Our Authors

Jeff and Joan Stanford came west to Carmel California to find careers in education, agreeing to help manage a small inn while looking for work. Jobs were scarce, the United States was in recession, and they found themselves enjoying their guests and rehabilitating the property they managed. Looking to the future, they chose to continue inn-keeping, and by 1980 they were in Mendocino starting a family. Joan ran the front, while Jeff remodeled the inn and created their certified organic farm on the site of what had been known as the China Gardens during Mendocino's logging era.

The Inn allowed both of them to return to their former interests. Passionate about early education, Joan trained as a Montessori teacher which led her to discover the power of art to transform human experience. She enrolled in psychology at Sonoma State University and received an MA, specializing in Art Therapy. Today she is a registered art therapist, collagist, and educator.

Jeff recognized that the "state of realization" that so many sought in the movement of the 1970s and 80s must come from a new relationship with life, beginning in the kitchen, where decisions affect the practitioner and the planet. He became vegetarian as a first step to honor all life, not only the lives of his family, friends, and pets. He and Joan sought to create an inn that sat softly upon the earth. They created one of the first “green” bed and breakfast inns without realizing they were doing so.

Understanding that their Inn was a destination, Jeff and Joan wanted to provide the highest quality food to their guests, which Jeff began cooking in the early 1990s. The restaurant followed their philosophy serving a whole food, plant based dishes designed to rival the cuisine found at the highest rated restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. They discovered that many cooks can create great food, and they created a co-creative kitchen where all are invited to comment and tweak dishes. The final arbiter is Jeff, but the process is dynamic and assures that each person in the kitchen can express their creativity.

Tyler Stanton and Tripp Crosby are a sketch comedy duo most known for their hilarious and viral YouTube videos. They have been writing, directing, and performing their own comedy material since 2006 and have since amassed over 23 million video views and over 65,000 subscribers.

Currently they are working full time as comedy writers and performers in Atlanta.

Amanda Stanton is a single mother raising two beautiful girls, Kinsley Elizabeth and Charlie Emma, in Orange County, California. Before joining ABC’s hit series The Bachelor and Bachelor In Paradise, Amanda was a full-time mom who hadn’t been on a date in more than five years. From her unique experiences on the dating shows, Amanda has received a crash course in relationships. She has developed a refreshing set of rules for what it takes to find the one – without losing ones self.

Charlie W. Starr teaches English, humanities and film at Kentucky Christian University in Eastern Kentucky where he also makes movies with his students and family. He writes articles, teaches Sunday school and has published three books, one on Romans, the second a sci-fi novel called The Heart of Light, and his third book, Honest to God, was released by Navpress in the summer of 2005. This anthology is the fifth Benbella Book to which Charlie has contributed. He enjoys writing, reading classic literature, watching bad television and movies of every kind. His areas of expertise as a teacher include literature, film and all things C. S. Lewis. Charlie describes his wife Becky as “a full-of-life, full-blood Cajun who can cook like one too.” They have two children: Bryan, who wants to be the next Steven Spielberg, and Alli, who plays a pretty mean piano.

Allen Steele encountered “Star Trek” when he was 8 years old, when one of his sisters gave him James Blish’s first novelization of the series as a Christmas present. Because the show’s first season wasn’t aired in his hometown of Nashville, Tenn., he didn’t actually see an episode of “Star Trek” until a year later. Since then, he has become a Hugo-winning science fiction writer with a dozen novels and four collections of short stories to his credit. His most recent novels are the Coyote trilogy: Coyote, Coyote Rising and Coyote Frontier. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and two dogs.

Ellen Steiber is a writer and editor who lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she shares a house with her husband and Catalina, a very beautiful and mischievous tortoiseshell cat. Catalina, they all agree, runs the house. Ellen has written essays in A New Dawn, Demigods and Monsters, and The World of the Golden Compass, as well as the novel A Rumor of Gems. She is currently working on the sequel to the novel as well as a young adult novel. The young adult novel is set in Tucson and involves teenage girls, horses, and several very tricksy cats.