Join the WNBA-SF hosts as they host "Pushing Boundaries: Stories of Border Crossings, Love, Courage and the Indomitable Human Spirit" in celebration of National Reading Group Month!

Kristina McMorris is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Sold on a Monday: A Novel. Her background includes ten years of directing public relations for an international conglomerate as well as extensive television experience. Inspired by true personal and historical accounts, her novels have garnered twenty national literary awards, and include Letters from Home, Bridge of Scarlet Leaves, The Pieces We Keep, and The Edge of Lost, in addition to novellas in the anthologies A Winter Wonderland and Grand Central. A frequent guest speaker and workshop presenter, she holds a BS in international marketing from Pepperdine. She lives with her husband and two sons in Oregon.

Debbie Clarke Moderow is the author of Fast Into the Night: A Woman, Her Dogs, and Their Journey North on the Iditarod Trail. The memoir recounts her experience running Alaska’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and explores her deepening and inextricable bond with her team of Alaskan huskies. The memoir, her first book, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2016 and was released by Boreal Books of Red Hen Press in June 2018. Debbie earned a BA from Princeton University in 1977 and an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop in 2013. She and her husband, Mark, live in Denali Park and Anchorage Alaska.

Lauren Markham is a writer based in Berkeley, California. Her writing focuses on issues related to youth, migration, the environment and her home state of California, and has appeared in outlets such as Narrative, The Guardian, Orion, Harper’s, The New Republic, Guernica, The New York Times, and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of The Far Away Brothers, which was the winner of the Ridenhour Prize, The Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award Silver Medal, and was shortlisted for an LA Times Book Prize and longlisted for the Pen America Literary Award. In addition to writing, she works at a high school for immigrant youth in Oakland, California.

Brianna Wolfson’s debut novel is Rosie Colored Glasses. She shares her narrative non-fiction in the San Francisco writing circuit, having performed at The Moth and been featured on Medium. Thinks and writes about family stuff. Does the crossword in pencil. Plays the lottery on Fridays.​ ​

Mary Monroe is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of over 20 novels, with over one million books in print, including One House Over: A Novel. She is a three-time AALBC bestseller and winner of the AAMBC Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the J. California Cooper Memorial Award. The daughter of Alabama sharecroppers, she taught herself how to write before going on to become the first and only member of her family to finish high school. She lives in Oakland, California. 

The moderator, Mary Volmer, is the author of two novels: Crown of Dust and Reliance, Illinois. She teaches at Saint Mary’s College (CA).