About Our Board

Michael DeSanto currently co-owns Phoenix Books with his life partner Renee Reiner. They have been in the book business since 1995. Phoenix Books has stores in Essex, Burlington and Rutland, Vermont. They co- own Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock and The Bookstore in Brandon. Michael is also the Executive Publisher of Onion River Press. In addition to working on the Green Mountain Book Festival, he serves on the board of the Independent Publishers of New England and is involved in the Vermont Authors Project. He brings a broad range of experience to the GMBF having had shorter careers as a lobbyist, teacher, actor and army military police investigator.

Barbara Shatara is Fletcher Free Library’s Programs & Partnerships Librarian. She plans and oversees library programming for adults, including festivals, traveling exhibitions, author talks, book discussions, educational seminars, art workshops, language literacy classes, and offsite humanities programming for seniors. She has worked with local and national funding agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Library Association, the Smithsonian Institution, NASA, the Freeman Foundation, Vermont Humanities, and the Vermont Arts Council.

In addition, Barbara establishes and maintains relationships with community schools, organizations and businesses in the greater Burlington area. Her work provides information to the library administration for future resource allocation and program development. When not in front of a computer or wandering the halls of the Library in her sensible shoes, she can be found fending off weeds in her garden, chatting up locals while on vacation or challenging her husband and son to fierce game of Spy Alley.

Shelagh Connor Shapiro is the author of a novel, Shape of the Sky (Wind Ridge, 2014). Her stories have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Baltimore Review, Short Story, Gulf Stream and others. Her story “somewhere never gladly” was included in Please Do Not Remove, a collection of stories and poems inspired by old Vermont library cards. The story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Shelagh has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been a contributing editor for the Vermont literary journal Hunger Mountain. She hosted the literary radio show and podcast Write the Book: Conversations on Craft for fifteen years.

Andrew Liptak is a writer and historian from Vermont. He is the Public Relation and Guest Services Coordinator for the Vermont Historical Society, and is the author of Cosplay: A History (Saga Press, June, 2022), a broad history of how cosplay came to be a mainstream force, and what it says about our relationship with the stories we love. You can order it here.

Liptak has worked as a journalist for more than a decade, appearing in places such as Clarkesworld Magazine, Gizmodo, Grist, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lifehacker, OneZero, Pando Daily, Polygon, Slate, Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, VentureBeat, The Verge, and other publications. He currently writes Transfer Orbit, a newsletter about the intersection of speculative fiction and real life, which you can subscribe to here.

Mark Morrison is the director of major gifts at the UVM Foundation and the Larner College of Medicine. He has notable development experience gained as the director for development at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine in Roanoke, Va., and as the vice president of development at HumanKind in Lynchburg, Va. He also has an extensive background in journalism. Mark has a B.A from American University and attended the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Heather Roberts is an owner of 1852 Media, a promotions and marketing firm for authors and 1852 Literary, a literary agency. She is passionate about helping clients come up with creative solutions, build their brands and websites and expand their reach. She also co-hosts the podcast For Book Sake, breaking down current issues in publishing.

She is a licensed attorney and voracious reader who adores falling in love with a new book. Heather is also an elected Justice of the Peace. Additionally, she sits on the board of After Action, a non-profit dedicated to helping trauma survivors. Heather has two adult sons and lives outside of Burlington, Vermont with her husband and ten goats.

Robin Bissett is a writer, editor, and library worker. She earned her MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana in 2024. She lives in Vermont, where she is working on a novel.