Glide Media is a publishing cooperative focused on literary historical fiction.

B.V. Glants was born in Soviet Ukraine and immigrated with his family to suburban New Jersey when he was ten years old. He was raised on family stories ranging from his grandparents’ fight for survival in WW2 to his parents’ confrontations with Soviet antisemitism. He now lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and daughter, where he is a lay leader at a Jewish day school and a member of the Wexner Heritage Program.

B.V. Glants dutifully followed the archetypical immigrant dream and became an entrepreneur, most recently having cofounded Tonic Health (sold to R1, NASDAQ:RCM) and Turnkey Labs. That hasn’t stopped him from earning an MFA at California College of the Arts and attending writers’ conferences at Squaw and Sewanee. He writes historical fiction from a Jewish perspective, focusing on how major historical events challenge and transform the lives of everyday families.

Val Dobrushkin immigrated to Rhode Island from Soviet Belarus as a teenager and the passion for history and especially World War II has continued to fill his life. Many of Val’s Jewish family members died in the Holocaust, some while fighting the Germans in the Red Army, and his Russian grandmother lost her leg after serving a machine gunner for the last three years of the war. The fact that surviving members never wanted to speak about their war experiences drove Val to read everything he could find. First, the propaganda-driven heroics of the Soviet books and memoirs, and after immigrating to the West, the dissident memoirs and Western historical books on the subject.

Val’s upcoming novel takes place in Soviet Belarus during Nazi occupation, where the teenage protagonist tries to maintain his moral compass while surviving under two brutal regimes and uncovering painful truths about his family and the world.

Outside of writing, Val spends his time in technology, mainly in cybersecurity, as he believes protecting people’s rights to privacy and all of the interconnected devices as fundamental human rights. Val has spent over two decades managing technological and cybersecurity programs for startups, Fortune 500, and government agencies. Val also loves mentoring others, playing soccer, practicing mindfulness, and spending time with his family.