Gary Crespo
Gary’s professional work has ranged from freelance illustration, page layout, and book design to managing art, design, and print production for educational publishers. Gary is the senior member of the critique group. He writes for the Young Adult and Adult markets. While Gary has yet to win a literary award, he did win a watermelon at a county fair when he was six years old.
Gary’s Young Adult novel, How to Ruin Your Life in 140 Characters or Less, is available now.
Erin Dionne
Erin Dionne writes middle grade novels, picture books, chapter books, and nonfiction. Her spooky chapter book series Shiver-by-the-Sea (Pixel + Ink) features magic, movie monsters, friendship, and SEL themes. Her novel Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking was an Edgar finalist in the Juvenile Fiction category. Her latest novel for tweens is Secrets of a Fangirl (Scholastic 2019), and her most recent picture book is Balletball (Charlesbridge, 2020). When not writing, she’s a professor at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA.
Wendy M. McDonald
Wendy M. McDonald claims that, in the fourth grade, she once got in trouble for reading in class. She spent her childhood wishing she could be Turtle Wexler, Harriet M. Welsch, Meg Murry, or Lucy Pevensie.
A member of the critique group since 2015, Wendy is a freelance editor and curriculum development specialist, and pens darkish stories from the garret of her New England home. Her short stories appear in three anthologies: our own Tonight’s Specials, FIRSTS (Writers’ Loft Press, 2016), and Once Upon an Apocalypse (Chaosium, 2015); her poetry for children is included in the Writers’ Loft Press’s Gnomes and Ungnomes (2023) and Friends and Anemones (2020). When not writing, Wendy watches science fiction, fantasy, dark comedy, and animated shows with her geeky husband, argues with her beagle, and knits socks.
Wendy’s Young Adult novel, The Willow, is available now.
Megan Mullin
Megan has wanted to be a writer since before she knew how to write, enlisting her mother to take dictation to accompany her lavish stick-figure illustrations. After learning how to write for herself, she tackled everything from poetry and one-act plays to comic strips and novels—and received her Master of Arts in Creative Writing from UMass Boston along the way. She’s been a member of the writers’ group for over 16 years and is currently working on an urban fantasy novel inspired by her Irish heritage and her unhealthy obsession with the movie Jaws.
Megan also has 20 years’ experience as a professional copywriter and has been writing exclusively for a travel company for 10 years. Speaking of which, when not writing, Megan loves traveling, action and fantasy movies, and staring moodily at the sea. She lives in Boston with her husband, two kids, and Teddy the golden-doodle.
Phoebe Sinclair
Among other identities, Phoebe Sinclair is a: writer, wanderer, friend, listener, bike-commuter, and community worker. She writes lyrical contemporary fiction featuring young people of color. Her debut novel is the middle grade Confessions of a Candy Snatcher (Candlewick, 2023). Voice is central to Sinclair’s work. She explores the methods through which people flourish in the margins, as well as themes of introspection, curiosity, and artistic expression. Her characters struggle with and cultivate identities that embody “both/and” rather than “either/or.”
Sinclair graduated with a BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College; won the PEN New England Children’s Book Caucus Susan P. Bloom Discovery Award; and was the 2018 Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writer’s Room of Boston. Her writing practice thrives in concert with others; she’s a 20+ year member of the critique group.
Annette Trossello
After over a dozen years in the educational publishing industry, where she worked her way from editorial assistant to copy editor to editor to senior editor, Annette stepped from behind the computer into the classroom: she recently completed her Master of Education in Library Media Studies.
When she’s not teaching fifth graders library media at the elementary school she works at, you can find her doing editorial freelance work, playing games with her family (she’s a sore winner and a sore loser), binge watching shows on Netflix, stand up paddle boarding, reading or rereading books, and of course writing. Other favorites include both clever and cringe-worthy puns, pumpkin spice ice cream fro JP Licks, and the Oxford comma. Annette joined the group in 2009 and is interested in screenwriting and romantic comedies. Her current project is a screenplay about the people we lose, the walls we build, and who’s worth breaking them down for.
Table for 7 Press 