Online Thriller School

Instructor Bios

1. 

   Kimberly Belle

   https://www.kimberlybellebooks.com/

   Kimberly Belle is the USA Today and internationally bestselling author with over one million copies sold worldwide, with titles including The Personal Assistant, The Marriage Lie, a Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalist for Best Mystery & Thriller, and the co-authored #1 Audible Original, Young Rich Widows. Kimberly’s novels have been selected by LibraryReads and Amazon as Best Books of the Month and optioned for film and television. She divides her time between Atlanta and Amsterdam.

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2. 

   May Cobb

   https://www.maycobb.com/

   May Cobb grew up in the piney woods of East Texas where My Summer Darlings, The Hunting Wives and Big Woods are set. After college, she moved to San Francisco where she studied Victorian Literature for her Master’s, and gravitated towards that era’s detective novels, known as “sensation novels”, such as Wilke Collins’ The Woman in White. She then lived in Los Angeles for a few years where she worked for filmmaker/writer Ron Shelton and his wife, the actress Lolita Davidovich.

   May currently lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and son where they enjoy traipsing around the area’s many beautiful parks. She also enjoys napping, staring into space, making to-do lists for her to-do lists, shoveling cookies down her throat when she’s writing a particularly difficult scene (and even when she’s not), wearing her PJ’s as often as she can get away with and collapsing into bed at the end of a day with a great book.

   She’s currently finishing a book about the late, jazz great, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, a project which has been in the works for twenty years. Kirk was a human phenomenon. During his brief life, he defied staggering odds—from blindness, to prejudice, to a paralyzing stroke—in order to play the music that came to him through dreams. His story is what made May want to become a writer.

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3. 

   Gabino Iglesias

   Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. the book reviews editor for PANK Magazine, and a columnist for LitReactor and CLASH Media. His work has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. He teaches at SNHU’s online MFA program. His reviews have appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, 3AM Magazine, Marginalia, The Collagist, Heavy Feather Review, Crimespree, Criminal Element, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, HorrorTalk, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other print and online venues. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

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4. 

   Jean Kwok

   https://www.jeankwok.com/

   Jean Kwok is the award-winning, New York Times and international bestselling author of The Leftover Woman (coming Oct 10, 2023), Searching for Sylvie Lee, Girl in Translation and Mambo in Chinatown. Her work has been published in twenty countries and taught in universities, colleges and high schools across the world.

   An instant New York Times bestseller, Searching for Sylvie Lee was selected for the Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club and featured in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, CNN, The New York Post, The Washington Post, O Magazine, People, Entertainment Weekly and more. Jean has been chosen for numerous honors including the American Library Association Alex Award, the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award, an Orange New Writers title and the Sunday Times Short Story Award international shortlist. She was one of twelve authors asked by the Agatha Christie estate to write an original, authorized Miss Marple story for Marple: Twelve New Mysteries.

   She has appeared on The Today Show and Good Morning America, and spoken at many schools and venues including Harvard University, Columbia University, Talks at Google and the Tucson Festival of Books.  A television documentary was filmed about Jean and her work.

   Jean immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood while living in an unheated, roach-infested apartment. In between her undergraduate degree at Harvard and MFA in fiction at Columbia, she worked for three years as a professional ballroom dancer. Jean is trilingual, fluent in Dutch, Chinese and English, and studied Latin for seven years. She divides her time between the Netherlands and New York City.

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5. 

   Meryl Moss

   https://www.merylmossmedia.com/

   Meryl Moss is founder and president of Meryl Moss Media Group, a literary media relations and marketing firm that for 25 years has been promoting and branding authors and their books through media exposure, speaking engagements, social media and creative marketing solutions. The firm specializes in working with first-time authors, as well as those who are established and looking for a seasoned group of professionals to take them to the next level. Meryl Moss Media Group is proud to work with authors book after book, the best compliment there is.

   Like many new ideas, Meryl Moss created BookTrib.com on a napkin. When traditional media outlets started reducing their coverage of books and authors, Meryl put a stake in the ground with a website featuring under-the-radar authors who deserved to be noticed, and that readers would enjoy discovering – whether debut writers, midlist or even occasional bestsellers. Rather than focus on the household names you read about everywhere, BookTrib.com’s mantra is to give voice to those authors that really need to be heard – and read.

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6. 

   Sarah Pekkanen

   https://www.sarahpekkanen.com/

   Sarah Pekkanen is the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of four novels of suspense including The Golden Couple and The Wife Between Us, and the solo author of the thriller Gone Tonight. A passionate volunteer for rescue animals, she serves as an Ambassador for RRSA India and works hands-on in India to heal and vaccinate street dogs. She lives just outside of Washington, D.C., with her family.

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7. 

   Douglas Preston

   https://www.prestonchild.com/

   Douglas Preston has published 36 books of both nonfiction and fiction, of which 29 have been New York Times bestsellers. He is the co-author, with Lincoln Child, of the Pendergast series of thrillers. He writes about archaeology and anthropology for the New Yorker Magazine, and he worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. He currently serves as President of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest association of authors and journalists.

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8. 

   Jeneva Rose

   https://www.jenevarose.com/

   Jeneva Rose is the New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Marriage, The Girl I Was, One of Us is Dead, You Shouldn’t Have Come Here, and the Detective Kimberley King series. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and optioned for film/tv. Originally from Wisconsin, she currently lives in Chicago with her husband, Drew, and her English bulldog, Winston. When she’s not writing, you can find her on TikTok.

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9. 

   Lisa Unger

   https://lisaunger.com/

   Lisa Unger is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of 20 novels, including her latest Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six. With books published in 33 languages and millions of copies sold worldwide, she is regarded as a master of suspense.

   Unger’s critically acclaimed novels have been featured on “Best Book” lists from the Today Show, Good Morning America, Entertainment Weekly, People, Amazon, Goodreads, L.A. Times, The Boston Globe, Sun Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times and many others. She has been nominated for, or won, numerous awards including the Strand Critics, Audie, Hammett, Macavity, ITW Thriller, and Goodreads Choice. In 2019, she received two Edgar Award nominations, an honor held by only a few authors, including Agatha Christie. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Mystery and Suspense, and her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Travel+Leisure. Lisa is the current co-President of the International Thriller Writers organization. She lives on the west coast of Florida with her family.

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