2007 AROHO Retreat Scholarship Recipients

Terri Brown-Davidson is a fiction writer and visual artist who also teaches writing and works as a writing coach.  Terri's book of poetry, The Carrington Monologues, was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and she published Marie, Marie:  Hold on Tight, a critically acclaimed novel, in 2004.  She is currently polishing a manuscript of short stories/novellas on Georgia O'Keeffe's life, entitled Ladder to the Moon.  Terri's many awards include the AWP Intro Award and a Yaddo fellowship.  She has earned three graduate degrees in creative writing:  the PhD, MFA, and MA.  Terri is also a first-level green belt karate practitioner who says that the karate "support(s) my overall vision for my work as stylistically beautiful and eminently risky and, I hope, meaningful in terms of content."  Read an interview with Terri and view samples of her artwork

The New Mexico Writers Scholarship is sponsored jointly by Lauren Baldwin and AROHO, and is awarded to a woman writer who lives in New Mexico, the land of AROHO's birth.  In addition to practicing law and writing, Lauren leads a knitting retreat at Ghost Ranch each fall.

Edite Cunhã is putting the finishing touches on an autobiographical novel based on her experiences growing up in a Portuguese-American subculture as well as a collection of linked stories set in her ancestral Portuguese villages.  Edite is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and has been widely published in periodicals and anthologies.  She currently teaches in the Department of English and Writing at Deerfield Community College.  Edite has a BA from Smith College in African American Studies and an MFA from Warren Wilson.  Edite is also Registrar of Voters for Hawley, Massachusetts and a mosaic artist.

Karen Desrosiers is a single mother who gave up a successful job in the high-tech industry in 2001 to pursue more creative work and so that she'd have more time for her son and her writing.  She became Executive Director and lead art teacher at the Exeter Center for Creative Arts, wrote a column on single parenting for a local women's monthly, co-authored with her local writing group A Group of One's Own:  Nurturing the Woman Writer, became author and photographer for Daytrips Quebec, and co-founded Writers Supporting Writers, a local group which gives writers a chance to network, discuss business issues related to writing, and share strategies for living the writer's life.  Karen has also returned to school part-time to complete a BA Studio Arts degree with a Psychology minor, in preparation to pursue a Masters in Creative Therapies (Narrative and Visual Arts).

Doris Fields is a poet, visual artist, and performance artist.  She has written two books of poetry,  Smellin' M'Self and Conexxxions: Dirt, Ocean Water, Rock, and illustrated Phyllis Hotch's A Little Book of Lies.  Her art has been exhibited throughout New Mexico, including one-woman shows in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Taos.  Doris has taught courses on Black Feminist Theory and on Women Communicating Across Cultures at the University of New Mexico, and co-organized and facilitated "Sister Girls: Black Women Writers and Readers," a book club sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women and Barnes & Noble in Albuquerque.  Doris has received numerous awards for her leadership and community service, including Youth Enrichment Program Mother of the Year and the 2004 NAACP Annual Honor Award from the NAACP's Santa Fe Branch.

Jill Maria Fraley holds a BA from Yale, a JD from Duke, and is currently a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky.  Her publications include conference papers on stereotypes of Appalachian women and other minorities, and expositions on toxic tort and genetically modified seeds, but Jill's real love is fiction.  Together with her agent, Jill is in the process of marketing her first novel.  Jill currently teaches nonfiction writing for law students at the University of Kentucky and volunteers at a rural Appalachian high school where she helps students prepare for college by improving their writing skills.

Carla Gerickeg was born and raised in South Africa, and moved to the United States after winning a green card in the lottery.  She is the 2006 recipient of the Irwin and Alicia Stark Award for outstanding short fiction and won second place in Zoetrope's Writers' Workshop in 2005 for her flash fiction collection.  Carla;s fiction has been published in many literary journals and she is in the process of completing her first novel, The Jet Setter's Guide to Immigration.  She is currently an MFA student at The City College of New York.  Carla has backpacked through thirty-one countries and her interests range from theatre to architecture to cooking and yoga.

Kristen Kuczenski is a poet and professional sailor.  In her application, Kristen admitted to musing a lot about craft.  "Does anyone else struggle to get verbs into their poems when images keep revealing themselves in compact globs of noun?"  Kristen holds a BA in English from Trinity College and has taught poetry and Women's Lit to scores of high school students.  Her poetry and essays have been published in literary journals and Classic Boat Magazine.  Kristen is currently first mate on the Schooner Brilliant out of Mystic, Connecticut.

The New England Writers' Scholarship is reserved for a woman writer who lives in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut or Rhode Island.  It is sponsored by Mary Johnson and her husband Lucas Lund, and is also funded by donations collected at a reading given by Meredith Hall, Mira Bartok, and Lorraine Lordi.  Mary is Creative Director of AROHO's Retreats, and her husband Luke is a big fan of AROHO.

Alysia Logan is the author of the Drama High series for young adults, with three novels already published under the penname L. Divine.  Alysia holds an MA in African American Studies from UCLA and was a visiting scholar at UCLA in 2006 at the Center for the Study of Women, and a Guest Lecturer for Women's Studies and African American Studies.  She has also taught high school in the DeKalb County School system and in Los Angeles.  She is the single mother of two children.  Check out Drama High web-site.

Patricia Loughrey has written seventeen plays, two one-woman shows, one screenplay, and one book.  Her HIV education play for youth, The Inner Circle, has had more than five hundred productions worldwide.  Patricia is currently working on a musical adaptation of a children's story for same-sex parent families.  A KTVU special about her play Secrets earned an Emmy award for the Oakland station.  Lord Derby's Giant Eland won recognition in 2005 from both the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and the American Theatre in Higher Education Play Works.  Patricia has also taught playwriting at San Diego State University, was a script reader for the Old Globe Theatre, and co-founded both the Actor's Club Theatre of New York and the Actors and Playwrights Theatre.  She also coordinates a new play reading series at Diversionary Theatre, San Diego's LGBT theatre.

Beth Neff has worked as a grist mill operator, a La Leche League leader, a journalist, a community planner, the manager of a Farmer's Market, and the founder and director of the Community Sustainability Project.  All that while parenting four children (as a single mother for the last eleven years since her youngest son was two), and while running an organic vegetable farm (including goats for milk and cheese) for twenty-three years.  In 2005 Beth sold the farm and bought a cottage on a river to devote herself to writing.  Fiction is Beth's primary focus, and she is also working on a collection of essays addressing lesbian experiences in the workplace.

Gabrielle Orcha is a recent graduate of Boston University's School of Theatre Arts.  Song of Miriam, a play about a woman with breast cancer which she wrote, directed, choreographed, produced, and in which she performed, was showcased at the 2007 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival.  Gabrielle was named runner-up for the National Student Playwriting Award connected with the Festival.  She was also designated 2004 "Emerging Artist" by Dance on the Top Floor and was recipient of Boston University's Kahn Award.  Gabrielle is contributing author to The Independent Writer.   Listen to an NPR interview with Gabrielle Orcha.

The Kara Thrace Future Memorial and Resurrection Scholarship is sponsored by the professional staff of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic in Manchester, New Hampshire. The doctors, nurses, and other staff are happy to support women who tell stories with umph. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace is Battlestar Gallactica’s cigar-chompin’, bar-brawlin’, whiskey-chuggin’ hotshot Viper pilot. She may also save the human race.

Dina O'Sullivan is an accomplished visual artist, working in painting, pottery, sculpture, art quilting, spirit dolls, handmade books, and jewelry, who audaciously applied for a scholarship to a writing retreat.  Dina was Museum Educator for the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi until Hurricane Katrina destroyed the museum, her studio, and her job.  She has since moved to balmy Minnesota.  Dina seeks to "improve my ability to put down in words the emotions involved in these losses in a universal way."

The Audacious Writer Scholarship is sponsored by Meredith Hall, (AROHO's 2004 Gift of Freedom Recipient and author of Without a Map.  Meredith speaks of her decision to apply for the Gift of Freedom as "an audacious act," and encourages all women, especially women writers, to act audaciously.

"Debris I is a soft sculpture doll I made a month after I arrived in Minnesota last December as a response to the storm.  She came about from an experience I had right after the storm when I went to Biloxi to see the damage to my museum.   I had to come over a long bridge from the interstate highway since the bridge between my town and Biloxi was gone.  When I came over the bridge, the trees, fences and standing structures were strewn and wrapped with fabric from sheets and clothing blown about during the storm.  It appeared as if the whole coast was wounded and wrapped in bandages.  It struck me as a profound image so Debris I came into being.  She is made of white muslin and wrapped with muslin.  She is covered with debris and fish and sticks.  She sits among the trees protecting herself from the storm.  She is wounded and submissive.  I did two other dolls after this.  The next was called Debris II and she was made of sticks like an antebellum woman, strong with her hands up, defending herself from the storm.  The third was made while I was participating in a Minnesota Women artists' three week seminar and was made of clay, a more substantial material, and she is naked and strong and full of hope.  I have made other dolls in response to the storm, but these three say the most."  - Dina O'Sullivan

Debora Seidman is a playwright with an MFA from Goddard College.  Her plays include In My Mother's Kitchen, The Lilac Minyan, and Monastery Dreams.  Deborah has also published fiction and poetry.  Sharing insight gained from living with her own physical disabilities, Debora leads writing workshops that emphasize sourcing one's writing in the body and telling the body's stories in a safe and sacred context.  She works with women, people with chronic and life-threatening illnesses and disabilities, survivors of childhood trauma and abuse, and the general public.  Her honors include a fellowship from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.

The Dorothy E. Coven Scholarship is reserved for a writer whose household income does not exceed $25,000, with priority given to women with physical disabilities.  Sharon K. Cooper, M.A. sponsors this scholarship in honor of her daughter Dorothy (Dottie) who is a technology educator for teachers, an advocate for progressive and creative education, and is particularly sensitive to gender issues and equality.  Sharon is an accomplished pianist, musical composer, a poet, a spiritual coach and mentor, and a 2005 AROHO Retreatant.

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 was awarded an AWP Intro Award for Nonfiction and The Bread Loaf School of English Poetry Prize.  Eliot was also a finalist in the JP Morgan/Chase Shipley Award on Diversity, for which her essay, "The Green Room," was published in Creative Nonfiction and taped live for National Public Radio.  Eliot was a 2005 AROHO Gift of Freedom Finalist.  She teaches Creative Writing at Marlborough School in Los Angeles.

The Marg Chandler Memorial Scholarship is reserved for a participant in a previous AROHO Retreat.  This scholarship is named in memory of Marg Chandler, Darlene Chandler Bassett's (mother, and is funded by the family and friends of Marg Chandler. Marg Chandler's life and death were the inspiration for the creation of AROHO.  Unforgettable and fearless, Marg put herself through Rice University during the Great Depression playing bridge.  She became a savvy businesswoman and her tenacity transcended economic trials.  A devoted mother and rabid sports fan with a flair for language, her favorite punctuating remark, "If a frog had wings he wouldn't keep bumping his ass."

Chizuko Tasaka began writing nineteen years ago, when she was pregnant and had just left communal living at a Zen Center.  She wrote steadily for five years before life's inevitable pressures found her "reduced to writing in the cracks of time."  When Chizuko was diagnosed with cancer for a second time as her son was preparing to leave for college, he asked her to write again for him.  Though given limited time to live, Chizuko has already doubled the days on her doctor's calendar.  Her prose poems have a spare beauty and hard-won authenticity.

The Connie Drawhorn Memorial Scholarship is reserved for a writer who is also a single mother.  Vickie Giblin, a generous contributor to AROHO's scholarship fund since the very first retreat and one of AROHO's original board members, named this scholarship in memory of her sister-in-law, Connie Drawhorn.  Connie loved literature, and raised a daughter alone for many years while simultaneously developing a successful career and pursuing higher education, even starting and completing a Master of Public Health degree after her diagnosis with colon cancer.

Yer T. Yang is an English Language Learner Teacher at North High School in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.  She writes the Yer Yang column for The Sheboygan Press and is in the process of writing a memoir.  Yer's memoir begins in Laos, in 1975, when she was five years old and North Vietnamese soldiers invaded her village, killing her mother and sister.  Yer has also been active in the Hmong Mutual Assistance of Sheboygan, serving as President of the Hmong Women Society.  In 2005 she participated in the Fulbright-Hays Travel Abroad Program, spending ten weeks in Southeast Asia.