Words and Wine Author Night

Kona Stories celebrates local authors and features them each month at our Words and Wine event.  

Kona Stories provides pupu (appetizers) and a glass of complimentary wine to get you started on this festive evening.  After everyone is seated the Authors (usually 3 per evening) give a 20-minute talk about their book and themselves, the writing and publishing process or a short reading from the book. 

To finish off the evening you can have the authors personalize your book for a keepsake for yourself or a gift for a friend. 

This event is free and everyone is welcome to come support our authors and local community.

Mary Quijano graduated summa cum laude from California State University in Los Angeles in 1987 and went on to pursue a career as a public school teacher in California and Hawaii for the next 31 years. During that time she pursued her passion for writing, with her first novel Bloodmaster published by Zebra books in 1989. She has gone on to publish eleven more novels: Smoke, Mirrors and Deep Space, Endtime Stories, Bloodmaster II, The Secret Life of God as Man, The Lampstand, Anomalies, God and the Multiverse, Fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, The Proxy, A Good Time in Olde Legeriton, A Time of Great Distress and most recently The Indian Problem.

Mary Quijano was active in the civil rights movement and environmental activism of the sixties, and that activist heart and sense of justice still beats strong within. She has five children, which she raised as a single mother, and nine grandchildren. She has lived on the beautiful island of Hawaii since 2004, and believes it is, like Noah’s Ark, the last place of refuge in this chaotic world.

Dawn Hurwitz was born in Chicago and left on her journey at sixteen to discover The Source Family commune in LA California. They traveled to Hawaii where she remained with them for five years, eventually landing in Chicago in 1979 and spending a decade in clothing and costume design while rubbing elbows in the music community. Her heart-strings to Hawaii pulled where she found herself as co-owner of a metaphysical bookstore cafe called “huna ohana”. In the early 2000s, a new transformation blossomed, this time as an Apple Tech. Now retired and sharing a home named Avoland with her husband Stephen and their beloved cats. She and Adam Sydney began The Puna Writers Workshops in 2017 prompting her to finally scribble down all of her adventures. 

Precocious Dawn, born in the fifties, is determined to find Mr. Wrong, indulging in the psychedelic scene of the times. At sixteen she set out on a five-year journey in the summer of 1972 to seek deeper meaning in life. Traveling from Chicago to Colorado, then San Francisco, finally landing on the Sunset Strip in LA joining The Source Family commune and vegetarian restaurant transforming into Galaxy the Aquarian. She becomes a second wife to Father Yod, who eventually weds 13. The Family ends up moving to Hawaii in a quest for a utopian lifestyle only to ultimately lose it all in a surprising turn of events. She later re-discovers her personal power after a crash-and-burn phoenix-like adventure. 

Jeffrey Mix grew up in the 300-person farm town of Spangle, WA—but from an early age suffered from a chronic and debilitating case of wanderlust. Places he’s since called home include Seattle, WA, Boulder, CO, Florence, Italy, Rio Dulce, Guatemala, Luang Prabang, Laos, Honolulu, HI, and he currently lives on the Big Island of Hawaii with his wife and two daughters. If he’s not writing or teaching, he can be found hiking volcanoes, or in the ocean doing his best merman impression for his two little mermaids, or spending entire weekends slow-cooking Italian food while pretending he’s back in Tuscany. 

Jeffrey has an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University. He’s written for Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living magazine and was a contributing editor for A River and Sound Review. Essays from his current collection were first published in Straylight Literary Magazine and T.H.R.O.B. (The Hawaii Review of Books). Through National Geographic Student Expeditions, he has led student journalism trips across Italy and Greece. Jeffrey currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Hawaii Preparatory Academy, and during the summer months, he teaches Creative Writing in Siena, Italy for Oxford/Siena Academia.

Have You Seen My Soulmate?: A Globe-Trotter’s Bumbling Search for True Love? Is a collection of six nonfiction, humorist essays that catapult the reader across numerous international destinations, telling tales of Jeffrey’s life adventures and quest for true love.