compilation, titled Wyatt Earp, GAP Pickles and Thoughts of Home,. Her 2nd compilation, Tire Patch Cookies are Good for the Soul , is a continuation of the fun, with more award nominations for the year it was published.