Featured Speakers

We're so excited to announce our featured speakers for the RWA2023 conference, July 19 - 22!

Keynote Speaker

Mel Walker

Mel Walker has been writing fiction most of his adult life, specializing in short stories and contemporary fiction and romance novels. He's a native New Yorker and life-long frustrated NY Mets fan.

Mel loves to write about ordinary people placed in difficult situations, especially as it relates to their closest relationships.

Featured Speaker — Saturday Author Panel

Peggy Jaeger

Peggy Jaeger writes contemporary romances and rom-coms about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them.

Family and food play huge roles in Peggy’s stories because she believes there is nothing that holds a family structure together like sharing a meal…or two…or ten. Dotted with humor and characters that are as real as they are loving, Peggy brings all aspects of life into her stories: life, death, sibling rivalry, illness, and the desire for everyone to find their own happily ever after. Growing up the only child of divorced parents she longed for sisters, brothers and a family that vowed to stick together no matter what came their way. Through her books, she has created the families she wanted as that lonely child.

As a lifelong diarist, she caught the blogging bug early on, and you can visit her at peggyjaeger.com where she blogs daily about life, writing, and stuff that makes her go "What??!"

Featured Speaker — Saturday Author Panel

Thien-Kim Lam

Thien-Kim Lam writes stories about Vietnamese characters who smash stereotypes and find their happy endings. A recovering Type-Asian, she guzzles cà phê sữa đá, makes art, and bakes her feelings to stay sane.

Thien-Kim is also the founder of Bawdy Bookworms, a subscription box that pairs sexy romances with erotic toys. She’s been featured on Jezebel, NPR, BBC America, and Glamour. Her debut novel Happy Endings is now available, and her forthcoming book Full Exposure was released February 2023.

Featured Speaker — Saturday Author Panel

Mia P. Manansala

Mia P. Manansala (she/her) is a writer and certified book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series, and uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture.

A lover of all things geeky, Mia spends her days procrasti-baking, playing JRPGs and dating sims, reading cozy mysteries and diverse romance, and cuddling her dogs Gumiho and Max Power.

Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram: @MPMtheWriter. Or check out her website: www.miapmanansala.com

Featured Speaker — Saturday Author Panel

Ella Quinn

USA Today best-selling author Ella Quinn’s studies and other jobs have always been on the serious side. Reading historical romances, especially Regencies, were her escape. Eventually her love of historical novels led her to start writing them.

She is married to her wonderful husband of almost forty years. They have a son and two beautiful granddaughters, a Great Dane and a cat. After living in the South Pacific, Central America, North Africa, England and Europe, she and her husband decided to make their dreams come true and are now living on a sailboat. They cruised the Caribbean and North America and completed a transatlantic crossing from St. Martin to Southern Europe. They will be sailing the Med for the foreseeable future.

Featured Speaker — Saturday Author Panel

Naima Simone

USA Today best-selling author Naima Simone loves writing sizzling romances with heart, a touch of humor and snark. Her books have been featured in The Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly, and described as balancing “crackling, electric love scenes with exquisitely rendered characters caught in emotional turmoil.”

She is wife to Superman, or his non-Kryptonian, less bullet proof equivalent, and mother to the most awesome kids ever. They all live in perfect, sometimes domestically-challenged bliss in the southern United States.