Elisa Kay Sparks
A teacher of literature (contemporary, modern British, and science fiction) and women’s studies for 35 years at Clemson University, Elisa Kay Sparks has published a series of articles on parks, gardens, and flowers in Virginia Woolf’s life and work as well as a number of pieces exploring connections between the works of Woolf and the American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe. She is also a printmaker, specializing in color-reduction...
Lynne Southerland
After a long career as a producer and director of animated movies and television, Lynne Southerland felt a strange pull to write her own stories and began writing a novel. The gravity of the process gently sucked her in until now the primary focus of her life is her writing. In the never-ending process of expanding her skills, Lynne has participated in The Highlights Foundation Writers’ Workshop at Chautauqua and actively attends...
Thenmozhi Soundararajan
Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a transmedia storyteller and journalist who believes story is the most important unit of social change. Growing up as a Tamil Dalit, she was driven to tell the stories of marginalized communities. This led to her founding the international media training organization Third World Majority. As a singer/director she fuses epic stories with complex visuals and melodies. Her films often explore interactivity,...
Jennifer Steil
Jennifer Steil is an American writer, journalist, and actor currently living in La Paz, Bolivia. Her first book, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (Broadway Books 2010) is a memoir about her adventures as editor of the Yemen Observer newspaper in Sana’a. The book received accolades in The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Sydney Morning Herald, among other publications. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune chose it as one of their best travel...
Amity Stoddard
Amity Stoddard joined her first circus crew nearly ten years ago, searching for the stories of the extraordinary people who move the show down the road. In her time with Circus Smirkus, Big Apple Circus, and Cirque du Soleil, she has loaded-in, set-up, torn-down, pulled stakes, cooked meals, justified ledgers, tracked down props, secured visas, driven big trucks and finessed fine print. She is currently working on a memoir.
Lisa Sukenic
Lisa Sukenic is a teacher, writer, and an adoptive mother of four children. She is currently teaching at The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. She has been an educator for the last 30 years. She is passionate about teaching writing and has involved students in NaNoWriMo, Haiku, and poetry publications. Her students have been published in Skipping Stones and Ecotone. This past year she was accepted by the Kid Lit Novel in a...
Kelly Sundberg
Kelly Sundberg completed her MFA at West Virginia University. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Creative Nonfiction at Ohio University where she is also the Managing Editor of Brevity Magazine: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in Guernica, Quarterly West, The Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, Slice Magazine, PANK, and others. Her essay, “Like Mourner’s Bread” was listed as a Notable Essay...
Elizabeth Sutherland
E.R. Harris is an urban educator and memoirist/essayist who lives in Northeast Minneapolis. She is a 2011 graduate of Hamline University’s MFA program in Literary Nonfiction. When she’s not writing, she can often be found riding her geriatric horse, Kaydee.
Aimee Suzara
Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Based in Oakland, Suzara has graced stages nationally, from Florida to Washington. Her debut poetry book, SOUVENIR (WordTech Editions 2014) was lauded as “a powerful meditation on history and the legacies of race, family and identity,” (David...
Darlene Taylor
Darlene R. Taylor has had a long career as a senior aide to the U.S. Congress and an advisor to arts, cultural and development nonprofits, and Fortune 100 corporations. She has served as president of Preservation Action, a nonprofit grassroots voice of local and state historic preservationists. Darlene is Chair of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, a 24-year-old nonprofit dedicated to preserving the voice of Black...
Ruth Thompson
Ruth Thompson is the author of Woman With Crows (2013) and Here Along Cazenovia Creek (2011). Jendi Reiter called Woman With Crows “an antidote to fear.” Read an interview about the book here. Ruth’s poems have won the New Millennium Writings, Harpur Palate, and other prizes. They were choreographed and performed by the great Japanese dancer Shizuno Nasu. In January 2015 Ruth will again collaborate with Shizuno in a performance of...
Tammi Truax
Tammi Truax spent her first twenty professional years working with families, and hopes to write for children. In 2013 she was editor of Longfellow’s Lady Wentworth; A Poet’s Tale (illustrated) (Bookbaby, 2013), and released her debut novel Broken Buckets, as an eBook. Her poems are in several anthologies, most recently The Widows’ Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival, with a forward by Justice Ginsburg (Kent State...
Susie Verkamp
At age 65, I am a writer emerging from creative isolation, committed to getting my work out into the world. I have written journals for much of my life, and found community in writing workshops whenever time, finances and circumstances allowed. My intention moving forward from the 2011 AROHO retreat was to cultivate my identity as a writer. My goal was to continue writing new and revised poems for submission and to create structure...
Caity-Shea Violette
Caity-Shea Violette is a writer and actor based in Chicago, IL. Her work has been seen in Washington D.C., Las Vegas, Minneapolis, NYC, Toronto, Denver, and Chicago. She holds a BFA in Theatre from the University of Minnesota, Duluth and is a graduate of Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. Caity-Shea is passionate about sharing the stories of women, particularly survivors of gender-based violence, by creating new work for...
Elizabeth Weber
Elizabeth Weber has published three collections of poetry, Small Mercies (Owl Creek Press), The Burning House (Main Street Rag) and Porthole Views: Watercolors and Poems on which she collaborated with artist Hazel Stoeckeler (Nodin Press). Her poem “City Generations” was chosen to be a permanent part of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail in 2010. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines including Calyx, Verse, Kalliope, Puerto...
Nancy White
Nancy White is the author of two books, Sun, Moon, Salt (winner of the Washington Prize) and Detour. Work appears in The Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, FIELD, Ploughshares, Rattle, Virginia Quarterly Review and others. She is editor and president at The Word Works in DC and a professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Adirondack. www.nancywhitepoetry.net Studio Hour Leader
Maria Williams-Russell
Maria Williams-Russell is the author of A Love Letter to Say There Is No Love and the founding editor of Shape&Nature Press. She is also the creator of The Favorite Words Project and The Flaneur Walk Pamphlet Series, two international, interactive transmedia projects designed to create community around language and literature. Her poems have been published in Belleview Literary Review, Bateau, Boxcar Poetry Review, Sous Rature,...
Michelle Wing
Michelle Wing is a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction. She is author of Body on the Wall (Saddle Road Press, May 2014) and co-editor of Cry of the Nightbird: Writers Against Domestic Violence (WolfSinger Publications, Sept. 2014). She blogs about writing, life with a service dog, and Zen practice, and also writes a monthly literary column, “Off the Page,” for Sonoma West Publishing. Michelle has a fifteen-year background in...
Molly Wingland
Molly Wingland is an artist and muralist who recently moved to LA to pursue an MFA. She spent the last several years living in San Francisco, Ca painting murals and developing her creative work. Molly is a creative consultant for Red Hen Press. She incorporates language, imagery and the imagination into her work, which spans paper to paint, wood to metal and sculpture. Molly is delighted to be the Site Artist at this year’s A...
Barbara Ann Yoder
Barbara Ann Yoder has worked as a writer and editor for more than thirty years. Her first book was The Recovery Resource Book. She is currently developing a novel and revising her book for women who write—a guide to overcoming self-censorship that taps the power of myths, tales, memoirs, and dreams. Barbara coaches writers on writing process and projects, blogs about writing and the writing life, and does developmental editing of...