Muzeo Museum & Cultural Center presents Open Book Series with Distinguished Authors

Stephen Maitland-Lewis

Stephen Maitland-Lewis is an award-winning author, a British attorney, and a former international investment banker. He has held senior executive positions in London, Kuwait and on Wall Street prior to moving to California in 1991. He has owned a luxury hotel and a world-renowned restaurant and was also Director of Marketing of a Los Angeles daily newspaper.

Maitland-Lewis is a jazz aficionado and a Board Trustee of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in New York.  In 2014, he received the Museum’s prestigious Louie Award. A member of PEN, the Palm Springs Writer’s Guild and the Author’s Guild, Maitland-Lewis is also on the Executive Committee of the International Mystery Writers Festival. In addition, he is on the Advisory Board of the California Jazz Foundation and is a former Board member. His novel Hero on Three Continents has received numerous accolades, and Emeralds Never Fade won the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award for Historical Fiction and the 2011 Written Arts Award for Best Fiction. His novel Ambition was a 2013 USA Best Book Awards finalist and won first place for General Fiction in the 2013 Rebecca’s Reads Choice Awards. Maitland-Lewis’ most recent novel Botticelli’s Bastard was a 2014 USA Best Book Awards finalist in three categories and won the Bronze Award in Best Regional Fiction (Europe) at the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. In January of 2016, Maitland-Lewis was sworn in as a Freeman of the City of London and admitted as a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of City Solicitors. In April of 2016, he became a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society (FRGS).

Maitland-Lewis and his wife, Joni Berry, divide their time between their homes in Beverly Hills and New Orleans and are sponsors and supporters of the annual Satchmo Summer Fest in New Orleans.

Steven Deeble

Steven Deeble studied film and journalism at the University of California, Irvine.  His award-winning writing and photography have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Los Angeles Times. His story, On the Run in the Getaway Car, appears in Lummox No. 6.

He is a writer, filmmaker, and multi-media artist. His art and photography have been shown in galleries across Southern California. He’s produced and directed short films based on original screenplays and served as associate producer on two independent feature films.

In 2017, he co-produced Representations of the Braid Groups, the winning film in Science Magazine’s ‘Dance Your Ph.D’ film competition.

John Brantingham

John Brantingham teaches composition and creative writing at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California. He has had hundreds of poems and stories published in the United States and the United Kingdom in magazines such as Tears in the Fence, Pearl, Confrontation, and The Journal.

He spent the 2015-2019 summers living off grid in a tent in the High Sierra, teaching poetry and writing for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. He is the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and his work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016.

He is the author of hundreds of poems, stories, and essays published in magazines in the United States and United Kingdom. His books include Mann of War, a crime novel, Let Us All Pray Now to Our Own Strange Gods, a short story collection, The Gift of Form, an instruction guide for beginning formal poetry, and East of Los Angeles, a poetry collection.