Writer Artist Categories

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Elmaz Abinader

Literary Arts: Playwright, Poet, Writer

To be born a writer and an Arab-American in this lifetime creates an imperative for my work and despite an education that led me away from politically charged writing, my life, my family’s country and the political climate demanded I give voice that nuanced characters and moments that have no complication in the media. My work has been inspired by the dislocation of my parents from Lebanon to the US, and has radiated outward to dislocations, occupations, and disenfranchisement of other people in the Arab World and Diaspora. My first book, a memoir, The Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon was the story of three generations of Lebanese and their various challenges in finding a home away from their country. Based on diaries, interviews and letters, the book covers two centuries, ending in 1947. My second publication, a poetry collection, In the Country of My Dreams…. Provides a collection of very specific dislocations—not only the family immigration but my own transition from New York to the Midwest and the shock of the open terrain of Nebraska and the intimate relationships with natural elements. In addition to these publications, I have written and performed several one-women plays: Country of Origin, Ramadan Moon, 32 Mohammeds, Voices from the Siege and The Torture Quartet. Each uncovers a personal perspective on the lives of Arabs in the middle of political trauma. For instance, 32 Mohammeds is an intersection with the death of Mohammed al-Durra, a boy killed in Palestine before the second Intifada; Ramadan Moon explores the mythology associated with women who are veiled and the different reasons and responses to the veil. My new poetry collection, This House, My Bones draws parallels between the changes of the earth through natural means to the changes in our bodies during unnatural traumas and how that trauma moves through generations. This collection is being published by Willow Press in October 2014 My current project is a novel, When Silence is Frightening (Working title)

Leslee Becker

Literary Arts: Writer

Leslee Becker teaches creative writing and literature at Colorado State University and has published a story collection, The Sincere Café. Her stories have appeared in Epoch, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, New Letters, Nimrod, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. She has won several prizes and grants, including the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize, the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Prize, the Mid-List Press Award for Short Fiction, the Ludwig Vogelstein Award, and the Pennock Distinguished Service Award.

Delores Goodrick Beggs

Literary Arts: Writer

You know the old saying, “Jack of all trades” that was often applied to men in times past? Perhaps I could be best described as a “Jill of all writing.” As far back as I remember I’ve been involved in writing, one way or another; in fact, many different ways. I started a neighborhood newspaper before I started kindergarten. Editor, I sat at my small child’s table with my younger sister opposite. Together we cut out and pasted a colorful variety of decorations (similar to child’s stickers available today) on a few sheets of paper. Then we wrote our “news” with care in our best penmanship around the illustrations. A few copies made that way wore out our creative spurts, and then we ran outdoors to knock on doors and sell to the neighbors. As soon as we sold two copies for a nickel each, distribution shut down and we raced to the corner grocery to buy 5 cent ice cream bars. (Yes, they were 5 cents then.) Growing up, I was always writing something, mostly poems and short stories that I collected over the years in a box I saved one Christmas. I picked up a Mrs. in college, and our family started soon after. I’d had meningitis as a child, and it left me with a lot of hearing loss. So I got in the habit of sitting beside the doorway of the babies’ rooms until they went to sleep, in case they cried instead. Sitting there I started writing again, with fervor. A variety of publishing followed as the children grew up. I became poet, book reviewer, columnist, feature writer, genealogist, and author. I cared for two horses, my feisty Moonrise whose antics demanded my full attention, and Beau, a courtly gentleman, in my care while my daughter was in college. My horses were so tolerant of my shortcomings I was soon writing at the stables too, sitting with them, sharing their content while they munched hay after their workouts. I had dogs to cuddle and warm my heart in quiet moments. The last two, Basset Hounds Scarlett and Buddy, were very special to me, warming my mind to create more story images. For me, life is a black and white sketch waiting for me to color in myself with my writing.

Bo Caldwell

Literary Arts: Writer

Bo Caldwell is the author of the national bestseller The Distant Land of My Father and the novel City of Tranquil Light. Her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Story, Epoch, and other literary journals. A former Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University, she lives in Northern California with her husband, novelist Ron Hansen.

Chitra Divakaruni

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, the O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese, and many of them have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Several of her works have been made into films and plays.She lives in Houston with her husband Murthy and has two sons, Anand and Abhay, who are in college. She loves to connect with readers on her Facebook page.

Mary Kennedy Eastham

Literary Arts: Writer

Mary Kennedy Eastham, M.A., MFA has had the good fortune of growing up in a small New England town. She spread her wings and moved to New York City, San Francisco and Malibu which is where many of her stories took shape. Her book, The Shadow of a Dog I Can’t Forget, now in its Fifth Printing, was a 2011 WILD CARD winner in the Hollywood Book Festival and a 2010 Celebrity Achiever Award winner by the National League of American Pen Women. Her poem ‘Points of Love’ a Top Ten winner in the 2012 Poetry Superhighway Contest. Her award-winning poetry and short stories have appeared in over 75 books, magazines, small presses and e-zines in the United States and abroad. The publishing list includes ‘Glamour’ magazine, Paris Transcontinental, the Circle Magazine, THE BEST of Map of Austin Poetry, the Paterson Literary Review, Poetry Superhighway, muse apprentice guild, Pearl magazine and the Red Rock Review to name a few. She has been awarded over $25,000 in Literary Awards. Her work has received a Chekhov Award, an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and she is a two-time award winning recipient of Literary Grants from the ARTS COUNCIL SILICON VALLEY. Mary calls herself a Word Actress letting her characters perform different roles on paper which is of course weaving her own needs, her own fantasies, her love, her loss and her joy into the poems and short stories she writes. She is currently finishing up “Channeling Ava Gardner”, the last story in her short story collection The Possibilities of Love, and is excited to be close to finishing her first novel Night Surfing. Mary’s life has been filled with confusion, chaos, fun and love. She lives in San Jose, California with her beautiful Golden Retrievers.

Chris Fink

Literary Arts: Writer

Professor Chris Fink specializes in fiction writing and teaches courses in creative writing, literature and journalism at Beloit College is Wisconsin. He serves as editor for the Beloit Fiction Journal and coordinates the Mackey Chair in Creative Writing. His book of stories Farmer’s Almanac: A Work of Fiction came out in the spring of 2013 from Emergency Press. Since 2000, he has published more than twenty five stories and essays at various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Malahat Review North Dakota Quarterly, Other Voices, The Pinch, South Dakota Review and others. He was a founding faculty member of the MFA program at San Jose State University, where he taught for five years and edited Reed Magazine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Silicon Valley Artist Laureate, and founder of the John Steinbeck Award for the Short Story.

Parthenia Hicks

Literary Arts: Writer

Parthenia M. Hicks is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Los Gatos, CA. and a freelance writer and editor with a Masters of Divinity in Kriya Yoga. She teaches privately and performs and reads poetry in the Bay Area. Her recent work is featured in Song of Los Gatos/Poems of the Gem City; The Call: An Anthology of Women’s Writing; Remembering: An Anthology of Poems; Sweet Obsession: The Art of Lynn Powers, and Local Habitations, featuring the poetry of five Bay Area Poets Laureate; and in The Red Wheelbarrow and CHEST medical journal.

Kristen Iversen

Literary Arts: Writer

Kristen Iversen is the author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Reading the West Book Award, and chosen one of the Best Books of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews, the American Library Association, and Mother Jones Magazine, and 2012 Best Book about Justice by The Atlantic. Selected by more than a dozen universities across the country for their First Year Experience/Common Read programs, Full Body Burden was also a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Recently Full Body Burden was published in China and it is forthcoming in Japan. Iversen is also the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction, and a textbook, Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Reader’s Digest, Fourth Genre, and many other publications. She has appeared on C-Span, NPR’s Fresh Air, and BBC World Outlook, and worked extensively with A&E Biography, The History Channel, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2014 was the recipient of the award for Distinguished Achievement in the Creative Arts from the University of Memphis. She holds a PhD from the University of Denver, and currently heads the PhD program in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. She has lectured widely across the U.S. and abroad.

Phyllis Koestenbaum

Literary Arts: Writer

Phyllis Koestenbaum is currently completing a mixed-genre manuscript of essays, prose poems, lyric essays (essay-like prose poems), and very short fiction. Autobiographical material links the individual pieces in the all-prose manuscript. She is also working on a manuscript of Selected Poems, to include work from her eight published poetry books as well as new poems; and a sequence of Mistranslations, poems veritably her own, since, except for a minor knowledge of French, she does not read or speak the languages of the original texts. Koestenbaum’s most recent book is Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies (2001), preceded by Criminal Sonnets (1998). Koestenbaum’s latest publication is her essay, The Secret Climate the Year I Stopped Writing, in the Summer 2007 issue of The Massachusetts Review. Other recent publications include a selection from her book oh I can’t she says in an anthology of fragmentary pieces (Impassio Press, 2006); prose poems in the literary journals Court Green, Witness, and Sentence; and poems and fiction online. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council and been in residence at MacDowell, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown as a Senior Fellow, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her poems have been selected twice for the The Best American Poetry anthology. A poetry teacher for many years, she has taught in Continuing Studies at Stanford and at the 2007 Foothill College Writers Conference. She continues to teach poetry students privately.

Daniel Leeson

Literary Arts: Writer

Daniel Leeson is a 30-year veteran of the IBM Corporation, a professional performing musician for much of his life, one of the editors of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe 120 volumes of Mozart’ss music, and, following retirement from his business career, a teacher of college-level mathematics. A former officer of the Mozart Society of America, he is also an award winning writer of nonfiction, the author of more than 100 technical articles, the co-author or co-editor of five books, and a published fiction writer.

Peter Nathaniel Malae

Literary Arts: Writer

Peter Nathaniel Malae is the author of the novels, Our Frail Blood (2013), an epic about the dissolution of an American family in three generations; What We Are (2010), a New York Times Editor’s Choice, winner of the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award and a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award; and the story collection, Teach the Free Man (2007), a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Glasgow Prize and a notable book selection by the Story Prize. He is a former John Steinbeck, Arts Council Silicon Valley and MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Elizabeth McKenzie

Literary Arts: Writer

Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of The Portable Veblen, forthcoming from Penguin in 2016. Her collection, Stop That Girl, was short-listed for The Story Prize, and her novel MacGregor Tells the World was a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Kat Meads

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

An award-winning writer of fiction, drama, nonfiction and poetry, Kat Meads is a native of eastern North Carolina. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry, a California Artist Fellowship in fiction and two Silicon Valley Arts Council fellowships. Her short stories have won awards from Chelsea and Inkwell Magazine, her essays from New Letters, Lyra and Drunken Boat. Her historical novel, For You, Madam Lenin, received an IPPY Silver Medal and was a 2012 ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her mystery novel, Senestre on Vacation (written as Z.K. Burrus), was a 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her short plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York and the Midwest. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Dorland, and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. She teaches in Oklahoma City University’s low-residency Red Earth MFA program.

Cathleen Miller

Literary Arts: Writer

Cathleen Miller is a bestselling author and, since 2004, has been a professor of creative writing at San Jose State University. Cathleen has taught hundreds of students – many of whom have gone on to become successful writers, editors, and teachers of writing – in what she call the “daisy chain of learning”. Her biography of Nafis Sadik, Champion of Choice, was named one of the top ten biographies of 2013 by Booklist. Cathleen is the director of the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State University, where she has brought nationally renowned authors to San Jose and has collaborated with organizations including Cinequest, MACLA, the NAACP, First Fridays, and the Hammer Theatre Center.

Kimberly Mohne Hill

Literary Arts: Writer; Performing Artist: Producer, Stage Director

Kimberly Mohne Hill received her MFA in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.). Currently an Associate Professor of Acting, Voice & Speech, and Dialects at Santa Clara University (SCU), Hill continues to direct and dialect coach throughout the Bay Area. Recent directing credits include: Assistant Director of A Thousand Splendid Suns at ACT/Theatre Calgary with Carey Perloff, When the Rain Stops Falling at the Dragon Theater, Venus in Fur at San Jose Stage Company, In the Next Room (or, the vibrator play) at CityLights Theater, and The Other Place at Dragon and Arcadia at SCU. Kimberly’s recent dialect coaching credits include: Around the World in 80 Days, Outside Mullingar and Constellations for TheatreWorks, Peter and the Starcatcher and The Elephant Man at Hillbarn, Shirley Valentine at Center Rep of Walnut Creek and Sweeney Todd at San Jose Stage, among others. She has published three books for young actors on the subject of dialects: Monologues in Dialect for Young Actors, Vol. I & II and Scenes in Dialect for Young Actors.

Ann Neelon

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Ann Neelon is a native of Boston and a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and of Holy Cross College. She has been a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa, as well as a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her poems and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Pequod, Poetry East, Manoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other magazines. She lives with her husband and son in western Kentucky, where she is Assistant Professor of English at Murray State University. Her collection of poems, Easter Vigil, won the 1995 Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

Minh Duc Nguyen

Literary Arts: Writer; Visual Artist: Filmmaker

Minh Duc Nguyen attended UC Berkeley, where he discovered his love for creative writing. He had several short stories published in prestigious literary journals and anthologies. Tale of Apricot was nominated for the O. Henry Award. In graduate film school at USC, Minh received the Jeffrey Jones Scholarship for excellence in screenwriting. His thesis film, Sunshine, inspired a favorable review in LA Weekly and was enthusiastically received at the Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Seattle Asian Film Festivals. For the past several years, Minh has worked as an editor for a variety of television shows that have aired on MTV, ABC, NBC, Bravo, Lifetime, USA, Spike, E!, Style, HGTV, Oxygen, The Travel Channel, Sundance Channel, and SOAPnet. Touch will mark his feature-length directorial debut.

Bradley J. Owens

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Bradley J. Owens is a novelist and poet living in San Francisco CA.

ZZ Packer

Literary Arts: Writer

Zuwena “ZZ” Packer grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and Louisville, Kentucky. Recognized as a talented writer at an early age, her first significant publication was in Seventeen magazine at the age of 19. Packer attended Yale University, where she received a B.A in 1994. Her graduate work included an M.A. at Johns Hopkins University in 1995 and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1999. She was named a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Shortly thereafter, she entered the national literary scene with a high-profile appearance in the Debut Fiction issue of The New Yorker (2000). Her short story in the issue became the title story in her collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003), which was published to considerable acclaim. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and personally selected by John Updike for theToday Show Book Club. Her stories have also appeared in Best American Short Stories 2000 and 2003. In 2005, she was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. She is on the faculty of California College of the Arts, where she serves as Senior Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, a workspace co-operative. She lives in Pacifica, California, a coastal town near San Francisco and is currently at work on a novel set in the aftermath of the Civil War. In June 2010 she was named one of the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of fiction writers worth watching.

Nils Peterson

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Nils Peterson is Professor Emeritus in English at San José State University. In 2009, he was chosen as the first Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County. He has published poetry, science fiction, and articles on subjects as varied as golf and Shakespeare. His chapbooks include Here Is No Ordinary Rejoicing, Driving a Herd of Moose to Durango, For This Day, The Revenge of the Socks, and For This Day II. A collection of poems, The Comedy of Desire, edited and introduced by Robert Bly, was published by The Blue Sofa Press. Other books include Water, Fire, Earth, & Air, Meditations and Poems on the Four Elements (San José, 2003), A Walk to the Center of Things (Caesura Editions, 2011), and a memoir Talk in the Reading Room (Wordrunner Press, 2014). In 2016, he published earth, water, fire, air a collection of poems each illustrated by a watercolor by Lorraine Chapparall. A new collection of poetry, All the Marvelous Stuff, was just published by the Poetry Center of San José (PCSJ). Coleman Barks called it, “intelligent, lonely, funny, and real.”

Jarvis Subia

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Born and raised in the San José Bay Area, Jarvis Subia’s work delves into his relation with his communities, sexuality, masculinity, national/global politics, lineage, race, gardening, mental health, personal growth, and love. Jarvis is San José’s 2018 Poetry Grand Slam Champion. He has been a part of 5 national poetry slam teams representing his college and city. His accomplishments include: graduating with a BA from San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing program, placing 2nd in the nation for multi-voice poems in 2015 with the Palo Alto slam team, coaching a youth and 2 collegiate poetry slam teams for MACLA in San Jose and SFSU, and participating in the masters writing workshop at the 2017 Las Dos Brujas writers conference. Jarvis is a member of 2017-18 & 2018-19 Youth Speaks’ Emerging Poet Mentors collective, an in-class teaching artist for SFJAZZ’s Jazz In The Middle residency program, and is the after school poetry instructor for the Digital Media & Culture Studio at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana/MACLA, a contemporary Latin arts and community organization based in San José.

Michael J. Vaughn

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer; Novelist

Michael J. Vaughn is the author of seventeen books, most recently Mascot, a literary novel set in a minor league baseball park. He is a competitions judge for Writer’s Digest, a thirty-year opera critic, and drummer for the San Francisco rock band Exit Wonderland. Vaughn is also an active poet, with more than 100 poems published in journals both off- and on-line. He graduated from San Jose State with a journalism degree and a classical voice minor. He was born in Brunswick, Maine, and spent much of his childhood shuttling around the country, courtesy of his father Harold’s career as a pilot with the US Navy.

Kirby Wright

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer; Visual Artist

I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. I am a graduate of Punahou School in Honolulu and the University of California at San Diego. I received my MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. I have been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes and three Best of the Nets. I am a past recipient of the Honolulu Weekly Nonfiction Prize, the Jodi Stutz Memorial Prize in Poetry, the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, two Browning Society Awards for Dramatic Monologue, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel. BEFORE THE CITY, my first book of poetry, took First Place at the 2003 San Diego Book Awards.I am also the author of the companion novels PUNAHOU BLUES and MOLOKA’I NUI AHINA, both set in Hawaii. I was a Visiting Fellow at the 2009 International Writers Conference in Hong Kong, where I represented the Pacific Rim region of Hawaii and lectured with Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder. I was also a Visiting Writer at the 2010 Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency in Edgartown, MA, the 2011 Artist in Residence at Milkwood International, Czech Republic, and the 2014 Resident Scholar at the Earthskin Artist Colony in Auckland, New Zealand.

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