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Speed Date with a Book

Multi-Author Panel

Meet multiple authors! Find out more about their books and writing lives and bring any questions you have for them on writing or their paths to publication.

Meet authors Rebecca McKinnon, Craig Kingsman, and Rick Bennett as they pitch their books in a fun "Speed Date with a Book" format. Q&A will follow the book pitches. (Learn more about each author below in our Author Bios section.)

Event Information

 Author book signing and book sales information: A book signing will follow this event. Each author at this event will handle their own book sales.

 Registration: Registration for this event is not required, however, if you register you will receive an event reminder via e-mail, and if you opt-in to a text message, also a text reminder.

 Access information: If you would like to attend via Zoom, please register on Zoom using this link: Brigham City Library Book Festival Events.

Credits & Partnerships: Part of the Brigham City Library Book Festival: Celebrating Books, Ideas, and Imagination.

This event is made possible in Partnership with Utah Humanities as part of the annual Utah Humanities Book Festival.

For other Utah Humanities Book Festival programs and events around the state visit the Utah Humanities website to view the Festival calendar.

Author Bios

Author: Rebecca McKinnon

Author Bio: Rebecca McKinnon enjoys playing with her imaginary friends and introducing them to others through her writing. She dreams of living in the middle of nowhere, but has been unable to find an acceptable location that wouldn’t require crossing an ocean.

Author: Craig Kingsman

Author Bio: Craig Kingsman writes about murder because committing it would be a real bummer for the victim. He grew up in a Utah Mormon family and spent time every summer on his grandparent’s dairy farm in a very small town in southern Idaho. This provided him the ideas for his Zane Grayson Mysteries series — family, small rural town, and religious themes. The first book in the series, Murder Comes Home, was released in February, 2026 from Twisted Dagger Press. He is currently working on the next book in the series.

Craig supports the writer community by speaking at conferences and writing groups. He is a member of Sisters in Crime, Private Eye Writers of America, and Utah Mystery Writers. He lives in the Wasatch mountains of Northern Utah with his wife and two cats.

Author: Rick Bennett

Author Bio: In the blockbuster biography of California’s richest man— The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison (Morrow, 1997)— Rick Bennett is credited as the advertising genius whose one-man ad agency took Oracle to its first billion-dollar sales year. 

Rick Bennett’s ads took Oracle from $15 million to over $1 billion in sales in 6 years, and he created Salesforce.com pre-IPO advertising. He specializes in guerrilla warfare

Mathematician and inventor whose Hagoth Voice Stress Analyzer made the front page of every U.S. Sunday newspaper on November 7, 1976, with his high-tech analysis of the Ford/Carter presidential debates, Rick Bennett has been covered by everybody from Business Week to The Wall Street Journal.  As a guest on ABC’s Good Morning America, both NBC’s Today and Tomorrow with Tom Snyder shows, PBS’s McNeil-Lehrer Report and on the syndicated Mike Douglas Show, his irreverence toward prominent political institutions has entertained millions. 

Goaded and sponsored by his friend, the late science fiction author Frank Herbert (who wrote the Dune series), Bennett sold his electronics company in 1978 and ran for the U.S. Congress.  Losing narrowly, he went on to Massachusetts where he helped manage the state’s tax-limitation initiative campaign.  He hired ad genius Tony Schwartz -- who created the famous Daisy ad that destroyed Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign -- and the Massachusetts initiative won by a landslide.  Convinced by his friend and mentor Schwartz that “One good ad can do more to improve the world than all the politicians placed end to end,” Bennett changed careers in 1979 and became a high-tech advertising hired gun.

Bennett’s 3 published novels are Destroying Angel, Daddy’s Little Felons, and The Last Will & Testament of Harley and His Dog. He also published a novella, Tabernacle Choir Aliens. Hardcopies of all these books will be freely available at the October 13th Brigham City Library “speed dating with authors” meeting. For those who can’t attend in person, all these books will be free of charge in Kindle format at Amazon.com on October 14th.

Rick Bennett lives with his wife (of 60 years) Rita in Brigham City, Utah.

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