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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)

Sally Ashton

Literary Arts: Poet

Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, teacher, and Editor-in-Chief of DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. She earned her BA in English with a creative writing minor from SJSU, and her MFA in Poetry and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship, Poetry, from Arts Council Silicon Valley and a fellowship from Montalvo Arts Center. She is the author of three books of poetry, two of which were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Poems also appear in the textbook, An Introduction to the Prose Poem, and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes, as well as in literary journals such as Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Brevity, Zyzzyva, 5am, Mississippi Review, and Poet Lore. She was awarded the Fish Flash Fiction First Prize, an international award, in 2014. Ashton was appointed the second Santa Clara County Poet Laureate on April 1, 2011. During her term, she compiled a collection of the favorite poems of County residents posted on a project blog. She also hosted a series of public readings of these poems throughout the county. Her project for 2012 was Poetry on the Move, a contest for county residents culminating in winning poems placed in county buses and light rail cars. Besides teaching at San Jose State University, she teaches private workshops and at writer’s workshops including Disquiet: An International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. She has a keen interest in the intersection of the arts and science and in the relation of image to word.

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.

David Denny

Literary Arts: Poet

David Denny is a writer, teacher, and editor. He is the author of three poetry collections: Man Overboard, Fool in the Attic, and Plebeian on the Front Porch. His poems and short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including The Sun, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Stone Voices, and Pearl. Honors and awards include a 2013 Artist Laureate Award from the Silicon Valley Arts Council, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Cupertino, California, and numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. He is former editor-in-chief of Bottomfish magazine.

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.

Jezrael Gandara

Literary Arts; Performing Artist: Producer; Visual Artist: Filmmaker, Videographer

Jezrael Gandara’s work straddles the line between documentary and art, encouraging his subjects to communicate their feelings. “There are parts of San Jose that remind me of El Paso, and it makes it feel like home. I hope my work can make an impact within the community by helping share its stories.”

Leah Halper

Literary Arts: Playwright

Leah Halper has worked as a journalist, activist, house-cleaner, translator, interpreter, file clerk, mediator, and freelance writer. She’s picked coffee in Nicaragua, studied disarmament at the UN, jogged in Romania, and interviewed cannery workers in Gilroy. Her literary non-fiction has been published in the Northwest Review, Trivia, Bad Subjects, and elsewhere. She teaches history and mediation at Gavilan College in Gilroy. She’s a member of writers pool for SF PlayGround at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre (eight seasons), Pear Avenue Theatre Writers Guild (eight seasons), Dramatists Guild, Theatre Bay Area, and Playwrights Center San Francisco. She’s been the grateful recipient of two Arts Council Silicon Valley grants: in 2001, a Playwriting Fellowship, and in 2007, a grant administered through Calaveras Repertory Theatre to produce Scene Nights in the South Bay for Emerging Playwrights. Leah’s been a Heideman Award finalist, and participated by invitation in the Theatre for Higher Education play development workshop in 2012. Her short plays have been performed from Seattle to LA.

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.

Jeffrey Lo

Literary Arts: Playwright

Jeffrey Lo is a Filipino-American playwright and director based in the Bay Area. He is the recipient of the 2014 Leigh Weimers Emerging Arist Award, the 2012 Emerging Artist Laureate by Arts Council Silicon Valley and Theatre Bay Area Director’s TITAN Award. His plays have been produced and workshopped at The BindleStiff Studio, City Lights Theatre Company, Custom Made Theatre Company and the Orange County Playwrights Alliance. Recent directing credits include Eurydice at Palo Alto Players Some Girl(s) at Dragon Productions and The Drunken City at Renegade Theatre Experiment. Jeffrey has also worked with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, TheatreWorks & San Jose Repertory Theatre. He is the FutureWorks Fellow at TheatreWorks, the founding artistic director of The 06 Ensemble and a proud alumnus of the UC Irvine Drama Department.

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.

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