Edwina Woodbury developed her love of reading in childhood when her mother read to her daily. As a young girl, she devoured volumes of The Bobbsey Twins adventure novels and the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, later developing a love of poetry and a broad range of fiction and nonfiction.

Her fascination with publishing began in the 1980s when she helped two elderly women write and publish their memoirs. The tools available to self-publishers at that time were few and far between, but she found the process of working with authors both rich and rewarding.

After a successful twenty-one-year corporate career in finance at Avon Products, Inc., Edwina left Manhattan for her home state, settling in Chapel Hill where she had earned her undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina. Once again, she was drawn to the idea of helping individuals write and publish their stories, which led to her acquisition of The Chapel Hill Press, Inc. in 1999.

Since then, she and her staff have seen the business grow to meet the demands of the increasing number of writers who want to self-publish their work. She finds every new project a learning experience, and has made life-long friends through their collaborations on book projects. Edwina’s greatest rewards come from enabling individuals to realize their dream of becoming published authors.

When she’s not working, Edwina enjoys creating organic sculptures, reading (especially fiction), traveling, choral singing, and discovering the latest farm-to-table restaurants. She and her husband Dennis McGill live in Chapel Hill with their Labrador retrievers, Seamus and Lola.

Katie Severa has had a life-long love affair with books. She is an avid reader, collector of antique books, and has been a volunteer reading tutor for children for almost twenty years. She started in graphic design in New York City in the early 1990s when desktop publishing was brand new and, after working her way from production and printing to advertising agencies and beyond, she nestled into the book publishing world and never left. She has enjoyed designing books for The Chapel Hill Press for more than twenty years.

There is almost nothing more thrilling to her than starting a new book design. Once she understands the look and feel an author wants—elegant, whimsical, handsome, mystical, or something else—she use fonts, color, images, and textures to bring information to life and to give the reader the experience that the author intends. There is little that is more rewarding to her than transforming an author’s words and images into a beautiful, perfectly crafted book.

A recent empty-nester since daughter Isabel left for college, Katie lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband Bob and dog Elsie.

Bob Land is a freelance editor, proofreader, and indexer with four decades of wide-ranging publishing experience. In addition to Chapel Hill Press, current clients include university presses (Oxford, Yale, NYU, Oklahoma, Johns Hopkins, et al.); theological presses (Orbis, Westminster John Knox, Crossroad, et al.); a cornucopia of business, education, nonprofit, and trade publishers (Aspen Institute, Social Science Research Council, Health Communications, et al.); and a few individual authors worldwide. Before becoming a full-time freelancer, Bob wrote and edited university-level business and insurance textbooks and examinations for the world’s largest self-study insurance education program, and also was the lead editor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Bob’s first job in the world of printing and publishing was a far cry from his headier work today: proofreading airline timetables and scratch-off lottery tickets in the early 1980s. One memory from those years is checking the printing plates for the big-money winning tickets of the original McDonald’s scratch-off games—laboring on the graveyard shift under the watchful eye of an armed Atlanta police officer.