2009 AROHO Writers’ Retreat Faculty

Kim Ponders, 2009 AROHO Writers’ Retreat Director

You can contact Kim at retreats@aroomofherownfoundation.org

Laura Fraser has been a freelance writer for 25 years, and has never had a full-time job. She is currently a contributing editor for More magazine, and writes for O the Oprah Magazine, Gourmet, the New York Times, Plenty, Town and Country Travel, Travel and Leisure, and many other national magazines. She has taught magazine writing at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Aspen Summer Words, San Francisco State University, UC Extension, MediaBistro, the San Miguel de Allende Writing Workshops, and the Grotto Writing Workshops in San Francisco, which she helped found. She is the author of the best-selling travel memoir, An Italian Affair, as well as an expose of the diet industry, Losing It.

Meredith Hall graduated from Bowdoin College at age forty-four and wrote her first essay, “Killing Chickens.” Two years later, she won the AROHO $50,000 Gift of Freedom Award which gave her the financial freedom to devote time to Without a Map, her national best-selling memoir. Her other honors include a Pushcart Prize and notable essay recognition in Best American Essays; she was also a finalist for the Rona Jaffe Award. Hall’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, The Southern Review, Five Points, Prairie Schooner, and several anthologies. She teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Maine.

Dana Levin’s first book of poetry, In the Surgical Theatre, was awarded the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Conduit and the Iowa Review. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, Levin teaches in the Creative Writing and Literature Department at the College of Santa Fe. Her most recent book is Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press).

Ellen McLaughlin’s plays have received numerous national and international productions. They include Days and Nights Within, A Narrow Bed, Infinity's House, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Tongue of a Bird, The Trojan Women, Helen, The Persians and Oedipus. Producers include Actors' Theater of Louisville, The Actors’ Gang L.A., Classic Stage Co. (N.Y.), The Intiman Theater (Seattle), Almeida Theater (London), The Mark Taper Forum (L.A.), the Public Theater in NYC, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The National Actors’ Theater (N.Y.), and The Guthrie Theater (MN), among other venues. Grants and awards include the Great American Play Contest, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the NEA, the Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and the Berilla Kerr Award for playwrighting.

Pamela Painter is the author of two collections of short fiction, Getting to Know the Weather and The Long and Short of It. She is the co-author, with Anne Bernays, of WHAT IF? Fiction Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, and Story. She is a founding editor of StoryQuarterly, and has received grants from the Massachusetts’ Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor of writing at Emerson College.

Other Faculty

Rita Dove (http://people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b) served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and, more recently, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, the 1997 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 1996 National Humanities Medal. In 2006 she received the coveted Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service (together with Anderson Cooper, John Glenn, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor of Jordan — see the press release, newspaper coverage and photos).

A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she received her B.A. summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She also held a Fulbright scholarship at the Universität Tübingen in Germany. She has published the poetry collections The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992), essays under the title The Poet's World (1995), and the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London, and other theatres. Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998. For "America's Millennium", the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Ms. Dove contributed — in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams's music — a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey. She is the editor of Best American Poetry 2000, and from January 2000 to January 2002 she wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice", for The Washington Post. Her latest poetry collection, American Smooth, was published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2004.

Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn. They have a grown daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn.

Mary Rose Betten is a member of the authors guild and a recently retired character actress of stage, screen, and television. She was a three-time Clio award winner for her comedic performances in TV commercials. Her chapbook, “Hanging Out With Loose Words,” is published by Foot Hills Publishing, New York. She has traveled the U.S. and Europe with her one-woman show, “Mary M. A Visit With The Magdalene,” and appeared as a stand-up comic performing her own material on The Tonight Show and network TV panel shows. Her plays are produced in New York, Hollywood and The National Theatre, London. She is the winner of Writer Magazine’s Poetry Spotlight Award.

Kate Gale was the 2005-2006 President of PEN USA, and president of American Composers Forum/LA. Like many writers, Kate has taken the road less travelled. Rather than mourn the lack of literary community in her adopted city of Los Angeles, she decided to create one in the form of Red Hen Press, Los Angeles' literary jewel, The Los Angeles Review, a literary magazine, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Series, the Geffen reading series, and a Writers in the Schools program for underserved communities. At forty, she completed her Ph.D in literature from Claremont Graduate University, ran her first marathon and climbed Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower forty-eight. Kate Gale's Rio de Sangre, an opera with Don Davis was performed in part at Disney Hall November of 2005 and her opera, Paradises Lost, was performed in part at the New York City Opera in May of 2006.

Mary Johnson has been a Board Member of A Room of Her Own Foundation since its inception. Her memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst: One Woman's Extraordinary Journey of Faith, Hope, and Clarity will be published with Spiegel & Grau in 2009. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Pulse, Texas Review, and others. She was a 2008 Fellow at the MacDowell Colony.

Sally van Haitsma is a literary agent with the Castiglia Literary Agency. The agency has placed best-selling nonfiction and fiction titles with major publishers since 1993, also representing film and foreign rights. Sally's new sales include: Wesley the Owl by Stacey O'Brien (Simon & Schuster); Silverstein & Me by Marv Gold (Red Hen Press); America Libre and El Nuevo Alamo-2 book deal-by Raul Ramos y Sanchez (Grand Central); and The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian (HarperCollins). Actively seeking new authors, Sally is interested in commercial and literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, education, business and current affairs. She has a Masters in Communication from UC San Diego and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.