Margaret Ajemian Ahnert was born in New York City. Growing up, she listened to her mother’s stories about her own childhood during the Armenian genocide in Turkey. She has an MFA from Goucher College and a BA from Goddard College, and is a graduate of the Barnes Foundation. She has pursued a variety of careers: producing television documentaries, lecturing as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and teaching art appreciation through the Art Goes to School program in elementary schools. Ahnert holds a 100-ton master captain’s license and is an avid hunter and fisherwoman. She also is an experienced pilot.

The Knock at the Door is her first book.

Painting first in watercolors and then in oils, her main interest was the process of painting from direct observation of plants in natural light.  The constant changing of passing daylight on leaves as they moved towards it fascinated and challenged her. She wanted to capture the strength of these living forms – the muscularity of stems and the shapes and patterns of leaves as she sought to portray the essence of each flower, leaf, and tree.

The results are not conventional, but come from much perceiving and thinking.  Alling’s paintings are a development and progression of formal visual ideas, color exploration, light, composition, scale, and the phenomena of the natural world.

Using close observation and magnified forms, she worked on a large-scale. Her first one-woman show at 55 Mercer in 1972 was enthusiastically reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl, in the Sunday New York Times, Roberta Smith in Art News, and others who identified Alling as a painter to watch among the generation of realist painters working in large scale perception of reality: Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and Jane Freilicher.

Film rights to Bass’s books have been sold to Columbia Pictures, Focus Features, the BBC, Channel 4, and other companies. His books have been named “Notable Books of the Year” by The New York Times and translated into a half dozen languages. He has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, NPR, BBC, and other venues as a commentator. Cited by the Overseas Press Club for his foreign reporting, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Wired, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Discover, and other publications.

Visit his website: Thomas A. Bass

For 15 years, Debra Beck has been a devoted mentor for teenage girls. She done workshops with Girl Power, a program that is devoted to helping “encourage and motivate 11 to 16 year-old girls to make the most of their lives.” She has also created and facilitated her own workshops and girls’ groups through Spirited Youth, an organization she founded to help girls in a positive and supportive way.

She has drawn on her own experience and the experiences of the young women she has helped to make My Feet Aren’t Ugly resonate with readers. She currently resides in Sedona, AZ.

Follow Debra’s blog: MyFeetArentUgly.com

Follow her blog: “Prescriptions for Life”

In the late 90s Michael began to chart a methodical pathway into present moment awareness with intent to develop a practical procedure that anyone, anywhere, could follow to initiate this experience for themselves. This procedure became known as The Presence Process. In 2002 Michael returned to South Africa and invited others to experience this inner journey. He discovered that as others embraced present moment awareness they too automatically experienced release from physical, mental, and emotional discomfort, including psychological disorders and addictions.

To make this journey accessible to everyone Michael wrote The Presence Process: A Healing Journey Into Present Moment Awareness. The Presence Process enables us to take present moment awareness from a mental concept to an abiding experience.