Bill Schubart
Bill Schubart has lived in Vermont since 1947. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. He is a regular commentator on Vermont Public Radio and has spent most of his life founding and leading businesses, including Philo Records and Resolution.
He has also chaired a variety of nonprofits including the VT Folklife Center, The VT Arts Council, VT Public Radio, Fletcher Allen Health Care, VT Journalism Trust, VT Business Roundtable, and he currently chairs the VT College of Fine Arts and serves on the ACLU-VT board.
He lives in Hinesburg, Vermont with his wife, Kate, and divides his time between harvesting wood and stone from nearby woods, writing fiction and commentary, and continuing his work with non-profits. You can read his essays, and learn more at http://www.Schubart.com.
Kitty Werner
Kitty Werner has been in writing and publishing since 1990, working as a journalist, editor and publisher after buying her first computer in 1982 while working at a computer store, teaching customers how to use their computers. As President of the League of Vermont Writers, she started and directed the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Writers Conference that ran for eight years. She was the editor of the Vermont Journal for six months, editor of FAB Women newspaper, wrote a column for Prime Time Journal, and many feature stories for the Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus weekend magazine Country Courier.
She founded RSBPress in 2001 after editing six books for Random House and designing the interiors of five of the books, then having an offered contract for a book turned down at the last moment by Macmillan. She successfully published the book rewritten and retitled, The Savvy Woman’s Guide to Owning a Home, that sold out three printings and went onto a second edition. Since then, she has been designing and publishing the books of others as Distinction Press, as well as designing for, and “shepherding” other publishers to establish their own publishing companies successfully.
Pat Fowler
Pat is the owner of Village Square Books in Bellows Falls, Vermont. Previously, Pat and her husband, Alan, owned The Sea Otter Bookstore from 1977-80 – first in Salinas CA then moved to Morgan Hill CA, so this is not their first bookstore venture. They are quite active in Bellows Falls making Village Square Books a popular place to visit.
Michael DeSanto
Michael DeSanto and his wife, Renee Reiner were the owners of The Book Rack and Children’s Pages, first located in Winooski, and then Essex, for eight years. They sold the store in 2003, but the appeal of bookselling was too strong to resist, they said. The couple founded Phoenix Books in Essex in 2007 and, in 2012, opened a second location in Burlington and a third in Rutland in 2015. Onion River Press is their independent, print-on-demand publishing enterprise located at the Burlington store.
Starr LaTronica
Starr LaTronica has been a librarian for over 35 years and can’t imagine anything she would rather be. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, she has worked for libraries in Berkeley, upstate New York, and is currently the Director of the Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, VT.
Starr has served as chair of the Newberry Committee, a judge for the National Book Award, a member of the Caldecott Committee, a judge for the New York Times Best Illustrated Books and is a past president of the Association for Library Service to Children. She is the namesake for Daniel Pinkwater’s “crazy as a bat” librarian, Starr Lackawanna in Looking for Bobowicz and carries that character’s creed, “I live to amaze, astonish and astound. Those are things librarians do well.”