PRESENTERS

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Steve Almond is the author of six books, most recently Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. He also, crazily, self-publishes books. This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey is composed of thirty brief stories and thirty brief essays on the psychology and practice of writing. He says that his Letters from People Who Hate Me is just plumb crazy. In 2011 Lookout Press will publish his third story collection, God Bless America.

Catherine Blake has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and an executive MBA from Harvard University. She is currently an adjunct professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics. She has been recognized by Who’s Who in Information Technology and has served on the board of directors of several nonprofit groups, including the MIT Enterprise Forum, the Boys and Girls Clubs, and Girls Inc. She is affiliated with SMPS (Society for Marketing Professional Services), SAMA (Strategic Account Management Association), and AMA (American Marketing Association). True to her values, Blake serves as a mentor to young business people and serves on a leadership team at her church in New Hampshire. She recently launched a community group called MarketPlace Connection, to raise the bar for ethics and integrity in the business world.

Rick Broussard, editor of New Hampshire Magazine, has been a short-order cook, managed communications for a prison ministry, operated a letterpress printing shop, helped build and run a family restaurant, shoveled giblets in a chicken-processing plant, and worked in the Gulf of Mexico on a drilling barge. He has interviewed presidents, rock stars, nationally famous writers and artists, and hundreds of local authorities and characters. He is cochair of Building on Hope, cofounder and a board member of the NH Theatre Awards, and a board member of New Hampshire Made and the New Energy Foundation. He is a member of the New Hampshire Humanities Council Board of Advisers and is entertainment chair of the annual “Best of New Hampshire” Party. He lives in a two-hundred-year-old house in Concord with his wife, three kids who come and go from various colleges, and a faithful parakeet. He keeps an organic garden and four pampered chickens.

Christopher Castellani’s first novel, A Kiss from Maddalena, won the 2004 Massachusetts Book Award, was a BookSense Top Ten Pick, and has been published in five countries. His second novel, The Saint of Lost Things, was published in 2005 and was long-listed for the IMPAC/Dublin Literary Award. Twice a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Castellani has taught fiction writing at Swarthmore College, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and numerous conferences around the country. He is currently on the fiction faculty of the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and the artistic director of Grub Street Writers in Boston.

John Clayton has been a feature columnist for the New Hampshire Union Leader for the past twenty-five years. In addition to receiving numerous awards for sports writing, feature writing, and investigative reporting, he has been honored three times by the New England Associated Press with Best Local Column honors, and he also received an Emmy for his work with New Hampshire Public Television, where he served as host of New Hampshire Crossroads. In 2007, when celebrating twenty-five years of broadcasting, New Hampshire Public Radio selected Clayton as one of the twenty-five most influential people in New Hampshire in the last quarter century. Meanwhile, for his many stories on behalf of veterans, the Catholic War Veterans of America presented him with its 2008 National Media Americanism Award. In his free time, Clayton has also written seven books about Manchester and New Hampshire, including his latest, Remembering Manchester.

Joni B. Cole is the author of the Toxic Feedback: Helping Writers Survive and Thrive, which was “strongly recommended” by Library Journal for students, teachers, and workshops. She is also the creator of Water Cooler Diaries: Women across America Share Their Day at Work, called“both fascinating and eye-opening” by Publisher’s Weekly. Her personal essays have appeared in several literary journals, and she is a contributor to the Writer magazine. Cofounder of the Writer’s Center of White River Junction, Vermont, Cole is a frequent speaker at writing conferences around the country. Her new book, Another Heartwarming and Hilarious Bad-Dog Story: Essays about Life, Love, and Neurotic Human Behavior, will be released this fall from PublishingWorks. For more information, visit http://www.jonicole.com.

Ann Collette spent 15 years as a freelance writer and editor before joining the Rees Literary Agency eleven years ago, a background that comes in handy when developing first novels. Her fiction list includes literary, horror, mystery, women’s fiction, and crime novelists, including Steven Sidor and RWA and Edgar award nominated Vicki Lane. Her non-fiction interests include memoir, biography, pop culture, race, class and military (particularly Vietnam and anything set in the Asian theater). 

David Corey has worked in the book-publishing industry for nearly two decades, from editing and acquisitions to marketing, publicity, and sales, at such houses as W. W. Norton and Tuttle Publishing. A former writing and literature instructor, Corey is a graduate of Emerson College’s master’s program in writing, literature, and publishing. He is the director of marketing and sales for the University Press of New England in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he oversees the publishing programs for Dartmouth College, Brandeis University, Wesleyan University, the University of New Hampshire, Northeastern University, and others.

Michele Filgate is a writer, independent bookseller, and book critic. She is the events coordinator at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth. She is a former broadcast associate for the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, where she found stories and helped produce Steve Hartman’s “Assignment America,” a weekly feature segment. Filgate has written for the Star Tribune, Bookslut, the Quarterly Conversation, the Brooklyn Rail, the Book Studio, and other publications. Filgate was selected for New Hampshire Magazine’s 2010 It List.

Jeff Friedman is the author of five collections of poetry: Working in Flour, Black Threads, Taking Down the Angel, Scattering the Ashes, and The Record-Breaking Heat Wave. His poems, mini stories and translations have appeared in many literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, 5 AM, New England Review, Poetry International, Quick Fiction, North American Review, Ontario Review, Antioch Review, Night Train, Cardinal Points, Agni Online, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, and the New Republic. His book of translations, Two Gardens: Modern Hebrew Poems of the Bible, was accepted for publication by Wolfson Press. A contributing editor to Natural Bridge, he is at work on a collection of mini stories, parables, and other prose pieces.

Erika Goldman is publisher and editorial director of Bellevue Literary Press (BLP), a mission-driven, nonprofit book press. Located within the NYU School of Medicine, BLP publishes literary and authoritative fiction and nonfiction at the nexus of the arts and the sciences, with a special focus on medicine. As BLP’s authors explore cultural and historical representations of the human body, illness, and health, they address the impact of scientific and medical practice on the individual and society. By bridging the gap between the arts and the sciences in original and artful ways, BLP promotes science literacy to its nonprofessional readership and humane and ethical practice to medical and scientific professionals. Among its recent titles is Tinkers by Paul Harding, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. Before cofounding BLP, Goldman worked at several major publishing houses in New York City, including Scribner, Simon & Schuster, and W. H. Freeman. A recipient of the Jerusalem International Book Fair Editorial Fellowship, Goldman has taught at New York University’s Center for Publishing and in the Creative Nonfiction Mentoring Program.

Paul Harding has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught writing at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. He lives near Boston with his wife and two sons. Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is his first novel.

 

John Herman is an artist, a writer, and a teacher. He serves as an emerging media trainer and consultant, covering the wide range of topics in the intersection of technology and culture. He founded and hosts NH Media Makers. Recent speaking topics have included live web streaming (for Boston University’s College of Communication), collaborative art on the Web (for Pecha Kucha), social media for writers (for NHWP’s annual Writers’ Day conference), and media literacy in the twenty-first century (for the Woods Hole Film Festival). Recently he was a featured comedy performer at the Tokyo Impro Festival. Herman was the first NHWP Literary Idol winner and is a member of NHWP’s board.

Tim Horvath is the author of Circulation, published by sunnyoutside press in 2009, and stories published in Conjunctions, Fiction, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, and many other journals. His story “The Understory” won the 2006 Raymond Carver Short Story Award, judged by Bill Henderson. Horvath teaches creative writing at Chester College of New England and Grub Street Writers and research writing at UMass Lowell. He blogs for Big Other and edits fiction for Camera Obscura. In 2008 he received a Yaddo residency. He can be found at www.timhorvath.com and in the woods.

Mary Johnson is the author of an upcoming memoir about her twenty years as a nun: An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life. Johnson is creative director of retreats for A Room of Her Own Foundation and is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony.

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. Named a best book of the year by the Independent of London and the Irish Times, Corpus Christi has received numerous awards. Johnston’s work appears in magazines such as the Paris Review, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, the Oxford American, and Tin House and in anthologies such as New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best for 2003, 2004, and 2005. He is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has written essays for Slate.com and is a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a new National Book Award for writers under thirty-five. A skateboarder for almost twenty years, Johnston is currently the director of the Creative Writing Program at Harvard University.

J. Kates a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a non-profit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems: Mappemonde, Metes and Bounds and The Old Testament. He is the translator of The Score of the Game and An Offshoot of Sense by Tatiana Shcherbina; Say Thank You and Level with Us by Mikhail Aizenberg; When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree and Secret Wars by Jean-Pierre Rosnay; and Corinthian Copper by Regina Derieva. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era.  A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry.

James Patrick Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays, and planetarium shows. His books include Burn, Strange but Not a Stranger, Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories, Look Into the Sun, and Planet of Whispers. His fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. He has won the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award twice: in 1996 for his novelette Think Like A Dinosaur and in 2000 for his novelette 1016 to 1. He writes an online column for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He posts two weekly podcasts: Free Reads and James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod. He received the 2009 New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Book of Fiction and currently serves on the board of NHWP.

Deb McKew is a freelance journalist for several New Hampshire publications, including Kearsarge Magazine, Upper Valley Life, and Edible White Mountains. She is also a contributor to the international magazine Italianicious: The Essence of Italy. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Boston University’s College of Communication. McKew earned her bachelor’s degree in biology and English literature from Mount Holyoke College. She is also a certified teacher of secondary English and teaches writing composition at Colby-Sawyer College. Because she believes writing should be fun, she founded Words in Play Writing Workshops (www.wordsinplay.net).

Mary Carroll Moore, MA, MFA, is the author of thirteen published books in three genres. Her recent novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award and was featured in the New York Times. She has taught for NHWP, the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center near New York City. A former syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times, she has had over two hundred of her essays, short stories, articles, and poems appear in literary journals, magazines, and newspapers around the United States and has won such awards as the McKnight Fellowship for Creative Prose and such competitions as Glimmer Train Press awards and the Loft Mentor Series.

Lorin Rees is an agent with Helen Rees Literary Agency, which represents such leading authors as Michael Hammer, Alan Dershowitz, Jack Welch, and others. Rees’s books and authors include Words That Work by Frank Luntz, Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green by Johnny Rico, and Travel Writing by Peter Ferry. Located in Boston, the agency acquires fiction, including literary and genre fiction, and nonfiction, including business, current affairs, memoir, and humor.

Rebecca Sinkler was literary editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1979 to 1983. She joined the staff of the New York Times Book Review in 1983 and became the editor from 1983 to 1995. She has reviewed books for the Inquirer, the Times, and the Washington Post. She has served as a Pulitzer Prize jurist on journalism and literary panels. She lives in Sandwich, New Hampshire, where she is writing The Trollopes, a memoir of her two grandmothers’ fifty-year, six-member book club of the same name.

Mary Ann Sullivan, editor of the Tower Journal, is a pioneer in the field of digital poetry. She earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Norwich University and a doctor of arts degree from Franklin Pierce University, where her dissertation focused on digital poetry. Sullivan is committed to expanding the field of digital poetry and to that end has collaborated on digital poems with Russell Goings, the author of The Children of Children Keep Coming, and with Jesse Glass, the publisher of Ahadada Books, and others. Sullivan is an associate professor at Hesser College. Some of her pioneering digital poetry can be viewed online at www.towerjournal.com/about_editor.htm.

John Walters is a writer, editor, and voice artist. He was the creator and host of The Front Porch on New Hampshire Public Radio. For his magazine writing, he was given the 2009 Donald M. Murray Award for Outstanding Journalism from the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. His first book, Roads Less Traveled: Visionary New England Lives, was published in 2010.

 

Lissa Warren is vice president, senior director of publicity, and acquiring editor at Da Capo Press, a member of Perseus Books Group. The author of The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity, she teaches courses on book publicity, book marketing, and book publishing at Emerson College and Boston University.

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