About the writer:
JG Nair is a pediatrician and writer living in the San Francisco Bay area. After college, he completed a Masters degree in cell biology at Yale University and conducted medical research at the National Institutes of Health. Following a brief stint teaching graduate students at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), he worked as a farmhand in New Zealand.
JGN left his idyllic agricultural existence in NZ and returned to the U.S. where he stumbled into medicine. He completed his pediatrics residency at Vanderbilt University.
The Burn Riders started as a short story, Gezlinger’s Knot, which, in 2003, was the top short story finalist in the Slamdance Film Festival’s Slamfi competition.
JGN has published three novels. His first two novels are The Healer Book 1: The Phantom Limb (written as Ja Man) in 2007 and The Healer Book 2: The Tree of Pain in 2012. Two more novels in the YA sci-fi series will be published in the future. In 2023, after ten years of work, he published Invisible Sun: Solar Eclipse, the first novel in the Invisible Sun sci-fi detective series. He is also working on various iterations of The Burn Riders post-apocalyptic project with friend and renowned artist J. William Myers — a serialized graphic novel, a tv series and a short story collection. And soon he expects to plunge into rewriting the first novel that he wrote, The Sacrifice Mask––the first book in a YA fantasy series.
In addition to writing fiction, JGN has coauthored twelve scientific papers ranging in scope from studies of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis to prey tracking in mantis shrimp.
About the artist ...
J. William Myers, an ADDY-award winning artist and illustrator of numerous posters, book covers, children's books, magazines, murals, album covers and storyboards for films, commercials and music videos, has three murals and a portrait at Vanderbilt University Law School. His album covers and posters include RCA’s iconic “ Waylon and Willie," the first country album to go platinum, Sony's' "Million Mile Reflections" and "Full Moon" by The Charlie Daniels Band. For Robert Altman’s film Nashville, he created the artwork used in the opening credits, soundtrack cover, screenplay cover, and poster. He did the storyboards for the movie Living Proof, The Life Story of Hank Williams, Jr., for NBC. Recently, he created storyboards for a Target commercial for Keith Urban’s album, the Emmy award winning film, “Running Back to Forward,” music videos by Brooks and Dunn, Alan Jackson, and Taylor Swift’s inaugural Diet Coke television commercial. Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books praised Myers' painting of Gore as a "stunning art poster" having a palette and style of Orozco, stating "I don't believe that even Barack Obama has inspired such overtly political iconography.”
He worked closely with academy award nominated producer/director R. J. Cutler creating the storyboards for the pilot and second episode of ABC’s new hit television series Nashville. Later, his storyboards and artwork for Seasons One, Two, Four and Five have actually appeared as props on screen. His storyboards for Season Three depict the biggest action scene yet filmed for that series, and the album cover for Season Six was featured in the grand finale. He is currently working with author JG Nair on transforming the graphic novel The Burn Riders, which he designed and illustrated, into a live action TV series.
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