Mark Coggins

Born in the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Mark Coggins is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation. He earned two degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa Key from Stanford University and has worked for a number of Silicon Valley computer and venture capital firms, including Netscape Communications and Hewlett Packard Company.

While at Stanford, he studied literature and creative writing with Tobias Wolff, N. Scott Momaday and Ron Hansen and wrote the first story featuring his series character August Riordan in a class taught by Hansen. This story, “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes,” was later published in The New Black Mask, vol. 4, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich.

His books have been nominated for the Shamus and the Barry crime fiction awards and have been selected for best of the year lists compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press and Amazon.com, among others.

Runoff and The Big Wake-Up won the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) respectively, both in the crime fiction category. The Immortal Game was optioned for a film.

Coggins has published short fiction in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the anthology Masters of Technique, as well as nonfiction in View Camera and Distributed Object Computing magazines.

He is also a photographer. He works with a range of subjects, but focuses on candid, black and white images taken in public—aka “street photography.” He has won numerous awards and competitions, including being shortlisted in the 2023 Photo Review Competition, receiving an award of excellence by the All-Japan Association of Photographic Societies and winning first place in the 2023 Ribbet Emerging Photographer Competition.

His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe and has been featured in a variety of on-line and print publications, including cover images for both fiction and nonfiction books. His own photography monograph, Street Stories, was published by Poltroon Press in 2021.

Randal S. Brandt

He is Head of Cataloging at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Bancroft in 2001, he held a variety of special collections cataloging positions on the Berkeley campus: Water Resources Center Archives (1994-2001); California Indian Library Collections, Hearst Museum of Anthropology (1992-1994); and, the California Maps Project (1991-1992).

He has been an active member of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College & Research Libraries since 2003, serving as Chair of the Bibliographic Standards Committee (2007-2009). He also served as one of the editors of Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Serials), published by the Library of Congress in 2008, and Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Cartographic), published by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section in 2016.

Randal Brandt received a B.A. in English (1987) from California State University, Fresno and a M.L.I.S. (1990) from the University of California, Berkeley.