Bywater Books and Amble Press welcomes five new authors to our publishing family.
SHERI REYNOLDS is the author of the novels Bitterroot Landing, The Rapture of Canaan (an Oprah book club selection and New York Times bestseller), A Gracious Plenty, Firefly Cloak, The Sweet In-Between, The Homespun Wisdom of Myrtle T. Cribb, and the full-length play, Orabelle’s Wheelbarrow. She teaches creative writing and literature at Old Dominion University, where she is the Ruth and Perry Morgan Chair of Southern Literature. She lives in the town of Cape Charles on Virginia’s eastern shore.
Bywater Books will publish her newest novel, The Tender Grave on March 16, 2021.
ABIGAIL PADGETT grew up in Vincennes, IN, and holds degrees from Indiana University, the University of Missouri and Washington University, St.Louis. She has taught high school English and college courses in Sociology and Creative Writing in San Diego and Boston, directed an ACLU chapter in Houston and worked as an advocate for the mentally ill, plus enduring some truly weird temp jobs.
Abbie is the author of multiple highly acclaimed mystery novels that have been translated into five languages, including both the Blue McCarron and Bo Bradley series. San Diego is home, although Abbie spends much time on the East Coast and in France. She is a dog person happiest in the company of dachshunds, a lapsed vegetarian with heartland food preferences, and a lifelong fan of Poe, Algernon Blackwood, and the Graveyard Poets.
Bywater Books will be reissuing the critically acclaimed Blue and The Last Blue Plate Special mysteries in 2021.
Native New Yorker ANN APTAKER’S Cantor Gold crime/mystery series has been the recipient of Lambda Literary and Goldie Awards. Her short stories have appeared in two editions of the crime anthology Fedora, Switchblade Magazine’s Stiletto Heeled issue, and will be featured in the Mickey Finn crime anthology. She is one of six writers invited to provide a novella for the second season of Down & Out Books’ crime series Guns & Tacos. Her flash fiction, “A Night In Town,” appeared in the online zine Punk Soul Poet, and another flash fiction, “Rockin’ Dyke Roll,” is featured in the Goldie winning anthology Our Happy Hours: LGBT Voices From The Gay Bars.
Culminating a career as a curator for museums and galleries, Ann is currently an art writer for various New York clients and is an adjunct professor of art history at the New York Institute of Technology.
Bywater Books will publish the 5th novel in Aptaker’s Cantor Gold Mystery Series in 2021.
SAMARA BREGER is a writer and performer from New York City. She has a background in classical music, sex education, LGBT advocacy, news reporting, and comedy—and in her previous life, she was an Emmy-nominated journalist, covering sexual and reproductive health.
Now, she writes books about magic and feelings. She has a crush on every character.
Bywater Books will publish her debut novel Bloom, a queer fantasy adventure in 2021.
MATTHEW CLARK DAVISON is a writer and educator living in San Francisco. He is the creator and teacher of The Lab: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007 in a friend’s living room on Douglass Street. 10+ Years/20+ Cycles/120+ Sessions/140+ Writers & Artists Studied/200+ Labbers/4 Locations/ & 1,000s of pages of stories later, The Lab is still going strong. He earned a BA and MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU, where he now teaches full-time in the BA/MA/MFA departments. Matthew served as the Chief Artistic Strategist at Performing Arts Workshop, where he worked for eleven years as a teaching artist and as a mentor to newly-hired teaching artists who bring intensive residencies in various art forms to children who may not otherwise receive an arts education. He has also coached writing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and continues to coach established and aspiring writers on their creative manuscripts.
His prose has been recently anthologized in Empty The Pews (Epiphany Publishing) and 580-Split; and published in or on Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Foglifter, Lumina Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Per Contra, Educe, and others; and has been recognized with a Creative Work Grant, (Inaugural Awardee/San Francisco State University), Cultural Equities Grant (San Francisco Arts Commission), Clark Gross Award for a Novel-in-Progress, and a Stonewall Alumni Award.
Courses taught at SFSU include MFA Process in Creative Nonfiction, Characterization, Short Story Writing, Uses of Personal Experience, Directed Writing (a one-on-one tutorial), Writers on Writing, Craft of Fiction, Style in Fiction, The Short-Short Story, Works In Progress, Personal Narrative, Teaching Creative Writing, Transfer Literary Magazine, and Fourteen Hills.
Amble Press will be publishing his debut novel, Doubting Thomas in summer 2021.
