Jamie Amos
Jamie Amos currently studies fiction at the University of New Orleans MFA program. She is the Associate Editor for Bayou Magazine, a regular columnist for NolaFemmes.com, and her work has received honorable mentions in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and the Orlando Prize in fiction. LAM Fellow.
Martha Andrews Donovan
Martha Andrews Donovan, educated at Williams College (B.A.) and the Bread Loaf School of English (M.A.), has been teaching for twenty-eight years. Her poetry chapbook Dress Her in Silk was published by Finishing Line Press in 2009. A founding member of the Stone Bridge Poetry Project and a professor of writing at New England College, she is currently working on a mixed-genre memoir tentatively titled Dangerous Archaeology: A...
Erin Bad Hand
Poet Erin Bad Hand, Lakota and Eastern Cherokee, deals with issues of multi-cultural identity in her poetry. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May of 2006. Since then, she has worked with and for not-for-profit organizations in Taos, New Mexico and has taught introductory creative writing courses at UNM-Taos. Erin’s published poems include “Could You Be The Perfect Wife?”...
Lauren Baldwin
Lauren Baldwin earned her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2010. She also completed a law degree at the University of New Mexico School of Law in 1992, worked as a Public Defender and in private practice as an attorney for nearly eighteen years, is now a Judicial Officer at the Second Judicial District Court, Family Court Division, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and also serves as a mediator and settlement facilitator...
Mary Beath
Mary Beath works at the confluence of science, art, and nature. After earning degrees in zoology (Duke) and printmaking (Rhode Island School of Design), she lived for ten years in New York’s East Village before moving to Albuquerque in 1989. She is the proprietor of an award-winning illustration/design/writing studio focused on projects concerning the natural world. She began writing seriously in the early 1990s. Her poetry...
Anne Beaufort
Anne Beaufort is a professor at University of Washington Tacoma, where she teaches creative nonfiction, among other courses, and professional development seminars for faculty who want to use writing effectively in their courses. Following ten years working in corporate communications, Anne did doctoral research on the issue of writers developing expertise in multiple genres. This led to two academic publications, Writing in the Real...
Liz Bedell
During the school year, Liz Bedell strives to balance writing and teaching English full-time, something of a juggling act. She has nearly completed a nonfiction manuscript about a course that integrates experiential service learning, literature and creative nonfiction writing. Currently at work on a novel set during and after World War I, she has taught writing to both adolescents and adults for nearly twenty years. AROHO Community...
Elana Bell
Elana Bell was selected by Fanny Howe as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award for 2011. Her first collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2012. Elana is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Drisha Institute. Her work has recently appeared in Harvard Review, CALYX Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, and Storyscape....
Jayne Benjulian
Jayne Benjulian is director of new play development at Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Before she began work in theater, Jayne was executive producer and creative leader at a number of Silicon Valley companies and chief speechwriter at Apple. She was Fulbright Lecturer in Language and Literature at the Université Lyon III in France and Danforth teaching fellow at Emory University, where she earned an M.A. in American and British...
Amy Berkower
President of Writers House LLC, Amy Berkower began her career as a literary agent in 1979 after graduating from University of California at Santa Cruz. She founded the company’s now thriving children’s book department and has developed a diverse client list including bestselling authors Nora Roberts, Ken Follett, Erica Jong, Sharon Creech, Laurie Anderson, Barbara Delinsky, Ann Martin, and Andrew Clements. AROHO Advisory...
Mary Rose Betten
Mary Rose Betten—Poet, playwright, essaist, retired character actress of stage, screen, and television—three-time Clio award winner. Her plays are produced in New York, Hollywood and The National Theatre, London. Her book of meditation drama: “People Of The Passion,” Sheed & Ward, 1985 is still being performed throughout the US. and used in meditation sevices by our troops in Iraq. . Her first chapbook, “Hanging Out...
Bridget Birdsall
Mary Rose Betten—Poet, playwright, essaist, retired character actress of stage, screen, and television—three-time Clio award winner. Her plays are produced in New York, Hollywood and The National Theatre, London. Her book of meditation drama: “People Of The Passion,” Sheed & Ward, 1985 is still being performed throughout the US. and used in meditation sevices by our troops in Iraq. . Her first chapbook, “Hanging Out...
Ginny Bitting
Ginny Bitting writes and sails out of Mystic, Connecticut, having left the country early in her life for England and Austria. She is at work on a memoir, Through the Cut, that illuminates her discoveries about love and truth during a year long sailing trip to the Bahamas with her husband and daughter. She teaches Language Arts to Eight graders in Stonington, CT and is excited to return to the AROHO retreat for a second time. AROHO...
Sandra Jean Ceas
Sandra Jean Ceas left a thirty year career in Fashion Design when she turned fifty years old to pursue her heart’s desire as a practicing fine artist. Within ten years she obtained a BFA in sculpture, an MFA in new genres, and is currently working on an MA in religious studies. Sandra is a person with dyslexia and finds writing extremely difficult yet her yearnings to communicate do not inhibit her expressing through the arts with...
Darlene Chandler Bassett
Darlene Chandler Bassett spent two decades as a corporate executive with famed entrepreneur and arts patron, Eli Broad. Concurrent with her corporate management positions, Bassett was also Board Chair of The California Abortion Rights Action League-South, from 1984 to 1991. Bringing her unique combination of corporate and non-profit management experience to the arts, Bassett now focuses her efforts on women writers and artists. She...
Breena Clarke
Breena Clarke is the author of two historical novels set in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Her debut novel, RIVER, CROSS MY HEART was an October 1999 Oprah Book Club selection. Clarke was the recipient of the 1999 New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association award for fiction and the Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association. Her critically reviewed second novel STAND THE STORM was chosen by the...
Jamie Clifford
Photography to me is a form of poetry. A way to express and share the beauty that I see around us. Beauty within and shared between people. In nature. In color, shape and texture. I began playing with a camera at an early age, capturing moments and communicating what I felt through imagery. This love flourished in a black and white darkroom, and has continued to deepen and evolve in the digital realm. My approach is a very...
Esther Cohen
Esther Cohen collects good stories, teaches them, and tries to write them in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She published 5 books, and ran Bread and Roses, a cultural non-profit for working people. She lives in New York, where she is often a book doctor.https://www.esthercohen.com/ AROHO Advisory Council Member; Desert Delight Contributor.
Teri Crane
Teri Crane, a retired educator and licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She is revising her thesis,We Never Used the F Word, a memoir of growing up in her native Southern California and the impact of her father’s death when she was seven years old. Her current writing project is a story about the travels of two women over the Oregon Trail by wagon train.
Tracey Cravens-Gras
A life-long lover of the written word, I studied English at the University of Cincinnati, and graduated with honors from the Ohio State University in 1997. After a miraculous decade raising two kids, and a family relocation to the desert southwest, I began working for A Room of Her Own as Darlene Chandler Bassett’s personal assistant in 2008. Author of thousands of emails and the rare and wildly-scrawled thank you note, I savor the...