Category: Regular Meeting

September 2025 Meeting & Presentation

Naima Simone Guest Speaker!

USA Today Bestselling author Naima Simone loves writing sizzling romances with heart, a touch of humor and snark. Her books have been featured in The Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly, and described as balancing “crackling, electric love scenes with exquisitely rendered characters caught in emotional turmoil.”

She is wife to Superman, or his non-Kryptonian, less bullet proof equivalent, and mother to the most awesome kids ever. They all live in perfect, sometimes domestically-challenged bliss in the southern United States.

Naima’s presentation will be on plotting.

August 2025 Meeting & Presentation

PRESENTATION: Back to School Young Writers’ Edition

Guest speakers are Jeeah Kim and Sariah Waller. Birmingham Police Chaplain, Marvin
A. Neal, will make a visit to collect much needed school supplies for the Birmingham
City Schools.

The authors:

Jeeah Kim is a Korean-American poet from Prattville, Alabama. She is a lifelong learner with a passion for equity in education, literacy and public speaking. The author of Asynchoritos (2022) and everything I couldn’t tell you (2023), she writes about everything from the fantastical, the day-to-day, and the experiences of Asian-American diasporas.

Sariah Waller is a published writer, a senior at Oak Mountain High School who just completed the Ava Long Creative Writing Workshop at UAB. She published her very first book, “The Healing Heart” on Amazon in April of 2022 while in eighth grade. It’s a love story about two different people from two different backgrounds whose hearts become one. She is currently working on a new book called “The Red Dagger.”

Heads up for September 2025 – Special speaker Naima Simone

June 2025 Meeting and Program

Program: Per Bestselling author Lauren K Denton, “I will plan to talk about my path to publishing, a little about my agent search, give a few recommendations for online help for writing, querying, and publishing, and how using journals has been helpful in my writing. It’ll be a little hodge podge, but if anyone has specific questions, I’m happy to answer any.”

Lauren is the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Amazon Charts bestselling author of The Hideaway and Hurricane Season, along with Glory Road, The Summer House, The One You’re With, and her most recent, A Place to Land. Born and raised in Mobile, Lauren lives with her husband, two daughters, and one shedding doodle in Homewood. For more than ten years, she wrote a monthly local newspaper column about life, relationships, and how funny (and hard) it is to be a parent. On any given day, she’d rather be at the beach with her family and a stack of books.

May 2025 Meeting and Program

We’ll view a video about “How to Upload a Book to Amazon in 2025.” Please attend even if you know how. Maybe there will be tidbits you were unaware of or you can help explain anything the presenter didn’t make clear.

Coming in June: USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Amazon Charts bestselling author Lauren K Denton talking about her publishing path. 

April 2025 Meeting & Presentation

Presentation: Author Laura Denton will present the history surrounding the events that led Shelby county being named Shelby, and about the use of genealogy to help with writing. She’ll answer questions at the end.

Bio Per Laura Denton: I have a BS degree from the University of Tennessee, Secondary Education, History and Political Science.I enjoy the study of Military History of the United States, and focus my writing on that subject. I have published two books and am now working on my third.  I am an avid amateur genealogist and have spent 25 years studying both my family’s history and my husband’s. I have two grown children and two grandchildren. I enjoy travel and reading and a little gardening in my spare time.

March 2025 Meeting & Presentation

Presenter: Author Sarah Stilwell will be our guest speaker—she has a PowerPoint presentation on Author branding and book covers. 

Future presentations:

June: LAUREN K. DENTON is the author of USA TODAY bestselling novels The Hideaway and Hurricane Season. She was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, and now lives with her husband and two daughters in Homewood, just outside Birmingham. Though her husband tries valiantly to turn her into a mountain girl, she’d still rather be at the beach. Website: LaurenKDenton.com; Instagram: LaurenKDentonBooks; Facebook: LaurenKDentonAuthor; Twitter: @LaurenKDenton.

October 2024 Program & Presentation

Presentation:

Maria Grace, six time BRAG Medallion Honoree, #1 Best-selling Historical Fantasy author Maria Grace has her PhD in Educational Psychology and is a 16-year veteran of the university classroom where she taught courses in human growth and development, learning, test development and counseling. https://austenvariations.com/maria-grace/ (Per her website)

Capture Your Reader in Your World

Readers read for escape and to feel. The means of escape and the feelings they desire depend on the genre, but in the end, readers want the same thing: An immersive world and characters to lose themselves in.

As we concentrate on characters and plot, it can be easy to short change the setting. But when that happens, the real world too easily distracts readers from the story world. Creating immersive, atmospheric settings is a first step to creating a world that the reader doesn’t want to leave.

In this workshop we will cover how to develop engrossing worlds through the use of POV, narrative distance, research (and how not to get lost in that rabbit hole!), sensory details, and the creation of deliberate memory tags for readers.