Evie Shockley
Evie Shockley’s most recent book of poetry,the new black (Wesleyan), won the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. She is also the author of a half-red sea (Carolina Wren P), two chapbooks, and a critical study,Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry(Iowa). From 2007-2011, she co-edited the poetry journal jubilat. Recipient of the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize, Shockley is...
Catherine Shubert
Catherine Shubert is a teacher, poet, and activist hailing from outside of Detroit, MI. She holds a BA in English with honors from the University of Michigan, a Master’s in Urban Education from the University of Pennsylvania, and last year she taught ESL abroad in Andorra through the Fulbright Program’s ETA grant. She currently works as a writer-in-residence in several Detroit district and charter schools, helping to...
Jan Smith
Jan M. Smith retired from a thirty-year career in social work and moved to Taos, New Mexico to pursue writing. Since then she has enrolled in Goddard’s MFAW program (’14), been the curator for SOMOS (literary organization in Taos) since 2009, has won an award from the 2012 SouthWest Writers for a short story, and been published in the Pitkin Review, Howl, andChokecherries.
Jennifer Steil
Jennifer Steil is the author of The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, An American Woman’s Adventures in the Oldest City on Earth (2010, Broadway Books/RandomHouse), a memoir of the year she spent as editor of the Yemen Observer newspaper in Sana¹a, Yemen. 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...
Lisa Sukenic
Lisa Sukenic has been a progressive educator for 28 years. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, working with 3rd and 4th graders. She teaches using an integrated Thematic Arts approach with an emphasis on Social Justice. As a writing teacher she works with young authors to help them develop their authentic voices in all genres. She helps to sponsor the Global Reading Challenge that encourages teamwork...
Shanti Thirumalai
Shanti spends more time not-writing than writing. She has finished a YA/ crossover novel and cannot understand why every agent she has sent it to is not in love with it. She is plodding along with her other novel set in India. It might take 17 years to complete but will be more comprehensible than Finnegans Wake. You can ask her about her experience reading the Wake only if you are prepared to listen to a long answer that might not...
Ruth Thompson
Ruth Thompson’s second book of poems, Woman with Crows, was published by Word Press Books in 2012. It was a finalist for the AROHO To The Lighthouse Prize in 2010. Her 2011 chapbook Here Along Cazenovia Creek was the basis for a collaborative performance of poetry and dance with dancer Shizuno Nasu last year. Ruth was an English professor, librarian, editor and college dean in California, and now lives mostly in Hilo, Hawai’i with...
Melissa Tomlinson Newell
Currently an Art Instructor at Edmonds Community College in Lynnwood, Washington, I have found a new form of creative expression in writing. In addition to making art and serving as co-chair in the Visual Arts, my work includes community art advocacy projects focused on art education. I have served as a juror for numerous exhibits and public works projects and led workshops for adults and children since 1984. When I begin the...
Tammi J. Truax
Writing is Tammi Truax’s second career, after twenty years working with children and families, primarily in promoting literacy. She is a newspaper columnist, blogger and novelist, who dabbles in poetry, primarily narrative. Overall she considers herself a storyteller and loves nothing more than to hear, read or share a good tale. She lives in a New England harbor town, where she practices the arts of mothering, cooking,...
Leslie Ullman
Leslie Ullman teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts and has published three poetry collecions. Her fourth, “Progress on the Subject of Immensity,” is due out from University of New Mexico Press just before the August conference. She has extensive experience working with poetry manuscripts, both in her teaching job and freelance, and enjoys dialogues about craft. Awards include the...
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...
Robin Vidimos
Robin Vidimos is a mechanical engineer by profession and a book reviewer by passion. Her engineering career has taken her to construction sites; her reading has transported her to far more exotic locales. Long an avid reader, Robin cut her teeth on book reviews for Moms Online, an early forum on America Online and wrote her first review for the Denver Post in 1997. Since then, the Post has run more than 400 reviews and author...
Janice Voshall
Janice Voshall holds a Development Project Management Certificate from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Besides her work in A Room of Her Own’s Development Department, she is involved with fundraising for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2010, she was involved in a local city council campaign in Laguna Hills, California where she searched public records for City Manager salary and...
Emily Wallis Hughes
Emily Wallis Hughes is a poet, teacher, and backpacker from Agua Caliente, California. Her poems have been published inGigantic Magazine, Sacramento News & Review, and by Ad Lumen Press. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from UC Davis, and teaches English at American River College. Emily currently lives in Davis, California, and enjoys taking trips to explore the Sierra Nevada, the Lost Coast, and Point...
Michelle Wing
Raised in Montana, Michelle Wing is a writer and poet who spent much of her adult life in the urban settings of Seattle, Osaka, Kyoto and San Francisco, but now lives in the country in northern California with her partner Sabrina, her faithful dog Ripley, and a houseful of other animals. She has been published in the Gay & Lesbian Review, Sinister Wisdom, and Vintage Voices, and works as the senior staff writer for a community...
Barbara Ann Yoder
Barbara Ann Yoder has worked as a writer and editor for more than thirty years. Since the early 1990s she has led many writing workshops and groups for women and is now completing work on a book for women who write—a guide to overcoming self-censorship that taps the power of myths, tales, memoirs, and dreams. Her first book was The Recovery Resource Book.Barbara has served as executive director of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project,...
Adina Zerwig
Originally from California, Adina Zerwig lives in Lake Tapps, Washington with her husband and toddler. She writes fiction and is currently working on a YA novel called The Wild Bird Child. When she’s not writing, she is chasing after her German Shepherd puppy, Charlie, and her fifteen-month-old son, Atticus, who just recently learned how to walk and, very recently, learned to climb. Adina has a B.A. in Journalism from California State...
Judith Zukerman
Judith Zukerman, Chicago native and long-time Madison, Wisconsin resident has recent work in Jewish Women’s Literary Annual Volume 9, N.Y.C., May 30, 2013, Midwest Prairie Review, April 2013, Wisconsin Poets Calendars 2013 and 2014, and Agora, vol. 2 & 3. Earlier work is in Grey Sparrow on line and in print and in Drash and Amsterdam Days, a journey through poetry. Music, sculpture, dance and being enriched by living with...
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...