Meet The Pitch Week XXI Finalists
Dr. Bernadette Anderson, 52 Prescriptions for Healing, Health, and Happiness
Everyone is a work-in-progress—including Dr. Bernadette Anderson. 52 Prescriptions for Healing, Health, and Happiness is a motivational guide and workbook to help you put your whole self—mind, body, and spirit—into shifting your life in the direction of your choice. It merges a healthy blend of holistic and traditional medicine with over 20 years of experiences. And the bonus is Dr. Bernadette has personally tried and tested each prescription. They have empowered her to tackle some hard stuff and live unbound by her past. What freedom!
Whether you desire to embrace forgiveness, set boundaries, restore inner harmony, or be a champion of your own wellness, 52 Prescriptions for Healing, Health, and Happiness will make “living the life you were born to live” your natural default.
Bernadette Anderson, MD, MPH is a well-loved and highly regarded medical expert, thought-leader, and visionary as well as the creator of Life in Harmony, an innovative and action-oriented approach to intentional well-being. It’s a harmonious mixture of traditional, holistic, and lifestyle medicine. During her extensive experience in acute, clinical, and preventive healthcare, she has devoted herself to educating people about health and curating wellness.
Dr. Bernadette’s prescription for setting the mood and tempo for her day is infusing her space with aromatherapy, morning meditation, an afternoon breathing exercise, and evening journaling. Her most favorite part of each day is checking in with her toddler niece! Joy.
Eileen Joyce Donovan, A Lady Newspaperman’s Dilemma
In the historical novel, A Lady Newspaperman’s Dilemma, Alex Lawson, visiting Sunset Valley, recalls her arrival there twenty-nine years earlier. Now a world-renowned journalist, her first reporting days were full of self-doubt. After a shooting incident at the county courthouse, Alex is thrust into the lead reporter’s role. Her insecurities increase when she realizes she doesn’t even know how to get around the town, or how to satisfy her editor’s expectations. When Adam, a young rancher, offers help, she finds him both attractive and infuriating. But after a day at his ranch, the attraction grows.
Sometime later, she breaks a main story that gets national coverage. The San Francisco Chronicle offers her a job. Now she must decide whether Adam, and marriage, or her career is more important.
Although born in New York City, where she has spent most of her life, Eileen Joyce Donovan has lived in six states and visited most of the others. She earned her MA in English at Northern Arizona University. In one way or another, she’s been writing her entire life, whether it was imaginative stories for friends, or advertising copy for industrial clients.
Eileen’s award-winning debut historical novel, Promises, was released in 2019 from Waldorf Publishing. She is also a contributing essayist to various themed anthologies.
She lives in Manhattan, New York and is a member of Authors Guild, Women’s National Book Association, and The Historical Novel Society.
Katie Mongelli, Finding His Way Back
In Katie Mongellis’s novel, Finding His Way Back, Zachary Hartmann is facing felony charges from his latest deal. Zach knows heading back home to the sleepy town of Pine Lake is his only option to avoid the media scrutiny and harassment from angry victims.
Zach has no plans to fall in love, but when he meets Missy Wagner, he feels a spark that he can’t ignore. And Missy seems to feel the same, but she doesn’t have room for another project in her life. She is already trying to balance saving the family inn from ruin while juggling being a single mom to Emma and caregiver to her aging grandma.
Will the magic of Pine Lake open hearts to new possibilities and fresh starts?
Over fifteen years ago, on a fall foliage trip, Katie noticed a cozy cottage perched up on the hillside overlooking a lake and pictured a woman curled up on a blanket staring out over the lake crying. She imagined the pain and loss this woman was feeling and how the magic of the lake could heal her pain and help her find love and happiness again. Katie eventually transformed that daydream into her first book of the Lakeside Hideaway series, A New Beginning.
Katie has been a practicing CPA for over twenty years and runs her own CPA firm where she finds joy in supporting her clients with their accounting and tax needs, but her childhood dream of being an author never faded.
Cé O’Flaherty, Puddin’
Puddin’ is the story of a thirteen-year-old girl who loved summers for a deeper reason than any child should need. A young girl fortunate enough to have grandparents who provided her with a safe place summer after summer. This fictionalized memoir set in the 1960s continues to follow Puddin’ as she navigates her life without her grandparents and the sanctuary they provided. Sanctuary that gave her a reprieve from the deep dark secret she harbors in her heart like a dinghy banging against its chambers.
A runaway who keeps running until her parents somehow find her and drag her back home. Raised in a house of silence punctuated with bursts of heated, cruel words, and the snapping sound of a leather strap against bare flesh, Puddin’ knows she cannot remain a second longer. Alone, she travels to the one place that will bring her closest to her grandparents.
Cé O’Flaherty is a retired nurse. Mom of three and Nana to four grandchildren. Life can start over at any point in a life and for as many times as needed or wanted. Her own life revved up when she turned fifty. She decided from then on to either annihilate a fear or tackle something she’d never done before. What she discovered in the process is there is fine line between brave and stupid, and she has found herself to be quite comfortable jumping over that line often with wild abandon. Maybe once or twice with little to no regard for the outcome (or consequences).
Ani Tuzman, Angels on the Clothesline
The child of Holocaust survivors and recent refugees to America, Ani Tuzman grows up in a world darkened not only by her parents’ unfathomable grief and terrifying rage, but also by the bewildering bigotry and abuse of her American neighbors, schoolmates, and teachers. Yet on the farm that is her home, Ani can’t help but find beauty and joy.
In her memoir, Angels on the Clothesline, told in bursts of narrative poetry and prose, Ani the woman “returns” to witness the play of dark and light in the life and heart of the child she was, and to be the compassionate presence that was missing then. And although the older Ani cannot change what takes place, her seeing changes everything.
Ani is a novelist, an award-winning poet, and a writing mentor. Her poems and articles have been published in a variety of literary journals and magazines, as well as on Ani’s blog, HARVESTING LOVE: Finding Love in Unexpected (& Expected) Places. She is the author of The Tremble of Love: A Novel of the Baal Shem Tov, hailed as “a rare work of transformative literary fiction.”
Ani founded the Dance of the Letters, where for almost forty years she has provided welcoming and joyous spaces for children, teens, and adults to find and free their voices through writing.
She lives in New England, where she savors walking through the changing seasons, meditating, and reveling with her grandchildren on their rare visits north. Learn more about Ani at www.anituzman.com.
Stacy Wilder, Charleston Conundrum
Charleston Conundrum is a cozy mystery set in Charleston, South Carolina.
Liz, a Private Investigator, lives in a close-knit townhome community. Her life is upended when her best friend and neighbor, Peg, is murdered and she becomes a suspect. Liz’s gun was the murder weapon. She loaned Peg the gun after Peg’s ex-husband threatened her when she refused to cover his debts. Peg’s family is “Old Charleston Money.” She left a substantial sum of money to Liz, including a piece of property in California, placing Liz at the top of the cops’ list of suspects.
Charleston Conundrum takes the reader from Charleston to Paris and back in the emotional unraveling of Peg’s life and death to a killer ending. It is the first book in the Conundrum series.
Stacy Wilder has traveled to six out of seven continents but her favorite place in the world is Charleston, South Carolina. Books have shaped her life and her travels. Her love of animals started at a young age through Beatrix Potter’s stories. A book she read in fourth grade led to a dream trip, a safari in South Africa. Her love of mysteries began with Nancy Drew.
Stacy lives in Houston, Texas. She and her husband enjoy time spent with family and friends, and a good shiraz. They have one grown son and a totally spoiled Labrador Retriever, Eve.
After an eclectic corporate career in human resources and accounting, Stacy’s writing career started later in life while running her own human resource consulting company. In addition to mysteries, Stacy writes children’s stories, short stories, and poetry.