WILLIAM BERNHARDT is the bestselling author of more than sixty books, including The Florentine Poet, The Game Master, the popular Ben Kincaid and Daniel Pike courtroom novels, and Nemesis: The Final Case of Eliot Ness. Bernhardt founded WriterCon, which hosts writing workshops and small-group retreats, an annual conference, and also offers a newsletter and magazine on Substack. His programs have educated more than three dozen now-published authors. He holds a master's degree in English literature, has won the Oklahoma Book Award twice, and has received the Southern Writers Guild's Gold Medal Award, the Royden B. Davis Distinguished Author Award (University of Pennsylvania), and the H. Louise Cobb Distinguished Author Award (Oklahoma State), which is given "in recognition of an outstanding body of work that has profoundly influenced the way in which we understand ourselves and American society at large." In addition to the novels, he has written plays, a musical (book and music), humor, nonfiction, children's books, biography, poetry, and crossword puzzles. He is a member of PEN International and the Academy of American Poets.
