Author Spotlight
Donna Marie has helped these authors bring their stories to life with Book in a Weekend.
Dr. Elizabeth Freas
The Female Framework: Redefining Feminine Leadership
With a Doctorate in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Management, complemented by dual Master's degrees focusing on educational leadership and literacy, Elizabeth blends practical experience with academic rigor. She is committed to shaping the future of education through innovation and excellence. Elizabeth is a passionate advocate for equity, education, and women's leadership, with a deep commitment to community and professional service.
Dr. Kelly Hastings
Leading Change That Lasts
Dr. Kelly Hastings is a leadership coach, former principal, and the founder of a leadership coaching company, Enlightening Leadership. With over two decades of experience in education, she has supported countless school leaders in transforming their campuses through practical leadership strategies and collaboration. Known for her ability to blend clarity with compassion, Kelly equips principals and leadership teams to shift from top-down decision making to collaborative, sustainable systems that empower teachers and improve student outcomes.
Dr. Marcy Roan
Stronger Schools By Design
Dr. Marcy Roan is a principal leadership coach whose work has helped schools achieve substantial growth gains and meaningful reductions in discipline disparities. In less than three years, she elevated school performance through a focus on instructional excellence and reflective practice. She now guides elementary, middle, and high school leaders in building instructional leadership capacity and driving sustainable student achievement.
Naomi Green
Plants Over Pills
Naomi spent a decade studying weight loss and behavior change, developing her own coaching frameworks to help women achieve lasting results. Through her Plants Over Pills programs and retreats, she has coached over 300 women to reverse high blood pressure, normalize cholesterol, regulate blood sugar, and finally feel proud of who they see in the mirror. She has built a thriving community of women ready to rise above the diet and health advice that isn't working for them.
Rachel Tenpenny McGonigle
The Truth About Healing After Loss
Rachel Tenpenny McGonigle is a grief expert, coach, and speaker who has spent over 15 years guiding others through loss and life's hardest transitions with honesty and hope. Her work began in 2008 after the devastating deaths of her twin daughters, just weeks after they were born. She helps grievers restore their bodies, reclaim their identities, and rediscover meaning after loss, whether they are navigating death, divorce, or the quieter losses of identity, faith, and shattered dreams.
Shira Woolf Cohen
Leading Future-Focused Schools: Engaging And Preparing Students for Career Success
As the co-founder of Innovageous, Shira focuses on building partnerships, designing innovative programs, and enhancing instructional practices in both school-based and out-of-school settings. She believes that opening opportunities for students is essential to their growth and success, and she works closely with leaders to create learning environments that connect academic content to real-world experiences.
Cynthia Schwartz
Lessons On Life, Loss And Rediscovery
Cynthia is a true Southern California gal, being born and raised with strong Christian family values. Her family would celebrate the sunrise if you would let them! Cynthia is an amazing and vibrant person with a big heart and a zest for life! From her early days in youth organizations like Girl Scouts, Jobs Daughters, and Toastmasters to her successful career in human resources and payroll, she's someone who believes in hard work, lifelong learning, and leadership while giving back wherever possible.
Deja Mantel
Echoes Within: Uncovering The Silent Wounds That Shape Our Lives
Deja Jantel is a writer, speaker, and faith-centered coach who helps individuals heal from unprocessed experiences and reclaim their God-given identity. With a background in nursing and mental health, she blends clinical insight with spiritual wisdom to create space for reflection, growth, and restoration. Deja writes from lived experience, navigating trauma, motherhood, faith, and transformation, with vulnerability, clarity, and purpose.
Tanya Peterson
Love Doesn't Have To Feel So Hard
Why does love feel so overwhelming - so fragile, so reactive, so painful - when all you want is closeness?
In this groundbreaking and compassionate guide, trauma-informed Occupational Therapist, board certified sexologist, and somatic practitioner Tanya Peterson introduces the H.O.L.D. Method, a body-based, nervous-system-attuned framework for transforming your relational patterns from the inside out.
Brenda Kennison
Trapped In Your Thoughts
Brenda Kennison is a licensed educator with 35 years of experience as a teacher, principal, and instructional specialist. She is also a Certified Neurocycle Facilitator and spiritual coach who helps people break destructive thinking patterns and renew their minds. Brenda blends biblical truth with neuroscience to teach practical tools for transformation, and is the founder of Day One of Sobriety Ministries, host of the Day One of Sobriety podcast, and author of Tools for Mind Renewal.
Diane Eagles
Finding Balance: A Parent's Guide
Diane P. Eagles is an educator, artist, author, and advocate for children’s emotional wellbeing. With more than three decades of experience working with children and families, she has dedicated her career to helping young people feel seen, supported, and emotionally grounded.
Donnalynn Riley
Lead The Vision - Lose The Grind
Donnalynn Riley spent 13 years as a Broadway sound designer before becoming CEO of a multi-location furniture retail business, which she scaled by over 600% and closed profitably on her own terms. For nearly two decades she has worked with entrepreneurs and executives navigating hard problems, developing the Triple Helix System and Vantage Point methodology to integrate operational design, leadership capacity, and human performance. She works with clients worldwide from her base in South Florida.
Saundra Russell-Smith, Ed.D.
Limitless Leaders: Leading Beyond Your Disability
Dr. Saundra Russell-Smith is a seasoned educator, former principal, and district leader with over three decades of experience navigating leadership as a Black woman who stutters. She is the author of Limitless Leader: Leading Beyond Your Disability and creator of the LEADER framework, which helps professionals with perceived or hidden disabilities turn what limits them into what leads them. Her keynotes blend real talk, strategy, and unexpected moments that leave audiences with more than motivation, they leave with perspective shifts and a sense of belonging they didn't know they needed.
Susan Page
A Life Before Love
Susan Page is the author of "A Life Before Love: Why the Best Relationships Begin with You", a certified life coach, and the founder of Best Life Coaching LLC. Through her work as a transitions coach for women, Susan uses her SELF Path™ framework to help women rediscover who they are beneath the roles they play. Her book guides women through the SELF Path™ and on a journey to create a life they love by learning to love themselves first.
Dr. Shayla Johnson
Grind With Grace
Dr. Shayla Johnson is a director of academic growth, instructional coach, educator, and faith-driven leader based in Rochester, New York. In her first book, Grind with Grace, she calls women to stop managing life alone and start inviting God into every decision, direction, and desire. It's a book about releasing unnecessary weight and building a life rooted in alignment instead of anxiety, doing what matters, in the right order.
Ina Saltanava
Find Your Voice Abroad
In Find Your Voice Abroad, global leadership coach Ina Saltanava speaks directly to women navigating careers across borders who are tired of shrinking to fit systems that were never designed for them. Drawing from two decades of lived international experience and coaching women across cultures, Ina names what so many feel, but rarely say out loud.
Jenny Handy
Missing Our Before
Missing Our Before is that book.
Written not by a doctor or therapist, but by a wife who lived it, this deeply personal guide speaks directly to the partners, spouses, and loved ones who are quietly falling apart in the background. The ones who sit on the couch in silence. Who cry in the shower. Who wonder if wanting to feel loved again makes them a terrible person.
Jessie Lang
Rentals Made Easy
Jessie Lang is a real estate investor in Columbus, Ohio who grew her rental portfolio from 3 to 70+ units in just under 4 years using the BRRRRS method. She continues to actively invest while guiding others to scale their own rental portfolios. Jessie is passionate about wealth building, coaching, and sharing her knowledge so others don't have to make the same mistakes she did.
Kim Campbell
The Teacher's Game Plan
Kim Campbell is a middle school teacher, dean of students, and dynamic presenter who has spent over 32 years energizing educators across the country. She engages teachers through keynotes and workshops that empower them to meet the needs of all students, and is the author of If You Can't Manage Them You Can't Teach Them. Kim says she still loves every minute of it.
Mari Harries
The Entrepreneur's Heartbreak
Mari Harries is a purpose-driven entrepreneur and creative business strategist who helps business owners shift from survival mode into soul-led success. She guides entrepreneurs to stop abandoning themselves in the name of achievement and build businesses that love them back, blending strategy with inner transformation to reconnect leaders with what truly drives them. Mari is known for articulating the honest truths most leaders feel but struggle to name.
Nicky Franchi
The Impactful Special Education Teacher
Nicky Franchi is a special education teacher and author of The Impactful Special Education Teacher, a practical guide to redefining what specialized instruction can and should be. Drawing on years of classroom experience, she introduces the F.O.C.U.S. framework, a straightforward approach to teaching executive functioning skills including task initiation, organization, communication, self-awareness, and purposeful studying. It's a roadmap for moving beyond compliance and into confidence, for both students and the teachers who serve them.
DMC
Dr. Donna Marie Cozine
Best-selling author, speaker, and leadership coach helping high-achieving women write their books, grow their influence, and lead with joy.
Best-selling author, speaker, and leadership coach helping high-achieving women write their books, grow their influence, and lead with joy.
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