Featured guests inlcude Helen Thomas, Marvin Kalb, Karen DeYoung, Judith Warner, Michelle Singletary, Alice Hoffman, Warren Brown and more!

Warren Brown is host of “Sugar Rush” on the Food Network, owner of CakeLove and Love Café bakeries and author of his first cookbook, Cakelove. In 2000, he left his career as a lawyer to pursue a dream and founded CakeLove in 2002. In 2006, he received the Small Business Person of the Year award for Washington, D.C. In 2005 and 2006 his bakery CakeLove won the best bakery category in The Washington Post’s Best Bets readers poll. Mr. Brown has also been recognized for his entrepreneurial spirit and featured by a number media outlets, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, People Magazine, Southern Living, Black Enterprise, Inc. Magazine, The Washington Post and many others.

Cynthia Cotten, a children’s writer who grew up in Lockport, New York, got inspiration for her book, At the Edge of the Woods, from her hometown. While finishing her studies at Vermont College in the Writing for Children Program, she began her career as a children’s author when she published her first book, Snow Ponies. Cotten says, “I love kids, I love books, and I love writing,” which allows her to thoroughly enjoy working in her dream job as a children’s books author. Currently she lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and two children.

Philip Dine has covered the labor beat for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for two decades, and is the author of State of the Unions : How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence . Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his labor reporting, he won the National Press Club's Edwin Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence in 2007 and first place for investigative reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists' Dateline Awards, for his coverage of Afghanistan's illicit narcotics trade. Since coming to the nation's capital in 1996, he's been cited seven times for top Washington, D.C. investigative or foreign correspondence by the National Press Club or Society of Professional Journalists' Washington chapter. He lives in Maryland with his wife and three children.

Alice Hoffman had already written and published her first novel, Property Of, by the age of 21. Hoffman’s works have received mention in the “Notable Books of the Year” by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and other literary journals. The Warner Brothers even created a film from her novel Practical Magic, which starred Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Hoffman has had her work published in twenty different translations and over 100 foreign editions. Her most recent novel, The Third Angel, examines the lives of three women at different crossroads in their lives, tying their London-centered stories together in devastating retrospect.

Marvin Kalb served as the first director of the Joan Shorenstein Center of the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Kalb spent 30 years as an award-winning news reporter for CBS and NBC News, which included his role as host of Meet the Press. He currently works as a Senior Fellow in the Center’s Washington, D.C. office, where he researches the media’s impact on public policy. Besides his work at the Center, he hosts the monthly Kalb Report program at the National Press Club, and he regularly contributes to the Fox NewsChannel, and has authored several books.

Thomas Mallon's seven novels include Henry and Clara, Bandbox and the recently published Fellow Travelers. He has written non-fiction books about plagiarism, Stolen Words; diaries, A Book of One's Own; and the Kennedy assassination, Mrs. Paine's Garage; as well as two volumes of essays, Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact.  His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review and more. He has been the literary editor of Gentlemen's Quarterly and has taught at Vassar College, George Washington University and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Mallon is the recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, as well as the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing.

Alice McGill’s book Molly Bannaky won the 2000 IRA Picture Book Award, the 2000 Jane Addams Award, and was an ALA Notable Book. Her most recent book, Way Up and Over Everything, is an account of the McGill's great-great-grandmother Jane, and how she meets a slave with magical powers that are created by the wish for freedom. After earning a degree in elementary education and teaching in schools for many years, Alice became a traveling storyteller and toured 41 states, Canada, the West Indies, and South America to collect all her stories. Alice now lives in Columbia, MD with her husband, where she continues her career as a professional story teller and award-winning author of children’s books.

E. Ethelbert Miller serves as the current editor for the Poet Lore magazine and board member of The Writer’s Center, while directing the African American Resource Center at Howard University. Aliterary activist and prized poet, Miller also founded and directed the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, one of the oldest literary series in the Washington, DC area. In 1979, the mayor of Washington, D.C. proclaimed September 28, 1979 as “E. Ethelbert Miller Day” for his contributions to literature and the community. He received his B.A. from Howard University, and continues to work at the university today.

Stanley Plumly grew up in the farming regions of Ohio and Virginia before receiving his B.A. from Wilmington College and M.A. & Ph.D. from Ohio University. His first collection of poems, In the Outer Dark, won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry-Award under a panel of judges including Robert Lowell. Over the next three decades he produced seven acclaimed works and has taught at several universities. Plumly also holds the Distinguished University Professorship at the University of Maryland. In his newest collection, Old Heart: Poems, Plumly confronts and celebrates mortality—in the detailed natural world, in the immediacy of the loss of friends, and in personal encounters.

Marty Rhodes Figley developed her interest in the poet Emily Dickinson and Dickinson’s poems while at Mount Holyoke College, where she received her BA in American Studies. The Emily Dickinson Journal first published Marty’s articles, titled Brown Kisses and Shaggy Feet that focused on Emily Dickinson’s relationship with her dog Carlo. Now a full-time writer, Figley has become a well-known children’s book author with her books The Schoolchildren’s Blizzard, Washington is Burning and her most recent, Prisoner for Liberty.

Michelle Singletary, TheWashington Post financial columnist, helps resolve financial issues in her column The Color of Money. After successful publication of her first two novels, Spend Well, Live Rich and Your Money and Your Man, she has a current proposal for her third book. Singletary’s electronic newsletter on www.washingtonpost.com has over 150,000 subscribers, who learn from her how to solve personal finance problems. Launched in 2006, her half-hour national television program Singletary Says has had great success, and has led to national networks recruiting her to prepare financial reports for their shows.

Myra Sklarew, former president of the artist community “Yaddo” in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., professor emerita of literature at American University and recipient of the University Scholar/Teacher Award in 1998, is the author of three chapbooks and six collections of poetry. Her most recent works are, Lithuania: New & Selected Poems; The Witness Trees; a collection of short fictions, Like a Field Riddled by Ants; and essays, Over the Rooftops of Time. Her poetry has been recorded for the Contemporary Poets' Archives of the Library of Congress. A nonfiction work entitled Holocaust and the Construction of Memory is forthcoming from SUNY Press. She was educated at Tufts University where she studied biology, and in the Writing Seminars with Elliott Coleman at the Johns Hopkins University.

Helen Thomas spent 57 years loyally serving as a Heart Newspapers columnist, covering every president since John F. Kennedy. Known as the “First Lady of the Press,” she became the first woman officer of the National Press Club and the first woman member and president of the White House Correspondents Association. Thomas has received several honorable merits including “Women of the Year” in 1975, being named one of the top 25 most influential women in America, and has been honored by President Clinton with the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award. She continues to ask tough questions of current President Bush, while also writing accredited books about journalism and the media.

Judith Warner has authored a range of nonfiction books including her newest book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, which details the crazy life of mothers in today’s world. In addition to writing her own nonfiction books, she writes the “Domestic Disturbances” column for the New York Times, reviews books for The Washington Post, hosts The Judith Warner Show on the radio and writes about politics and women’s issues for different publications. A former special correspondent for Newsweek in Paris, Warner now lives in Washington, DC with her husband and two daughters.

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