Be Your Own Best Publicist

Melinda Palacio & Lida Sideris

This session offers wisdom from the trenches from award-winning authors on promoting your project. You’ll get practical marketing advice on aspects of building an author platform and putting yourself and your book out there.

Melinda Palacio is an award-winning poet, author, and speaker. She’s the current Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, she holds 2 degrees in Comparative Literature, a BA from the UC Berkeley and an MA from UC Santa Cruz. She’s a 2007 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2009 poetry alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her latest poetry collection is Bird Forgiveness, 2018. She is a master of author self-promotion.

Lida Sideris writes soft-boiled mysteries and was a winner of the Helen McCloy Mystery Writers of America scholarship award. The third installment in her Southern California Mystery series, Murder: Double or Nothing will be released in June by Level Best Books. She’s also wrote The Cookie Eating Fire Dog, a picture book for ages 4-8. She lives in the northern tip of SoCal with her family, rescue dogs and a flock of uppity chickens. She teaches “Be Your Own Best Publicist” at SBWC with Melinda Palacio.

Antoine Wilson’s most recent novel Mouth to Mouth was featured on Barack Obama’s

Summer Reading List and was a finalist for The Scotiabank Giller Prize, the CALIBA Golden

Poppy Award, and the Prix Fitzgerald. Antoine is also the author of the novels Panorama City

and The Interloper, and he is a contributing editor of the literary magazine A Public Space. He’s

a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction

Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin.

Zohreh Ghahremani writes for both adults and children. Her debut picture book, Memory

Garden, illustrated by her daughter, Susie, was published by Godwin Books/Macmillan in 2024,

with another picture book about Norooz/Persian New Year to follow in 2026. She published

her first novel, Sky of Red Poppies, in 2010. Her sophomore novel, The Moon Daughter, won

Writer’s Digest Book Awards for Best Literary Fiction. She’s also the author of The Commiserator

(in Persian) and has contributed to numerous other literary volumes.