Authors & Illustrators represented by Don Congdon Associates

Sharan Newman is a medieval historian and author.  

Rather than teach, Newman chose to use her education to write novels set in the Middle Ages, including three Arthurian fantasies and ten mysteries set in twelfth-century France, featuring Catherine LeVendeur a one-time student of Heloise at the Paraclete, her husband, Edgar, an Anglo-Scot and Solomon, a Jewish merchant of Paris. The books focus on the life of the bourgeoisie and minor nobility and also the uneasy relations between Christians and Jews at that time. They also incorporate events of the twelfth-century such as the Second Crusade and the rise of the Cathars.

The Catherine Levendeur mysteries have been nominated for many awards. Sharan won the Macavity Award for best first mystery for Death Comes As Epiphany and the Herodotus Award for best historical mystery of 1998 for Cursed in the Blood. The most recent book in the series The Witch in the Well won the Bruce Alexander award for best Historical mystery of 2004. Just for a change, she set her most recent mystery, The Shanghai Tunnel (Forge 2008) in Portland, Oregon in 1868. Her short story collections, Death Before Compline, and The Golden Quest are available in eBook.

Newman has written the popular non-fiction books, The Real History Behind the Da Vince Code, Real History Behind the Templars and the Real History of the End of the World (Berkley), as well as a biography of Queen Melisende, Defending the City of God.

She lives in the west coast of Ireland.

Karen Palmer is a Pushcart Prize winner and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Colorado Council on the Arts, and been awarded residencies at McDowell, Yaddo, and VCCA. Her essay “The Reader Is the Protagonist,” originally published in Virginia Quarterly Review,

was selected by Leslie Jamison for inclusion in Best American Essays 2017; VQR also published “Birds of Paradise” which won the 2022 Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction. She is the author of two novels published by Soho Press, and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, Arts & Letters, and Kalliope, among others. Karen currently lives in Los Angeles.

Website

Marlon Peterson is the principal of The Precedential Group, a social justice consulting firm. He is host of the Decarcerated Podcast, a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity, a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, and a 2015 recipient of the Soros Justice Fellowship. Ebony Magazine has named him one of America's 100 most influential and inspiring leaders in the Black community. His TED Talk, "Am I not human? a call for criminal justice reform," has over 1.2 million views. He contributed to Kiese Laymon's How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin's How We Fight White Supremacy. His writing has appeared in Ebony, The Nation, USA Today,

Colorlines, and more. A graduate of New York University, he lives in Brooklyn and plays the steelpan during the summer.

Evelyn Piper is the penname that Merriam Modell (1908-1994) adopted on her suspenseful, psychological mystery novels. Having graduated from Cornell University in the late 1920s, Modell led a very independent life, working as a model in New York and for a time as a secretary to a harmonica quartet. She traveled widely and lived in Germany for an extended period of in the early 1930s. Then she wed and became a mother. In 1941, she went on to publish her first short story in The New Yorker, and she went on to publish both short fiction and novels, including The Lady and Her Doctor (1956), Bunny Lake is Missing (1957), and The Nanny (1964). The latter two novels were both made into films in 1965. Modell’s books explore the psychology of the American family and in particular the social roles imposed on women, often with a wicked twist.

John Prados (1951-2022) was a senior research fellow on national security affairs, including foreign affairs, intelligence, and military history, at the National Security Archive. He is an award-winning author of 22 books, most recently The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power and Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun. In addition to three Pulitzer Prize nominations, Prados was the recipient of the Henry Adams Prize in American History and the notable book award from the United States Naval Institute. He earned a PhD in International Relations from Colombia University and was a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History.