Attica Locke & Rachel Howzell Hall

Rachel Howzell Hall is the critically acclaimed author and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist for And Now She’s Gone, which was also nominated for the Lefty-, Barry- and Anthony Awards. A New York Times bestselling author of The Good Sister with James Patterson, Rachel is an Anthony-, International Thriller Writers- and Lefty Award nominee and the author of They All Fall Down, Land of Shadows, Skies of Ash, Trail of Echoes and City of Saviors in the Detective Elouise Norton series. Her new book, These Toxic Things, is a thriller about what happens when a dead woman’s cherished trinkets attract the interest of a serial killer. She is a former member of the board of directors for Mystery Writers of America and has been a featured writer on NPR’s acclaimed Crime in the City series and the National Endowment for the Arts weekly podcast; she has also served as a mentor in Pitch Wars and the Association of Writers Programs. Rachel lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Attica Locke’s latest novel Heaven, My Home, sequel to the Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird, is a NY Times best-seller. Her novel Pleasantville was the winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was also long-listed for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction. The Cutting Season was the winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Her first novel Black Water Rising was nominated for an Edgar Award, an NAACP Image Award, as well as a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.  A former fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab, Locke works as a screenwriter as well.  She was a writer and producer on the Fox series, Empire, the Netflix series When They See Us and the Emmy-nominated Little Fires Everywhere, for which she won an NAACP Image award for television writing. She is currently writing and producing an adaptation of her sister Tembi Locke’s memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home for Netflix. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.