WRITERS JOINING THE FESTIVAL IN 2020
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THE HUDSON VALLEY WOMEN’S WRITERS GROUP:
COLLEEN GERAGHTY, KIT GOLDPAUG, EILEEN HOWARD,
TANA MILLER, MARY K. O’MELVENY, JAN ZLOTNIK SCHMIDT, and KAPPA WAUGH
CLICK ON ANY NAME ABOVE TO ZOOM TO THAT PARTICULAR WRITER, OR SIMPLY SCROLL DOWN TO VIEW THE ENTIRE ROSTER.
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Dominique Sindayiganza
E. J. Antonio
E.J. Antonio is a 2009 fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a recipient of fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation and the Cave Canem Foundation.
Antonio writes, performs, and records her original works. She has appeared as a featured reader at venues in the NY tri-state area, such as Cornelia Street Café, the Bronx Council on the Arts First Wednesday reading series, the Calypso Muse Reading Series, the Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Harvard Club, WBAI’s broadcast Perspectives, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the Bahai Center, Hunter Mountain Arts Festival, the Bowery Poetry Club, the Port Chester Art Fest 2008, 2009 and 2010, the Home Base Project, the York Arts Center, the Latimer House Museum, and the Howl Festival.
Her work appears online at www.thedrunkenboat.com, poetz.com, and roguescholars.com, and has been published in various Journals and magazines; including, African Voices Literary Magazine, Amistad Literary Journal, Terra Incognita, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Mobius: The Poetry Magazine, The Mom Egg Literary Journal, One Word/Many Voices: A Bi-Lingual Poetry Anthology, and Torch.
Her work is forthcoming in The Encyclopedia Project. The Premier Poets Chapbook Series published her first chapbook, Every Child Knows, in the Fall of 2007, and she is one of the featured poets on the CD, Beauty Keeps Laying It’s Sharp Knife Against Me: Brant Lyon and Friends.
This is Antonio’s third Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “MINDING THE LITERARY ESTATE”.
Visit her at: www.ejantoniobluez.net
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Breena Clarke
Breena Clarke is the author of three novels, River Cross My Heart, Stand the Storm, and her newest, Angels Make Their Hope Here. All three novels present vivid views of African-American communities.
She is a faculty member of the Stone Coast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. She is affiliated with A Room of Her Own: A Foundation for Women Artists. She is an avid swimmer. Since retirement from Time-Warner in 2000, she has been a full-time writer.
Breena is a co-organizer of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers.
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Cheryl Clarke
Cheryl Clarke is a black lesbian feminist poet and the author of five books of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), Experimental Love (1993), By My Precise Haircut, winner of the 2016 Hilary Tham Award from Word Works Books; and the chapbooks, Your Own Lovely Bosom (2014) and Targets (2018).
Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the journals Conditions, Sinister Wisdom, Callaloo, Black World, African American Literary Review, and the iconic anthologies: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.
For the midterm elections of 2018, she co-edited Dump Trump: Legacies of Resistance, a Sinister Wisdom special issue.
Cheryl is a co-organizer of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers.
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Esther Cohen
Esther Cohen is a novelist and poet living in New York City. She’s the author of several books, including Book Doctor. Her writing appears daily on her blog I Am and I Am Not which features her intensely personal poetic observations of life in New York City and the world.
Esther is one of the original members of the Festival and this is her eighth Festival as a participating writer. She will be offering the Writing INTENSIVE Workshop “THE GOOD STORIES INTENSIVE WORKSHOP”.
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Toi Derricotte
Toi Derricotte’s books of poetry include I: New & Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry; The Undertaker's Daughter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011); and Tender (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), which won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize.
She is also the author of a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W. W. Norton, 1997), which won the 1998 Annisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction.
Among her other honors are: the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, two Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Together with Cornelius Eady, Derricotte co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation in 1996, a national poetry organization committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017 and is professor emerita of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
This is Toi’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering a Public Reading.
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Kathy Engel
Kathy Engel is a poet, essayist, educator, and organizational strategic consultant. She currently serves as Chair and Associate Arts Professor in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Department of Art and Public
Policy, and Masters Program in Arts Politics.
Over the past 40 years she has worked in many of the major social justice movements in the U.S. Published and anthologized widely, her books include Ruth’s Skirts (IKON, 2007); The Kitchen, in collaboration with artist German Perez (Yaboa Press, 2011); and We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, co-edited with Kamal Boullata (Interlink Books, 2007).
Kathy’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. The video work Whowillkneel4you? (2018) appears on The Root, and features a chorus of artists reading Kathy’s poem, “To Kneel.”
This is Kathy’s third Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “COLLABORATIVE POETICS”.
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Marita Golden
Marita Golden is co-founder and President Emeritus of the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation.
Books by Marita Golden include the novels The Wide Circumference of Love, After and The Edge of Heaven and the memoirs Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons and Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey Through the Color Complex.
Her most recent book is the anthology which she edited, US Against Alzheimer’s Stories of Family Love and Faith. She is the recipient of many awards including the Writers for Writers Award presented by Barnes & Noble and Poets and Writers and the Fiction Award for her novel After awarded by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
This is Marita’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “UNTHINKABLE, UNFORGETTABLE: Creating Compelling Fictional Characters”.
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Áine Greaney
Áine Greaney is an Irish-born author who never published anything until she emigrated from Ireland to America, alone, at age 24.
Since 1986, she has published five books. Her features, essays, and stories have been published and broadcast in the U.S., Ireland, the U.K. and Canada in publications such as Creative Nonfiction, NPR/WBUR, The Boston Globe Magazine, Numero Cinq, Litro, Salon and The Drum. She is also the author of the popular instructional book, Writer with a Day Job (Writers Digest Books).
Her awards and shortlists include a citation in Best American Essays. Also, “Sanctuary,” her essay about family bereavement, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her second novel, Dance Lessons, was one of 20 chosen by the National Women’s Book Association for National Reading Group Month.
Áine has facilitated creative writing workshops at national and regional conferences, including the Writers Digest Conference in New York City, the Cape Cod Writers Conference, and the Examined Life Conference in Iowa City.
This is Áine’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “DARLING, YOU’RE MAKING A SCENE”.
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Abeer Y. Hoque
Abeer Y. Hoque is a Nigerian-born Bangladeshi American writer and photographer.
Her books include a photography monograph, The Long Way Home (2013), a linked story collection, The Lovers and the Leavers (2015), and a memoir, Olive Witch (2017). She has won fellowships from Fulbright, NEA, and NYFA, and her work has been published in Guernica, the Rumpus, Elle, ZYZZYVA, and the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, among others.
Abeer has held two solo photography exhibitions. She has degrees from the Wharton School and the University of San Francisco.
This is Abeer’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “WRITING GRANTS”.
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Ginnah Howard
Ginnah Howard's work has appeared in Water~Stone Review, Permafrost, Portland Review, Descant 145, Eleven Eleven Journal, The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere. Several stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Night Navigation, Book 2 of her upstate novel trilogy, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Chronogram called Book 3, Doing Time Outside (Standing Stone Books, 2013), “a beautiful read.” Book 1 of the trilogy, Rope & Bone: A Novel in Stories (Illume, 2014) was listed by Publishers Weekly as one of the “best of the best” Indie books of 2015.
In her latest book, I’m Sick of This Already: At-Risk Learning in a High School Class, Howard focuses on a year of working with students in a small rural town. Currently she is putting together a collection of poetry and prose titled An Opera of Hankering.
This is Ginnah’s sixth Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing INTENSIVE Workshop, “PICTURES WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS – Intensive”.
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The Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group
The Hudson Valley Women's Writing Group members include: Colleen Geraghty, Kit Goldpaugh, Eileen Howard, Tana Miller, Mary K. O’Melveny, Jan Zlotnik Schmidt and Kappa Waugh.
In addition to being writers, all are feminists and political activists. . Furthermore, all have been loyal attendees since the inaugural 2013 Festival.
Colleen Geraghty is a professional social worker, musician, and artist. She is a certified Amherst Writer and Artists facilitator, founder of The Story Cottage, and regular presenter/facilitator at numerous writers’ festivals and conferences, including “Women at Woodstock.” She facilitates regular writing workshops, Story Cottage and Story Cottage Words, at local and out-of-state venues.
Her stories and poems have appeared in Wallkill Valley Writers Anthology 2012 and 2013 and in A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. Her story, “The Beer House” received first prize in the Hudson Valley Writers Guild 2013 Short Story Contest.
Kit Goldpaugh taught writing for over for over thirty years in the Hudson Valley to students ranging in age from middle school to college.
Over that time, she participated in the Bard Institute for Thinking and Writing program, the Hudson Valley Writers Workshop, and was awarded both a FIPSI summer grant on composition and an NEH fellowship on Women and Fiction. Kit has read at local poetry reading events.
Eileen Howard is a retired psychiatric nurse, an active writer and photographer as well as an active hiker and lover of nature. She lived in California, Hawaii, and Nova Scotia before landing in New England and then the Hudson Valley.
Many of Eileen’s poems bring a photographic lens to the natural beauty of our environment. She has done readings at local Hudson Valley events.
During a thirty-year career as a teacher, Tana Miller authored language curriculum guides for her school district, cofounded and facilitated a grade 5–8 annual literary magazine, presented award-winning Whole Language workshops in Hudson Valley public schools and at the New York State Reading Conference.
Her work has been published in several feminist journals and in A Slant of Light (Codhill Press). Tana was a selected reader at the Newark Public Library and has been a featured reader at local gatherings, libraries, and book stores.
A retired labor rights lawyer, Mary K. O’Melveny commutes between Woodstock, New York, and Washington, DC. Mary’s poetry has appeared in various print and online journals as well as on various blog sites such as Women at Woodstock, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and The New Verse News.
Her work has been awarded recognition in several national writing contests; her poem Cease Fire won the 2017 Raynes Poetry Competition. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Woman of a Certain Age (Finishing Line Press, September, 2018).
A SUNY Distinguished Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, Jan Zlotnik Schmidt’s work has been published in many literary journals, such as Alaska Quarterly Review and Kansas Quarterly, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series.
Jan coedited, with Laurence Carr, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley. Jan has authored two poetry volumes published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She Had This Memory, 2000).
Her chapbook The Earth Was Still was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, was published by Word Temple Press.
Kappa Waugh recently retired after twenty happy years as Reference Librarian for Vassar College. She was born into a family of writers and began her own writing as a young woman. Kappa’s poetry was published in school and college literary journals and, during her twenties, in BlackRock.
More recently, Kappa’s work has appeared in three editions of Legacies, in a poetry anthology, and in A Slant of Light, and on the blog site “Writing in a Woman’s Voice.” Kappa has read at numerous Hudson Valley literary venues.
This is The Hudson Valley Women's Writing Group’s first Festival as participating writers and they will be offering the Public Program PANEL CONVERSATION: Collaborating to Create A Women’s Writing Community.
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Mary Johnson
Mary Johnson is the author of An Unquenchable Thirst, named one of 2011’s best nonfiction books by Kirkus Review and awarded the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Nonfiction.
After spending twenty years as a nun with the Sisters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College and helped found A Room of Her Own Foundation.
Mary now considers herself a secular Humanist and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, O the Oprah Magazine, The Huffington Post, Bloomberg View, Religion News Services, and National Public Radio.
Mary's work has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, Salon.com, Poets & Writers, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, and The Rosie Show, among others. A Humanist Celebrant, Mary creates unique ceremonies for weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage, and has twice been voted New Hampshire’s top wedding officiant.
She blogs at Medium and can be found at www.maryjohnson.co. Mary LOVES the Hobart Festival of Women Writers. She’s currently writing about the brain, the mysteries of consciousness, and the illusion of the self — so understand that while everything in this bio is true, it’s an illusion to think all this belongs to Mary.
This is Mary’s fifth Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “WRITING A GREAT SEX SCENE”.
Visit her at: www.maryjohnson.co
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Micharne Cloughley
Micharne Cloughley is a TV and theatre writer. Cloughley is currently a staff writer for Law & Order : SVU.
Her plays include A Dream Panel of Real Women, which was developed through the Creative Arts Fellowship at the National Library of Australia. With The Civilians, she wrote The Way They Live and co-wrote The End and the Beginning, both performed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Other plays have been developed or presented by The Tank, Animus Theatre, Australian Made Entertainment, Holden Street Theatres, Rock Surfers Theatre, Spark Youth Theatre, and the Q Theatre.
This is Micharne’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “PLOTTING THE TV EPISODE”.
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Venise T. Berry
Venise T. Berry’s professional media career began in radio news but has expanded into teaching, media research, and criticism, as well as fiction, script, and nonfiction writing.
She is the author of three national bestselling novels, So Good, An African American Love Story (Dutton/Penguin, 1996), All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (Dutton/Penguin 2000), which received Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association in 2001, and Colored Sugar Water (Dutton/Penguin/Putnam 2002).
In 2001 she was recognized with an Iowa Author Award from the Public Library Foundation in Des Moines. Also In 2003, she received the Creative Contribution to Literature award from the Zora Neale Hurston Society. She has degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Texas-Austin.
This is Venise’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “TRIAGE EDITING: Effective revision for new and established writers.”
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Marina Antropow Cramer
Born in postwar Germany into a family of refugees from the Soviet Union, Marina Antropow Cramer has enjoyed the benefit of lifelong ties to Russian expatriate communities.
Her work has been performed by Roselee Blooston's Short Story Theater. A short story, “Pear,” appeared online in Blackbird Literary Journal in 2009; another story, “Grave,” came out in the Fall 2009 online issue of Istanbul Literary Review.
The digital journal Wilderness House Literary Review published “In Case of Fire” in the Winter 2010 issue, and “Half the Bed” in Winter 2012.
Roads was her first novel. Her second, Anna Eva Mimi Adam, is scheduled for a February 2020 release. She holds a BA degree in English.
This is Marina’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “FACT + FICTION: Writing The Historical Novel”.
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Denise B. Dailey
Of French-Chilean origin, Denise B. Dailey has traveled to the seven continents which inform much of her writing.
Publications include a travel journal, Listening to Pakistan: A Woman’s Voice in a Veiled Land; a biography of the Czech painter, Jan Emmerich Mikeska, Riko: Seductions of an Artist, for which she won a Kirkus starred review (www.podcastone.com/episode/Christopher-Goffard).
Additionally, her memoir, Leaving Guanabara, is about her life as a child in Brazil during the Second World War. She holds degrees from McGill and Columbia Universities.
This is Denise’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “TRAVEL WRITING”.
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Junauda Petrus-Nasah
Junauda Petrus-Nasah is a writer, pleasure activist, filmmaker and performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born on Dakota land. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation.
She is the co-founder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, an experimental arts production company. She is currently writing and directing, "Sweetness of Wild" a poetic-episodic film series themed around Blackness, queerness, biking, resistance, love and coming of age in Minneapolis. Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them is out on Dutton Children’s list.
Junauda lives in Minneapolis with her wife, child and family.
This is Junauda s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “DREAMING OUR LIVES AND FUTURES THROUGH YOUNG ADULT FICTION WRITING”.
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Mercy Tullis-Bukhari
Mercy Tullis-Bukhari is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who focuses on the woman experience through individuality, motherhood, and sexuality.
She published two books of poetry titled Smoke and Mango. She is a Callaloo Fellow, an MFA recipient in Creative Writing from The College of New Rochelle, and the Poet Laureate of the New York University 30th Anniversary Celebration Gala.
Mercy was named by Remezcla Magazine as one of the “8 Authors Bringing Afro-Latina Stories to the Forefront.” She was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2016 for her essay, “Black Dolls for Everyone.”
Mercy teaches high school English Language Arts in the Southeast section of The Bronx, is completing her first novel, and is completing her third book of poetry. She lives in New Rochelle, NY, with her two children.
This is Mercy’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE: Finding Beauty in Life-changing Events”.
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Alice Lichtenstein
Alice Lichtenstein’s recently published novel, The Crime of Being (Upper Hand Press, 2019) has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. She has received a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction and has twice been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony.
Previous novels include: The Genius of the World (Zoland Books, 2000), and Lost (Scribner, 2010). Her short fiction has been included in numerous publications, three of them nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
She is a renowned teacher of fiction writing, a featured writer and panelist at The Tucson Festival of Books, and teaches at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York and in Surrey, Maine. She holds degrees from Brown and Boston Universities.
This is Alice’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “TRANSFORMATIONS: Autobiography into Fiction”.
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Stephanie Nikolopoulos
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer and editor, based in New York City. She is the author, along with Paul Maher Jr., of the book Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
She also wrote the introduction to the reissue of the travel classic A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird and contributed to Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia.
Stephanie’s personal essays and journalism on visual arts, literature, endangered languages, and Greece and Sweden have appeared in such publications as BOMBlog, Brooklyn Rail, Gothamist, The Literary Traveler, and The Millions as well as mentioned by The New Yorker (Page-Turner), The Paris Review (On the Shelf), The Huffington Post and other media outlets.
For more than a decade she has edited books for a publishing house. She is also the visual arts editor for Burnside Writers Collective, where she writes a column about church architecture called Church Hopping and offers live tours. She has taught writing classes in New York and Michigan and written curriculum for authors. Stephanie has given readings at the Bowery Poetry Club, Cornelia Street Café, The Sidewalk Café, and other establishments.
Stephanie is one of the original members of the Festival and this is her seventh Festival as a participating writer. She will be offering the Writing Workshop, “WHO GETS TO TELL A STORY?”.
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Bertha Rogers
Bertha Rogers, named First Poet Laureate of Delaware County, New York, in March 2005, is a poet, translator, visual artist, and master teaching artist.
More than 250 of her poems and critical reviews have appeared in such journals as Many Mountains Moving, The MacGuffin, Connecticut Review, Laurel Review, Karamu, Nimrod, Chelsea, Pivot, Yankee, and Barrow Street; and in several anthologies.
Her poetry collections include Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen, 1991), The Fourth Beast (Snark Publishing, 2004), For the Girl Buried in the Peat Bog (Six Swans Artists Editions, 1999), and A House of Corners, winner of the Maryland State Poetry Society and Review Competition (Three Conditions Press, Baltimore, 2000). Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, was published in 2000 by Birch Brook Press, Delhi, NY, and her interdisciplinary Beowulf exhibit with readings and workshops toured the U.S. from 2000-2002.
In 2005, Bertha published Even the Hemlock, a collection of words and images from her "Even the Hemlock: Reliquaries and Illuminations" exhibit, traveling throughout New York since 2003. The exhibit and book were funded through grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Grant Program.
She has also received a fellowship from the AE Foundation. Her word-and-image works are in the Harry Ransom Collection, the University of Texas and other public and private collections. In 2007 her exhibit "The Stones & Bones of Delaware County" was awarded a NYSCA grant and was exhibited in museums and galleries in Delaware County, NY and at the Hamilton Club Gallery, Paterson, NY (March-April 2008).
In 2009, her exhibit, "Riddle Me This: The Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Poems Translated for Our Time and Place," received a New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Program grant and toured Delaware County, opening at the Elijah Thomas Gallery, Delaware County Historical Association Museum in Delhi; then traveling to the historic Hanford Mills Museum in East Meredith.
Bertha is one of the original members of the Festival and this is her seventh Festival as a participating writer. She will be offering the Writing INTENSIVE Workshop “EXPANDING IDEAS: Words into poems into artist books”.
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Elena Schwolsky
Elena Schwolsky, RN, MPH, whose book, Waking in Havana: A Memoir of AIDS and Healing in Cuba, was published in November, 2019 by She Writes Press.
Her essays have appeared in The American Journal of Nursing and The Veteran, and her work has been included in the anthologies Storied Dishes: What Our Family Recipes Tell Us About Who We Are and Where We’ve Been and Reflections on Nursing: 80 inspiring stories on the art and science of nursing. A chapter she co-wrote appears in the textbook Children, Families and AIDS: Psychosocial and Therapeutic Issues.
Schwolsky is the recipient of a writing award from the Barbara Deming Money for Women Fund and is proud to be recognized as the madrina (godmother) of Proyecto Memorias, the Cuban AIDS Quilt project
This is Elena’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “WRITING ACROSS BORDERS”.
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Sophfronia Scott
Sophfronia Scott is the author of the best-selling novel Unforgivable Love, a scintillating re-telling of Dangerous Liasons, set during the Harlem Renaissance.
She is the author of This Child of Faith, written with her thirteen-year-old son, Tain, a tender and provocative non-fiction book and she has also written, Love's Long Line, a provocative and thoughtful rumination on motherhood, race, and contemporary culture.
Sophfronia is the author of All I Need to Get By, a novel and author of the much-heralded work of nonfiction Doing Business by the Book: How to Craft a Crowd-Pleasing Book and Attract More Clients and Speaking Engagements Than You Ever Thought Possible. She has contributed to three Chicken Soup for the Soul books and the book Forty Things to Do When You Turn Forty. As well, she edited How the Fierce Handle Fear—Secrets to Succeeding in Challenging Times. Sophfronia began her career as a journalist at Time and People Magazine.
Sophfronia is one of the original members of the Festival and this is her seventh Festival as a participating writer. She will be offering the Writing Workshop, “WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN? Navigating Your Novel or Memoir Through The Sea of Time”.
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Renée Olander
Renée Olander is author of the poetry collection American Dangerous and chapbooks A Few Spells and Wild Flights.
Her poetry and prose have appeared in Forgotten Women, Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility, Sistersong: Women Across Cultures, 13th Moon, Plainswoman, and the Split This Rock/Blog This Rock Poem of the Week, among others.
Since 1994, ten of her interviews with writers, including Mary Oliver, June Jordan, Dorothy Allison, Lesléa Newman, and Anne Waldman, have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle and its predecessor The AWP Chronicle.
Renée lives in Southeastern Virginia, in the crosshairs of climate change and sea-level rise.
This is Renée’s first Festival as a participating writer and she will be offering the Writing Workshop, “WRITING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE”.
Visit her at: meccajamilahsullivan.com