June 17, 2015MARCh 18, 2014 |
Jaqueline Luckett I Eunetta Boone
In 1999 Jacqueline Luckett left the corporate world to kickstart her
writing career with classes she took on a dare—from herself. Reinvention, self-awareness, and self-fulfillment are themes throughout Luckett’s novels. She strives to write compelling and interesting stories while addressing fear and what can be done to conquer it. “We can all afford to be fearful, but we can't let fear keep us from doing what we want or need to do.” Luckett refuses to be boxed into categories that limit her drawing power. “My novels have universal appeal—both in story and character,” Luckett says. “Personally, I'll follow a story that makes me look at the world with a perspective different from my own. In both Passing Love and Searching for Tina Turner the main character could be you, your best friend, a co-worker, or the mother of your child's classmate.Jacqueline, a native Californian, lives and writes in Oakland, but takes time out to indulge her love of traveling and to nurture her passion for photography and exotic foods.
TV writer/producer, WGA member who created and exec-produced UPN comedy series’ One on One and Cuts. Ms. Boone served as co-executive producer for My Wife and Kids and The Hughleys. She was also a supervising producer on the The Parent ‘Hood; a producer on Living Single and a story editor/consultant on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Roc, and Getting By. She co-wrote her first book, My Bipolar Life and the Horses that Saved Me, with Sylvia Harris. Boone brings the lives of enigmatic figures to life on the page and screen. The book examines Harris' life, her battle with mental illness, and her run as a successful female jockey. Boone holds a Master's of Journalism from Columbia and was one of the first black woman sports reporters for the Baltimore Sun. She currently teaches screenwriting at UCLA.
Faith Adiele I Elaine Lee I Jenny Irzary I Jezebel Delilah
The author of The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems (Shebooks), a witty, tricultural look at black women and fibroids, and Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton & Co.), a travel memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun. She is also the Co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press. Educated at Harvard University, the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Faith has lived in West Africa and Southeast Asia, worked as a diversity trainer and community activist, and taught travel writing, memoir, and creative writing from Bali to Switzerland to Ghana. She is a member of The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and was recently appointed Associate Professor of Writing at California College of the Arts
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Elaine Lee is an avid world traveler, travel writer and media maven. She is the author/editor of "Go Girl: The Black Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure" as well as a freelance travel writer who has contributed to the numerous national and local magazines, newspapers and webzines. Her travel stories generally address subjects such as African American travel trends, adventure, women’s travel issues, spirituality, solo travel, health, budget travel and travel planning. She has also contributed stories to five anthologies and two books.
Jenny Irizary is a Latina who grew up in a cabin in the redwoods and escaped floods and ghosts to live in Oakland, CA, where she earned a B.A. in Ethnic Studies and an M.A. in literature at Mills College. A member of the Sunday Stories Writing Group who has appeared at LitCrawl, Jenny is completing her memoir.
Jezebel Delilah X is a queer, feminist, performance artist, writer, and literacy educator of color. She is particularly interested in the intersecting uses of art, media, and activism in the temporal construction of culture and identity. She is finishing her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mills College. |
December 17, 2014 |
Renee Swindle I Kelly E. Carter I Lizette Wanzer I Meilan Carter
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Writing A PINCH OF OOH LA LA gave Renee an opportunity to write about two of her favorite things: baking and jazz. Since she’s an only child, she had a blast writing about Abbey’s large multi-racial family made up of musicians and artists. A PINCH OF OOH LA LA takes place in her beloved city of Oakland, CA. Renee would rather hoard books than shoes and goes to movies for the popcorn as much as the film. She owns three rescue dogs that force her to walk every day, rain or shine. Along with world peace, she dreams of one day having her novels adapted to the big or small screen.
Kelly E. Carter is a New York Times bestselling author, Editor of Haute Living Magazine San Francisco, Founder of The Jet Set Pets® and an Italophile who toted her posh pooch Lucy around the globe. As a speaker, Kelly dazzles audiences with tales of her journey to award-winning sportswriter to celebrity reporter to pet travel expert. Her latest book, The Dog Lover's Guide to Travel, was released by National Geographic Books in April and earned Kelly a prestigious Lowell Thomas Award. The tail-all travel guide is available in bookstores and on Amazon.
Lyzette Wanzer is a San Francisco fiction
writer and essayist. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills
College. A flash fiction connoisseur and
essay aficionado, her work has appeared in Callaloo, Tampa Review, The
MacGuffin, Ampersand Review, Journal of Advanced Development, Journal of
Experimental Fiction, and others. She is
a contributor to The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays
(Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2012) and 642 Tiny Things to Write About (Chronicle Books,
2015). Lyzette has been awarded writing
residencies at the Blue Mountain Center (NY), Kimmel Harding Center for the
Arts (NE), Playa Summer Lake (OR), and Horned Dorset Colony (NY). With the support of the grants,
Lyzette is currently at work on an essay collection entitled Gelatin
Prints.
Meilan Carter-Gilkey is a creative writer and a freelance writer who blogs about being a mother of sons 16 years apart ([email protected]). She has an MFA from Mills College in creative writing and her work has appeared in mater mea, Mutha Magazine, Heart&Soul, and in the anthology Who’s Your Mama?
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September 17, 2014
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Natalie Bazile I Elmaz Abinader I Aya Deleon I Lisa D. Gray
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Natalie has a M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA, and is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers where she was a Holden Minority Scholar. An early version of Queen Sugar won the Hurston Wright College Writer’s Award, was a co-runner up in the Faulkner Pirate’s Alley Novel-in-Progress competition, and excerpts were published in Cairn and ZYZZYVA. She has had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation where she was awarded the Sylvia Clare Brown fellowship, Virginia Center for the Arts, and Hedgebrook. Her non-fiction work has appeared in The Rumpus.net, Mission at Tenth, and in The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 9. She is a former fiction editor at The Cortland Review, and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Natalie grew up in Southern California and lives in San Francisco with her family.
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Elmaz is a playwright and novelist. Her new collection of poetry, This House, My Bones was the 2014 Editors Selection from Willow Books and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first memoir, Children of the Roojme, a Family's Journey from Lebanon, chronicles 3 generations of immigrants battling dislocation and tradition. The poetry collection, In the Country of My Dreams... won the 2000 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry award. Elmaz's work has been widely anthologized, most recently in The New Anthology of American Poetry, Vol. 3, and The Colors of Nature. Elmaz is one of the founders of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, (VONA/Voices) in its 15th year providing workshops for writer-of-color. Her writing comes from a tradition in her culture and family to tell stories, create poetry and fill the house with music as a way of communicating the significant moments of a life, a family and a village.
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Lisa is a writer who working on completing her first novel, One Summer that follows twelve girls in 1963 Georgia as they take on Jim Crow as they come of age. She earned an MFA from Mills College and writes short stories, creative non-fiction, and a bit of poetry. She began her writing career as a reporter with the New Haven Independent after graduating from Spelman College with and an English degree. She's studied at the Voices of Our Nations Foundation and completed a residency at the Writer's Grotto in San Francisco. She's also completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and spent a long hot summer writing in the beach at the Fine Arts Work Center. Her work focuses on the intersections of race, class, and gender and explores themes of family and becoming. Her work appears in the journals Mission at 10th and As Us as well as on line in her blog The Randomness of Me on Tumblr.
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Aya is a writer/performer working in poetry, fiction, and hip hop theater. Her work has received acclaim in the Village Voice, Washington Post, American Theatre Magazine, and has been featured on Def Poetry, in Essence Magazine, and various anthologies and journals. She was named best discovery in theater for 2004 by the SF Chronicle for “Thieves in the Temple : The Reclaiming of Hip Hop,” a solo show about fighting sexism and commercialism in hip hop. Aya has been an artist in residence at Stanford University, a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a slam poetry champion. She has released three spoken word CDs, several chapbooks, and a video of “Thieves…” She is currently working on a sexy female Robin Hood heist caper, and is represented by Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Union Literary in New York. Aya is the Director of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program, teaching poetry, spoken word, and hip hop at UC Berkeley. Her recent freelance work has been featured in xojane, Movement Strategy Center, Writers Digest, Woman’s Day, the Good Men Project, the Feminist Wire, My Brown Baby, KQED Pop, Bitch Magazine, and she was recently a guest on HuffPostLive.
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