2005 Retreat Faculty

Retreat for Committed Women Writers

Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is a passionate poet, fiction writer, and teacher, finalist for the 2000 National Book Award, and recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal. Her dynamic energy and keen poetic sense make her workshops unforgettable experiences.

Kim has authored four collections of poetry, most recently What Is This Thing Called Love (W.W. Norton), which Tony Hoagland called "a hot, dark book of the body, engrossed in the fusions and fissions of eros." Her previous collections, all from BOA Editions, are The Philosopher's Club, Jimmy & Rita, and Tell Me, finalist for the 2000 National Book Award and PEN USA West Book Award. A book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure, was published by Fiction Collective 2. She is also co-author, with Dorianne Laux, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton). With Cheryl Dumesnil, she co-edited Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos (Warner Books).

Kim’s poems and stories have appeared widely in anthologies and literary journals including American Poetry Review, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day, Gettysburg Review, Other Voices, Paris Review, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She currently teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA.

Kim's first novel, Little Beauties—a story about mothers and daughters, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and the messiness of life—is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster this summer. Kim can be found online at http://addonizio.home.mindspring.com

Rebecca Brown

Rebecca Brown is the author of ten books, including novels, memoir, prose poetry and short stories. Her titles include The End of Youth, The Terrible Girls and The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary (all with City Lights), The Gifts of the Body and Excerpts From a Family Medical Dictionary. Her most recent book Woman in Ill Fitting Wig is a collaboration with painter Nancy Kiefer (available at www.pistilbooks.net). Rebecca has also recently completed a libretto for a dance opera, The Onion Twins to be performed by Better Biscuit Dance in 2005. She has been awarded the Boston Book Review Award for fiction, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and a Washington State Governors Award. Her work has been translated into six languages, and she is an indefatigable and enthusiastic teacher of broad experience. Rebecca's work has also been widely anthologized, including stories in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories.

Rebecca is currently artistic director of the 2005 Centrum's Port Townsend Writers' Conference, and has taught in numerous settings including Goddard College, where she is currently on the MFA faculty, Northwestern University, The Cranbrook Academy, the University of Washington Extension, Pacific Lutheran University, prisons, senior citizen's homes, libraries, and bars. For two years she was Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House Literary Center in Seattle where she served as Senior Teacher, met community members for writing consultations, curated an eclectic reading/performance series for The Jack Straw Foundation, Red and Black Books, and the local NPR affiliate.

Rebecca has lived in London and Italy and now makes her home in Seattle with her spouse, their cats, and an impressive collection of rock-n-roll, classical, and weird CDs.

Breena Clarke

Breena Clarke, author of River, Cross My Heart, an October 1999 Oprah Book Club selection, is also the recipient of the 1999 award for fiction by the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association and the Alex Award, given by the Young Adult Library Services Association, for her debut novel.

A graduate (B.F.A.) of Howard University, Breena Clarke is co-author with Glenda Dickerson of Remembering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show, which is anthologized in Contemporary Plays by Women of Color and Colored Contradictions, An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays. Her short fiction is included in Black Silk, A Collection of African American Erotica, and Street Lights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience.

Breena has been published in Time, Black Masks, Women and Performance, Conditions, Attaché, Essence Magazine, Dog Fancy, The Chicago Tribune Book World and others. While administering the Editorial Diversity Program at Time Warner Inc. in New York City, Breena mentored a number of young journalists and writers.

Breena, who has survived the death of her only child, writes with depth and clarity about grief. Her work is marked by compassion and magnificent use of language. She is also a keen observer of the relations between humans and their canine partners. She is engaged in wonder at the ways that material goods and work tools tell the history of people who are marginalized on the literary landscape. Fascinated by the vast array of small and insignificant objects that contain finely detailed denigrating images of African-Americans, Breena is a passionate collector of Black Memorabilia as well.

Since leaving Time to write fiction full time, Breena lives with her husband and two dogs in Jersey City, NJ. She is completing work on a novel set in Civil War era Washington, D.C.

Maggie Klee Lichtenberg, PCC

Maggie Klee Lichtenberg, PCC has been a publishing coach for nine years, and brings a wealth of experience to the AROHO Retreat. Her career began as a journalist, with essays, criticism, and features in many publications including The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, The Nation, Ms., Mademoiselle, and Working Woman. Maggie then worked for 20 years as an editorial, marketing and sales publishing company executive in New York and Boston (Simon & Schuster, Bantam, Grove Press, Beacon Press). In 1995 she quit her job as marketing director for Beacon Press in Boston, and moved 2000 miles across the country, without a partner, to the environment of her dreams — the Southwest, where she founded a national coaching business for companies and individuals in career and life transition who, concurrently, may be pursuing book publication.

A public speaker and facilitator as well, Maggie leads seminars—on becoming an advocate for yourself and your life choices—for writers and business owners at universities, writers’ conferences, women’s organizations, and national publisher association meetings.

Maggie’s newest passion evolved out of her experience with unexpected open-heart surgery in July 2003. Now thriving, Maggie is currently completing a book, Open Heart Coach: The Heart Surgery Home Recovery Planner For Patients and Caregivers.

Maggie is a Coach U graduate, and has been credentialed as a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) by the International Coach Federation. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan and pursued graduate work at Harvard on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She is past president of the New York Chapter of the Women’s National Book Association.

Maggie has two adult children, both writers, living in New York City. Currently, Maggie lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her new husband, Bill. Learn more about Maggie’s publishing coaching at www.maggielichtenberg.com.

Ellen McLaughlin

Ellen McLaughlin is an accomplished playwright and passionate teacher whose past AROHO workshops have received rave reviews. Ellen's plays have been produced Off Broadway, regionally and internationally. Her plays include "Days and Nights Within," "A Narrow Bed," "Infinity's House," "Tongue of a Bird" "Iphigenia and Other Daughters," "The Trojan Women," "Helen," "The Persians," and "Oedipus." Producing theaters have included the Almeida Theater, London, the National Actors' Theater, the Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, and the Guthrie Theater, MN. She is the winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award. She has been the recipient of grants from the Fund for New American Plays and the NEA.

An anthology of Ellen’s work, The Greek Plays, with an introduction by Tony Kushner, was recently published by Theatre Communications Group. Ellen has taught playwriting at Barnard College since 1995.

Also an accomplished actor, Ellen is most well known for having originated the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, appearing in every U.S. production through its Broadway run.

Antonya Nelson

Antonya Nelson is the author of three novels and four short story collections: Female Trouble, Living to Tell, Nobody’s Girl, Talking in Bed, Family Terrorists, In the Land of Men, and The Expendables. Toni’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Redbook and other magazines, as well as in numerous anthologies. The New Yorker named Toni one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”

Toni is the 2003 Rea Award Winner for the short story, whose previous winners include Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Grace Paley, and Joyce Carol Oates. Her other awards include the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction, the PEN Nelson Algren Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. Her books have been New York Times notable books in 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. Toni is also the recipient of an NEA grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Toni’s writing is consistently praised for its beauty and for her exploration of the emotional terrain of women. The Washington Post Book World calls her “a formidable writer. That is, she’s a woman of piercing intelligence, a first-rate stylist, an explorer of language who questions all its customary uses while fashioning evocative descriptions and incisive phrases.”

Family is a frequent theme in Toni’s writing, and literature seems to be a theme in her family. The child of two English professors, Toni and her husband novelist Robert Boswell share the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, and her daughter and her first book were both “born” a year after her marriage. Toni divides her time between Telluride, Colorado, and Houston Texas, and also teaches at Warren Wilson College and is a frequent visiting faculty at writing conferences.

Jody Rein

Jody Rein incorporated the literary agency JODY REIN BOOKS, INC. in late 1994. JRB’s clients’ books are published around the world (foreign rights sold by Jenny Meyer Literary Agency), in audio, large print, book club, CD, and digital editions, and several have been acquired for film and television. JRB’s client list is small and select, with a focus on commercial and narrative nonfiction, literary and mainstream fiction, and highly visible authors.

Some of JRB’s more well known clients include W. Bruce Cameron, author of the JRB bestseller 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter (from which the well-known TV series was also sold by JRB); Dean King, whose JRB books include the New York Times bestseller Skeletons on the Zahara, optioned by DreamWorks; and Mark Obmascik, whose JRB book The Big Year is also a New York Times bestseller and also optioned by DreamWorks, in conjunction with Ben Stiller’s and Curtis Hanson’s production companies.

Jody spent much of her early career in New York on the editorial side, and was executive editor at both Bantam/Doubleday/Dell and Morrow/Avon. She started her agency in Colorado in 1994, and somewhere between editing and agenting, she ghostwrote a book for Viking that went on to receive rave reviews.

Jody and her books have won many awards, and she is a popular guest speaker at writers' conferences nationwide, including the Aspen Writers Festival, Utah's Writers at Work, the Maui Writers' Conference and Virginia’s The James Rivers Writers Festival, where she was the inaugural and sole agent invited. She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Denver’s Introduction to Publishing course for many years and is a member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives and The Authors Guild.

Jody is a single mother with two young sons. Visit JRB's website at http://www.jodyreinbooks.com.

GUEST WRITER

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo is a multi-talented artist of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, an internationally known poet, performer, writer and musician. Joy has published seven books of acclaimed poetry, including She Had Some Horses, In Mad Love and War, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and her most recent How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems from W.W. Norton.

Joy also co-edited an anthology of contemporary Native women’s writing: Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, Native Women’s Writing of North America, which the London Observer pronounced one of the Best Books of 1997. Joy also wrote the award-winning children’s book The Good Luck Cat and contributed poetic prose to photographs by Stephen Strom in Secrets from the Center of the World. A book of stories is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Joy’s poetry awards include the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award, Oklahoma Book Awards, 2003; The American Indian Festival of Words Author Award from the Tulsa City County Library: the 2000 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award; 1998 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award; the 1997 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Joy’s first music CD, Letter from the End of the 20th Century, was released by Silver Wave Records in 1997. She co-produced the album and is featured as poet and saxophone player. The album was honored by the First Americans in the Arts for Outstanding Musical Achievement and called by Pulse Magazine the “best dub poetry album recorded in North America.” Her recently released second CD of original songs, Native Joy for Real crosses many genres and has been praised for its daring brilliance. Joy has performed internationally, from the Arctic Circle in Norway at the Riddu Riddu Festival, to Madras, India, and to the Ford Theater in Los Angeles. She was featured on Bill Moyers’ The Power of the Word series, and was featured together with Sandra Cisneros on Garrison Keillor’s new Literary Friendships series in May. Joy was also the narrator for the Emmy award-winning show Navajo Codetalkers for National Geographic.

Joy’s other accomplishments include co-producer and talent of the music video “Eagle Song,” nominated for best music video at the American Indian Film Festival 2002. The American Indian Film Festival awarded her the Eagle Spirit Achievement Award that year. She has served on the National Council on the Arts. She is the Joseph Russo endowed professor at University of New Mexico, and when not teaching and performing she lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she is a member of the Hui Nalu Canoe Club.

For more information about Joy and to sample her work, visit www.joyharjo.org.

ADDITIONAL PRESENTERS

Mira Bartók

Mira Bartók is an artist and a writer living in Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, Tikkun, LINK, and others, and this past year she received a grant from the Barbara Deming/Money for Women Fund Award for nonfiction and a Fourth Genre’s Editor’s Choice Award (second place). Mira is also the author of over 28 books for children on the art and history of world cultures. She has exhibited her artwork throughout the world, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Detroit Museum of Art, and many other institutions. Mira is currently working on an illustrated book of essays entitled Wunderkammer: Rediscovering Wonder in the Age of Extinction and spends her free time reading about platypuses, echidnas and other evolutionary oddities.

Meredith Hall

Meredith Hall is the 2005 recipient of the Gift of Freedom Award, a two year writing grant from A Room of Her Own Foundation. During the grant period she is on leave from the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches and is the Assistant Director of the Writing Program, to write her memoir, Wtihout a Map. She won a 2005 Pushcart Prize and her essay “Shunned” was named a “notable essay” in The Best American Essays 2005. Her work has appeared in Creative nonfiction, the New York Times, and in two anthologies: In Fact: Best of Creative Nonfiction and True Stories from the Midlife Underground. Meredith lives on the coast of Maine.

Marguerite Maria Rivas

Marguerite Maria Rivas, widely regarded as the de facto poet laureate of Staten Island, holds a Doctor of Arts and Letters degree from Drew University where she specialized in American literature. Marguerite is the author of a limited-edition chapbook, Poetry Cannot Save You (2003 Quarantine Press), and her work has been published in journals including Americas Review, Welcome Home, Frisson, Earth's Daughters, and Waterways. She has received the Irene C. Fromer Award for Literary/Performing Arts and the Campbell Prize for Literature and has been cited by the New York State Assembly for her contribution to the literary arts. Marguerite teaches at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, has conducted poetry-writing workshops for the New York Public Library and Poet's House, and was the host of The Muddy Cup Coffeehouse Poetry Series. With writers Wil Wynn, Allan Douglass Coleman, and J.J. Hayes, she is a co-founder of Sepoy Rebellion, a poets’ collective that regularly reads at arts centers, colleges, and coffeehouses in the New York City area.

Eliot Sloan

Eliot Sloan, born and raised in New York City, has degrees in literature and creative writing from Vassar College, The Bread Loaf School of English, and The University of Arizona. She has been awarded several prizes for her writing, including an AWP Intro Award for Nonfiction and The Bread Loaf School of English Poetry Prize, and she was a finalist in the JP Morgan/Chase Shipley Award on Diversity, for which her essay, “The Green Room,” was published in Creative Nonfiction magazine and taped live for National Public Radio. Eliot lives near Boston, where she teaches English and Creative Writing at Milton Academy.