Pen Names

Calloway Marsh writes books for families -- stories that earn a place on a shelf and stay there. His work spans genres and eras, but his prose never does.

Eleanor Vane spent fifteen years as a research historian specializing in Tudor court records before she decided the sanitized version was no longer bearable. She writes historical fiction the way she reads history: with the belief that the bodies, the desires, the betrayals, and the deaths of real people deserve to be taken seriously — not cleaned up for modern comfort. Her books have been described as what Philippa Gregory would have written if nobody had told her to slow down.

Mira Kowalczyk grew up in a Philadelphia rowhouse where three generations spoke four languages badly, creating a household dialect no one outside could fully understand. Her father repaired typewriters long after anyone wanted them fixed, and she learned early that obsolescence and value weren't the same thing. She started writing to make sense of the noise, then kept writing because silence turned out to be worse. Her first novel took seven years and was rejected by thirty-two publishers before a small press in Pittsburgh took a chance on it. That book, about a woman who steals her dead sister's frequent flyer miles, became an unexpected word-of-mouth success. She's since published four more novels, each one smaller in scope and larger in ambition, moving from family sagas to quiet studies of single decisions that crack lives open. Critics have stopped trying to predict what she'll do next. Kowalczyk believes good fiction should feel like eavesdropping on someone who doesn't know you're listening. She's currently working on a novel about a man who returns library books for people too ashamed to face their fines. She writes every morning in a rented office above a pizza shop, begins each session by reading the previous day's work aloud to an empty room, and has never once enjoyed the process.