Mary Wolverton
Owner & CEO
Ben Wolverton
Executive Assistant
Apex-Writers.com, Mystorydoctor.com, Website Structure, Marketing
Forrest Wolverton
Master NLP Trainer and Co-Founder of The Story Doctors
Apex Accelerator Meetings Host
Forrest Wolverton is a Trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP presents a model of how we create these internal thinking problems and provides possible solutions to get out. This means no matter what you are experiencing, you can experience something different. Come learn how to get back to what is important to you and create the lifestyle you desire as a writer.
Matt Wright
Assistant
Website Admin, Teachable Platform, Enrollment, Social Media, Online Customer Service
Matt Wright is the author of the Sun Maker Saga, a self-published space opera fantasy series, as well as a freelance writer and editor. He co-edited The Southern Quill (2017), a literary journal at Dixie State University, as well as the sci-fi/fantasy anthology, Unmasked: Tales of Risk and Revelation (2021). He also edited and reissued a new edition of From the Earth to the Moon and Round the Moon by Jules Verne (2021). He’s also the author of a few short stories set in the Sun Maker universe: Warriors (2021), The Last Star (2021), and The Astraneaum (2022).
Nick Mills
Assistant
Zoom Conference Scheduling & Hosting
September C. Fawkes
Assistant
Weekly Emails, Social Media
Sometimes I scare people with my enthusiasm for writing and storytelling. I have worked in the fiction-writing industry for over ten years, with nearly seven of those years under David Farland. I have edited for both award-winning and best-selling authors as well as beginning writers. I also run an award-winning writing tip blog at SeptemberCFawkes.com and serve as a writing coach on Writers Helping Writers. When not editing and instructing, I’m penning my own stories. Some may say I need to get a social life. It’d be easier if my fictional one wasn’t so interesting.
Rafael Hohmann
Lead Instructor
318R & Epic Novel Workshop
Rafael Hohmann was born in the dungeon of a castle in South America. He is a number one best-selling epic fantasy author, a writing instructor and college curriculum builder, and digital artist. Trained by David Wolverton and an avid member of the writing industry, Rafael’s passion is in part to write amazing books but also to strengthen the community of authors.
Kary English
Co-Instructor
318R & Epic Novel Workshop
Kary English grew up in the snowy Midwest where she avoided siblings and frostbite by reading book after book in a warm corner behind a recliner chair. She blames her one and only high school detention on Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy caused her to laugh out loud while reading it behind her geometry textbook.
Today, Kary still spends most of her time with her head in the clouds and her nose in a book. To the great relief of her parents, she seems to be making a living at it. Her fiction includes several short stories, and a fantasy saga about a little girl and an orange kitten. Kary’s highest aspiration is to make her own work detention-worthy.
Kary is a Hugo and Campbell nominee and Writers of the Future winner whose fiction has appeared in the Grantville Gazette, Daily Science Fiction, and Mike Resnick’s Galaxy’s Edge.
Martin L. Shoemaker
Co-Instructor
318R & Epic Novel Workshop
Martin L. Shoemaker is a writer and programmer. As a kid, he told stories to imaginary friends. He couldn’t imagine any career but writing fiction until his algebra teacher said, “This is a program. You should write one of these.” Fast-forward through thirty years of programming, writing, and teaching. He wrote, but he never submitted anything until his brother-in-law read a chapter and said, “That’s not a chapter. That’s a story. Send it in.” It was a runner-up for the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award and earned him a lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that!
Shoemaker hasn’t stopped writing since. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection and in The Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4. He received the Washington Science Fiction Association’s Small Press Award for his Clarkesworld story Today I Am Paul, which continues in Today I Am Carey, published in March 2019.
AJ Benson
Career Strategy Lead/Coordinator
Apex Strategy Meetings
As a Skill Community Director, AJ leads career development opportunities for thousands of people at a government agency where she has been an analyst and writer for over 25 years. Her work involves career planning support, as well as skill development and experience opportunity creation.
She is also the author of Quest for the King (a devotional written as a fantasy novella), as well as a number of fantasy short stories, including “Time to Play” in the Grifty Shades of Fey anthology. She has a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from The George Washington University and is currently a member of the Maryland Writers Association. She enjoys fantasy across sub-genres, ancient myth and lore, and magic wherever it can be found. She loves the epic struggle between good and evil.
AJ lives in Maryland, USA with her two sons, two dogs, and two cats. She loves Dungeons and Dragons, Harry Potter, and board games.