We are pleased to announce the following participating writers (current as of July 21, 2008).
 | Adair Lara
Author, magazine writer, teacher, former columnist for san francisco chronicle, lives in san francisco with her husband Bill LaBlond, cookbook editor for Chronicle Books.
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 | Lizann Bassham
Lizann Bassham explores difficult issues of human community: grief, AIDS, domestic violence; yet they never become "issues" books, they are always character driven and full of grace and humor. She is a musician, playwright, and once, quite by accident, won a salsa dance contest at a bar in East L.A.
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 | Karen Batchelor
Karen Batchelor has published poetry, short stories, articles, textbooks and the novel Murder at Ocean View College. It is a new idea - a story for college students written at a sixth grade reading level. The impetus came from her students who could not read well enough to succeed in mainstream classrooms.
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 | Dan Bellm
Dan Bellm has published three books of poetry: One Hand on the Wheel, Buried Treasure, and most recently, Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008). His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Best American Spiritual Writing, and Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. He is also a widely published translator of poetry and fiction from Spanish. He lives in San Francisco.
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 | Ellen Boneparth
Tatiana is Ellen Boneparth's fourth book. Judith, a San Francisco foundation executive, discovers her Russian friend Tatiana has ovarian cancer. Judith assembles several women to help Tatiana -- Kay, Judith's boss; Gloria, an African-American internist; Carmen, a Hispanic oncologist. By healing Tatiana, the group members themselves are healed.
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 | Terry Ehret
Terry Ehret has published four collections of poetry: Suspensions, Lost Body, Translations from the Human Language, and Lucky Break. Literary awards include the National Poetry Series, California Book Award, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart nominations. She is the co-founder of Sixteen Rivers Press, a shared-work publishing collective for San Francisco Bay Area poets. From 2004-2006 she served as poet laureate of Sonoma County where she teaches writing and lives with her husband.
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 | Andrew Demcak
Andrew Demcak is an award-winning poet who has been widely published and anthologized both in print and on-line. He has an M. F. A. in English/Creative Writing from St. Mary's College in Moraga, CA , where he studied with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Michael Palmer, Carol Snow, Frank Bidart, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright, and Sharon Olds. Andrew is also a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where he studied with Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard, and Lucille Clifton. His poems, including Young Man With iPod (Poetry Midwest, #13), are taught at Ohio State University as part of both its English 110.02 class, "The Genius and the Madman," and in its "American Poetry Since 1945" class. He currently works as a librarian for Oakland Public Library.
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 | Adelle Foley
Adelle Foley writes American haiku treating modern subjects - including her own life - in a form which honors classical Japanese haiku. Leza Lowitz writes of Foley's work, "Basho's spirit is alive and well, spinning out verses in Oakland."
Photo courtesy Lucha Corpi
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 | Jack Foley
Jack Foley is a poet and critic whose work in both poetry and criticism carries an experimental edge. He writes multi-voiced pieces in whose performance my wife Adelle participates. Dana Gioia has calls the work "a rare commodity - genuinely avant-garde poetry...experimental poetry with depth and intelligence as well as intensity."
Photo courtesy Lucha Corpi
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 | Cristina Garcia
Cristina García is the author of four highly-acclaimed novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, and the recently published A Handbook to Luck. She has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, a picture book, was published in April 2008 and the middles grades novel I Wanna Be Your Shoebox will be published in July 2008. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, A Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others.
Photo: Norma I. Quintana
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 | Elizabeth Gomez
Originally from Mexico and Elizabeth Gomez has loved art since she was a little girl. In Mexico City she saw many beautiful murals and colorful folk art that is still the biggest influence on her art. In her illustrations Gomez loves to use bright colors and decorative patterns that reflect her background.
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 | Susan Griffin
Susan Griffin, a well-known writer and poet, has published nineteen books. Her latest, Wrestling with the Angel of democracy On Being an American Citizen, a blend of memoir and history, explores the creative inner life that engenders and sustains American democracy. It is a companion to a Chorus of Stones, the Private Life of War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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 | David Harris
David Harris is the author of ten books - including his widely acclaimed study of the professional football business, The League - and a former contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone. He has been a 49ers fan since he was ten and first crossed paths with Bill Walsh as a Stanford student in the 1960s. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Photo courtesy Jennifer Sauer |
 | Alta Ifland
Alta Ifland was born in Romania and now lives in California. Her prose poems and short stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, Bitter Oleander and AGNI. She has published a bilingual (French-English) collection of prose poems, Voice of Ice, and has finished a book of fiction, Death-in-a-Box.
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| Tom Kendrick
Bluewater Gold Rush chronicles the offbeat California sea urchin diving business from Santa Barbara to the shark-infested Farallon Islands. It has been featured in several publications, including California Diving News, The Surfer’s Journal, National Fisherman, and the pbs television show, Huell Howser’s California’s Gold. A screenplay is currently in production.
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 | Stephen Kessler
Stephen Kessler is the author of 8 books and chapbooks of original poetry and 13 books of literary translation, most recently Burning Daylight (poems, Littoral Press) and Les Ziaux/Eyeseas by Raymond Queneau (translation, with Daniela Hurezanu, Black Widow Press). He edits The Redwood Coast Review.
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 | Brenda Kinsel
An award-winning image consultant and stylist, Brenda has been dressing women for over 23 years, matching their clothes to their personality, passion and lifestyle. She champions a woman’s right to express herself beautifully at any size, age or income level.
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 | Ken Kolsbun
Ken is a photographer, writer and historian, active in the peace movement and an authority on the peace symbol. This 40-year labor of love in picture and words, chronicles the remarkable, sometimes controversial and misunderstood story of the peace symbol since its creation 50 years ago to the present day.
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 | Becca Lawton
Becca Lawton’s most recent book, Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life (with Jordan E. Rosenfeld), grew from a love of writing and the creative process. Her book about the river guiding life, Reading Water: Lessons from the River (Capital Books), was a San Francisco Chronicle Bay Area bestseller in 2008.
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| Julia B. Levine
Drawing on her work as a psychologist, Julia Levine's work largely centers on the coexistence of violence and beauty in our lives. Her poetry is an attempt to locate and question human existence in multiple realms of consciousness and experience. Levine has won numerous international and national awards for her poetry, including the Discovery/The Nation Award, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, The Anhinga Poetry prize, a bronze medal from Foreword and the University of Tampa Poetry Prize.
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 | Mab Maher
Mab Maher, who has lived through many life transitions, has been writing for years but only recently put together a book of her stories. These stories are based in events and ironic inner shifts in her life, but while they are about her life they mirror events in many lives. She artistically writes of "shedding grace," as in let go of.
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 | devorah major
Former Poet Laureate of San Francisco (2002-2005) devorah major is also established as a novelist with two published novels, four books of poetry, where river meets ocean (City Lights 2004- most recent) Editor of poetry anthology the other side of the postcard (City Lights 2005). She is also a noted poetry performer who travels nationally and internationally and is featured on six CDs.
Photo courtesy Lori A. Cheung
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 | Gianna Marino
Gianna Marino was born and raised in San Francisco. She spent the first half of her life galloping horses through Golden Gate Park, and the second half exploring every crevice of the world. She lives in the Bay Area with her family, two dogs, a cat, a lizard and her horse.
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 | Michelle McDonald
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 | Toni Mirosevich
Toni Mirosevich's new book, "Pink Harvest: Tales of Happenstance," received the First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award and explores life's shifting, tilting moments and encounters. She has also authored three collections of poetry, including "Queer Street" and "My Oblique Strategies," winner of the Frank O'Hara Chapbook Award. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.
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 | Linda Morganstein
Linda Morganstein is an award-winning writer who grew up in the resort hotels of the Borscht Belt in upstate New York. In the seventies, she dropped out of Vassar and moved to Sonoma County. Her new mystery, Ordinary Furies, takes place in the Russian River area and features Alexis Pope, self-defense instructor and recovering cynic.
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| Doris Murphy
Born in Portland, OR in 1910, Doris B. Murphy landed in San Franciso on the eve of World War II, looking for adventure and romance. She found them with the love of her life, labor leader Joe Murphy. She lives in Occidental.
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| Rose Murphy
Rose Murphy, writer and lecturer in Irish studies, has focused on Irish women for 15 years. She co-taught Irish literature at Sonoma State University, taught English at Santa Rosa Junior College, and now teaches community classes in Irish literature and culture in Sonoma. This is her first book; it grew out of research into several Irish women immigrants in California.
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| Meredith Norton
Meredith Norton, who came to Cotati via Berkeley and Paris, has been a game show producer, hymnal editor and school teacher. In her memoir "Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting," she uses wit and humor to take a hard, fresh look at the effects of disease.
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| Peter Orner
Born in Chicago and the author of Esther Stories, Finalist for Pen Hemingway Award and a novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Guggenheim Fellowship, 2006.
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 | Noelle Oxenhandler
Noelle Oxenhandler's essays have appeared in many national and literary magazines, ncluding The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, VOGUE, and Tricycle. Her previous works of non-fiction are The Eros of Parenthood and A Grief Out of Season. She teaches Creative Writing at Sonoma State University.In The Wishing Year, she explores the ancient human art of wishing and - despite her very skeptical nature - she dares to launch three wishes of her own.
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| Jonah Raskin
Jonah Raskin has lived and worked in Northern California since 1976, and has taught at SSU since 1981. He is the author of 10 books, and for two decades was the book critic for the Press Democrat.
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| George Rathmell
George Rathmell is a freelance writer whose work has been published in Coast and Valley, The Californians, and Travelers Tales. His articles appear regularly in The Nob Hill Gazette. "Realms of Gold" takes a fresh look at 26 major San Francisco writers from Brete Harte to Lawrence Ferlenghetti.
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 | Jordan E. Rosenfeld
Jordan E. Rosenfeld is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and editor who is grateful for the writing life she has created with the powerful Write Free work. She is the author of the books Make A Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time and Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life with Rebecca Lawton. She also edited Zebulon Nights: An Anthology of LiveWire Readers.
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 | Lee Slonimsky
Lee Slonimsky is a hedge fund manager who transitioned from free to metrical verse under the influence of the numbers required in stock trading. His 2007 sonnet sequence, PYTHAGORAS IN LOVE, remembers a Pythagoras who was ethically enlightened regarding animals, and uses mathematical metaphors to express respect for the natural world.
Photo courtesy Nora Slonimsky
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 | David Smith-Ferri
David Smith-Ferri's book, Battlefield without Borders, portrays his encounters with Iraqi people during visits to Iraq and Jordan over the last nine years. Proceeds from booksales (the entire sale price) go to Iraqi victims of this war, through a grassroots program of urgent medical care called Direct Aid Iraq (www.directaidiraq.org).
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 | Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is author of 12 books including "War Made Easy," which the Los Angeles Times called "brutally persuasive" and "a must-read." The newspaper added: "Solomon is a formidable thinker and activist." Solomon received the George Orwell Award and the Annual Ruben Salazar Journalism Award. He lives in North Bay.
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 | Ruth Stotter
Ruth Stotter, former Director of the Dominican University Storytelling Program, is the author of several books on the art of storytelling. A performer, author and speaker, Ruth also exhibits her collections of puppets and masks in schools and libraries.
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| Susan Swartz
Susan Swartz is a Sebastopol author and journalist whose goal is to encourage women over 50 and beyond to enjoy their lushness and rid the world of stuffy old stereotypes about aging, which she does via radio, blogging and writing books, including "The Juicy Tomatoes Guide to Ripe Living After 50."
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 | Katherine Tillotson
Katherine Tillotson is a children's book illustrator with a background in children's book design and art direction. She illustrated "Night Train" written by Carolyn Stutson, and most recently "Penguin and Little Blue" and "When the Library Lights Go Out" both written by Megan McDonald. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she currently lives and works in San Francisco.
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 | James Tipton
James Tipton has a Ph.D. in English and teaches in the Bay Area. Annette Vallon, A Novel of the French Revolution, gives the untold story of the woman who was mistress and muse to poet William Wordsworth during the French Revolution and an underground fighter against the Reign of Terror.
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 | Marianne Ware
A daughter of an American Communist, Marianne Ware organized for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, earned an MFA in her 40s, taught English and Creative Writing in my 50s and 60’s and has just completed The Meaning of Water, her first book-length work.
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 | Gillian Wegener
Gillian Wegener lives in Modesto with her family and teaches junior high English. The author of a chapbook (2001, In the Grove Press), Wegener has had poetry published in many journals and is a recipient of top prizes in the Rosenberg Poetry Contest for 2006 and 2007. Her book, The Opposite of Clairvoyance, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in March, 2008.
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 | Julia Whitty
Julia Whitty's latest book, The Fragile Edge: Diving & Other Adventures in the South Pacific, is the recipient of the 2008 John Burroughs Medal Award, the 2008 Kiriyama Prize, and the 2008 Northern California Book Award for creative nonfiction.
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