Kathleen M Rodgers

Born in The Land of Enchantment, Kathleen M. Rodgers is a novelist whose work has appeared in Family Circle Magazine, Military Times, and in several anthologies.

Named a 2021 WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Contemporary Fiction from Women Writing the West for her fourth novel, The Flying Cutterbucks, Kathleen's other novels have garnered many awards and favorable reviews.

In 2020, she received The Founder's Award from MWSA for her third novel, Seven Wings to Glory. She’s been featured in USA Today, The Associated Press, and Military Times. 

A native of Clovis, New Mexico, Kathleen resides in North Texas and is working on her sixth novel. She presented at Eastern New Mexico University’s Media-Con '21 and was invited back for Media-Con '22. She’s a two-time finalist for the MWSA Writer of the Year Award and recently gave a talk about "Not Giving Up" at the 2022 MWSA national conference in New Orleans. Kathleen is available to speak at events and book clubs.

Dane Zeller

Dane Zeller is an at-large MSWA board member. He writes and teaches fiction, and moonlights as a comedy writer for the radio drama stage.

He has published a detective novel, Smart Shield, and an anthology of short stories, Drive-by Romances (Blind Dates Gone Wrong). He writes for KKFI-FM, 90.1 in Kansas City.

Zeller is an expert on the dark hole of social media. He has many Facebook friends and twitter followers.

Fortunately, his MBA degree in marketing forces him to think of those fans as the strangers they are.

He and his wife Rita live in Westwood, Kansas, in the neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Zeller is a veteran of the Vietnam war. He believes we all owe the world a story.

John Cathcart

Award-winning author John Cathcart earned his USAF pilot wings in 1980 and served on active duty for 20 years, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. Most of John’s AF flying was in two versions of the F-111.

After retiring, John flew with American Airlines, where he spent most of his career flying the 737 out of their Miami base. He retired from American in 2015 and now spends his days in retirement writing, catching up on all the honey-dos, and scaring (not catching) fish.

 John has volunteered with MWSA since 2009, serving as webmaster, reviewer, awards director, and at-large board member.

Jim Tritten

Jim retired after a forty-four-year career with the Department of Defense, including duty as a carrier-based naval aviator. He holds advanced degrees from the University of Southern California and formerly served as a faculty member and National Security Affairs department chair at the Naval Postgraduate School. Dr. Tritten’s publications have won him seventy-two writing awards, including the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award from the Navy League of the U.S., the Military Writers Society of America (MWSA) Writer of the Year and the Parris Award from SouthWest Writers (SWW) – both of these in 2023. He has published thirteen books and over four hundred chapters, short stories, essays, articles, and government technical reports. Jim was a frequent speaker at many military, arms control, and international conferences and has seen his work translated into Russian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.