John Copenhaver: HALL OF MIRRORS (with Chris Chambers & Cheryl Head)

About the Panelists:

• John Copenhaver, John Copenhaver’s historical crime novel Dodging and Burning won the 2019 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery. The Savage Kind, his second novel, won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery. He is a founding member of Queer Crime Writers, an at-large board member of Mystery Writers of America, and a cohost of the House of Mystery Radio Show. He’s a faculty mentor in the University of Nebraska’s Low-Residency MFA program and teaches creative writing and literature at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, where he lives with his husband, artist Jeffery Paul (Herrity). His new novel, Hall of Mirrors, set in Washington, DC, is the sequel to The Savage Kind.

• Christopher Chambers, Christopher Chambers is a Washington, D.C. native lecturer at Georgetown University and attorney an affordable student housing developer. He’s currently on the Bouchercon Mystery Conference Board. His first hardcover crime novels by Random House were Sympathy for the Devil and A Prayer for Deliverance; his short story “Leviathan” was a finalist for PEN/Malamud Award. He is the author of pulp works Rocket Crockett and the Shanghai She Devil, Black Pulp I & II, The Bronze Buckaroo Rides Again. He co-edited or co-scripted graphic works like The Darker Mask with Gary Phillips, The Possum, Autobahn Tales and The Green Hornet. He’s contributed to Marvel’s The Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, and the upcoming Sam Wilson: Captain America. His crime short fiction has appeared in the Anthony Award winning The Obama Inheritance, The Faking of the President, Midnight Hour, and again with Gary Phillips in Witnesses for The Dead from Soho Press. The noir hardboiled novels in his D.C. trilogy, Scavenger and Standalone, were feted by Publishers Weekly. The third, Streetwhys, arrives in late 2024.

• Cheryl A. Head, Cheryl A. Head is a former television and radio executive. She is the author of the award-winning Charlie Mack Motown mysteries, whose female PI protagonist is queer and Black, and the 2023 novel, “Times Undoing,” shortlisted for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Head is an Anthony Award nominee, a two-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, and winner of the Golden Crown Literary Society’s Popular Choice Award, and an Indie Publishers Book Award. Head is National Chair of Bouchercon-the largest mystery fan convention in the world-and is a Senior Associate at Baltimore-based media recruiting firm, Livingston Associates. Cheryl lives in Washington, DC, with her partner and rescue pooch.