This session will explore the treatment of honest feminist topics in modern publishing. Despite the fact that more than half of the published authors in the US are female, there are still plenty of taboos subjects and challenging situations common to the existence of women that rarely make it to the page. This may be due to gun-shy publishers, a reluctance to offend, editorial bias, or a slow-growing female tolerance for harsher subject matter like gore, violence, horror, or emotional dysfunction. Without examining these areas, though, publishing provides a less-than-honest representation of womankind, skirting around what’s really going on with us girls! Can we convince the world to let us express the authentic (sometimes even shocking) experiences of women through the characters and narrators that appear in our books?
PANELISTS:
SUZANNE MATTABONI is a fiction writer, poet, essayist, PR professional, podcaster, Newsweek Expert Forum contributor, and former Newsday reporter. Her debut novel ONCE IN A LIFETIME (coming-of-age women’s fiction set in the 1980s) was an Eric Hoffer Finalist and won a PenCraft and an IPPY Award. One of the short stories in her new collection GORE, LUST & KIN (launch date 10/19/26) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Seventeen, Women First, The Huffington Post, Guideposts, The Little Demon Digest; and in anthologies including the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, the Pizzas and Poltergeists ‘80s-themed horror story anthology, the Hard Boiled and Loaded with Sin noir anthology, and the 2026 Stevie Nicks-themed poetry anthology White Winged Doves.
ANGEL ACKERMAN is a writer, editor, and “passionate participant in the world.” A former print journalist and the author of the FASHION AND FIENDS horror series, she loves travel (favoring Djibouti, Africa), blogs, and writes a Substack, when not performing duties as publisher at Parisian Phoenix Publishing, which she founded with graphic designer Gayle Hendricks in 2020. She lives in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley with her daughter and too many pets. Angel teaches at Northampton Community College and is a board member at the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group and Mary Meuser Memorial Library. Her five-book series blends urban fantasy, romance, and horror where characters face monsters and their own demons in exotic locations and around the Lehigh Valley.
CARLA CONTI is a journalist-turned-true-crime author whose award-winning debut, Chained Birds: A Crimemoir, features a decade long investigation into federal prison gangs, abuse, and corruption. CHAINED BIRDS received multiple national book awards, including several best true crime honors and a Nellie Bly journalism prize. Her forthcoming book, THE JACKLIGHTER: Murder, Betrayal, and Justice in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains, examines a 1976 “hunting accident” she covered as a young reporter. (Launch date 10/27/26). Carla writes for readers who love real life thrillers, investigative journalism, and survivor driven true crime. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, who supports her true crime habit.
GERALDINE DONAHER is a teacher, creative writer, tutor, former nun, and dogged researcher/speaker on painful subjects such as human trafficking or the loss of a child. Born in Philadelphia, she would as a youth often escape to the basement to write poetry or cross the tracks behind her home to create stories in the fields and paths along Tookany Creek. Her novels STILL and MOUTH SHUT HEAD DOWN fictionalize heartbreaking journeys, sometimes based on true events and circumstances, exploring difficult and often overlooked themes and conditions in society.
CHRISTINA VANDERPOL is a writer, physician, and former coroner—the first female coroner to be elected in Chester County, PA, in more than two centuries. Her fiction and nonfiction focuses on death investigation and its intersection with medicine, public health, and the justice system. A real-life Dana Scully, her book, MADAM CORONER: A Memoir of Death and Politics in Suburbia won a 2025 Killer Nashville Claymore Award and is scheduled for publication with Exposit Books, an imprint of McFarland & Co. Her stormy years as coroner spanned both the opioid epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic, overseeing 5,000+ death investigations and achieving the advanced certification of medicolegal death investigator. Christina has been interviewed and quoted by the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, NBC News, and the LA Times on topics including drug deaths, unclaimed bodies, COVID-19, deaths in custody, and climate-related deaths.
