Avideh Bashirrad is Deputy Director of Marketing at The Random House Publishing Group.

Esther Bushell, an alumna of Tufts, was a high school English teacher in the Greenwich, CT Public Schools for forty years. As she approached retirement, her former students, now adults involved in book groups, often invited her to lead their book groups. This morphed into a natural and almost spontaneous second career as a book group facilitator, particularly in Fairfield and Westchester counties. Esther now facilitates at private book groups as well as the Sunday Forum at St. Paul’s Church in Riverside, CT and the Evening Book Discussion Group at the First Presbyterian Church in Greenwich. Esther is also the coordinator for Community Reads, an annual event at the Perrot Memorial Library, sponsored jointly by the Library and Just Books, Too, an independent bookstore in Old Greenwich.

Jennifer Hart is the VP, Associate Publisher of Harper Perennial and Harper paperbacks where she oversees the marketing and publication of more than 250 paperbacks a year. She has worked on the marketing campaigns for such reading group favorites as Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Bel Canto and Ahab’s Wife, and more recently, The Madonnas of Leningrad and The Space Between Us. Jennifer is the member of two book clubs and in April of last year she began writing the blog www.bookclubgirl.com, dedicated to sharing great books (from all publishers, not just her own), news and tips with book club girls everywhere.

Jamie Layton recently turned 40; co-founded the ‘Queen Beaches’ blog with Katherine Quinn; was diagnosed with fashion Obsessive-Compulsive disorder- a wonderful excuse for buying new shoes; and has taken out a second mortgage to feed her addiction to premium denim. Her goals for the next forty years include hiring a personal stylist; finishing the entire Martini Menu of her Club in one sitting; and traveling to more fabulous places she barely can afford. At last count there were over 2,000 books in her house most of which have been read, but there's always room for more! When not raising two kids or trying to give away her husband’s three dogs, she is a bookstore manager, water aerobics instructor, free lance writer and competitive dieter.

Debra Linn is the Book Club Coordinator and one of the Events & Marketing goddesses at Books & Books – an independent, locally owned bookstore with three locations in South Florida and a brand new store in Grand Cayman. Books & Books –- known for hosting 60-70 author events a month -- just celebrated the 25th anniversary of its Coral Gables location and soon will mark 20 years on Miami Beach’s famed Lincoln Road. Debra is based out of the 3-year-old store in the Bal Harbour Shops, a beautifully landscaped open-air garden that also happens to be the most lucrative shopping mall in the United States. A recovering newspaper sports editor who served most of her 13 years at the Miami Herald and Chicago Tribune, Debra now writes Books & Books’ weekly newsletter and recommendations and enjoys not worrying about which authors are using Human Growth Hormone.

A former English major at Yale, Andrew McCullough long ago stopped reading serious fiction and concentrated instead on work, family, and his golf handicap. Sensing that he was missing something, he assembled a group of friends in Marin County, California and formed the Man Book Club (www.manbookclub.com). It was an immediate success. The Man Book Club has since shared with other men and book groups around the country its formula for encouraging men to read and enjoy fiction. Andrew has agreed to post his occasional observations on men and reading.

Kathy L. Patrick is the owner of Beauty and the Book, the only Hair Salon/Bookstore in the country located in historic Jefferson, Texas. She also is founder of The Pulpwood Queens Book Club, which is the largest “meeting and discussing” book club in the world. Kathy Patrick also founded and runs three book festivals in the Arkansas/Louisiana/Texas area including Books Alive, Girlfriend Weekend, and the International Book Club Author Extravaganza. She currently writes a Pulpwood Queen Blog for The Marshall News Messenger, one of the 27 Cox Newspapers, and she writes a bimonthly column for Southern Living online, called “What the Pulpwood Queens are Reading.” Currently, she is in negotiations for her own television talk show with TSTN in Dallas, Texas.

She has appeared on "Oprah", "Good Morning America", and other national television shows, and she has appeared in national publications such as Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal.

Kathy L. Patrick lives just outside of Jefferson, Texas in the piney woods with her husband, Jay, and two teenagers, Helaina and Madeleine.

Nora Rawlinson began her career in public libraries, working as a reference and readers advisory librarian and then head of buying for Baltimore County Public Library. As a buyer, she read hundreds of reviews a year, which served as background in her next position as Book Review Editor for Library Journal. She developed several new services for the magazine, including the Collection Development series and Prepub Alert, which still rate among the most popular sections of the magazine. As Editor-in-Chief of Publishers Weekly, she developed the first email newsletter for the publishing business and began a bimonthly magazine on Spanish language publishing. In 2005, she joined the Hachette Book Group to create a department of Library Services. She recently left that position to found a Web site for collection development and readers advisory librarians, EarlyWord.com.

Shannon McKenna Schmidt is the co-author of Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West (www.noveldestinations.com), which will be available in May 2008. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, New Jersey Monthly, Arrive, Pages, and on Bookreporter.com, and she is a regular contributor to Shelf Awareness (shelf-awareness.com) and ReadingGroupGuides.com. Shannon lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, and has been a member of a book club for 12 years.