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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: 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: 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: 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: 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.

Ann Neelon

Literary Arts: 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.

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