Members of The Writers’ Room are poets, novelists, journalists, graphic novelists, translators, librettists, playwrights, memoirists, and historians. We pride ourselves not just on our vibrant creative diversity, but on our cultural and socioeconomic diversity, too.Written in the Room.
A partial presentation of our current members includes:
Jess Barber grew up in northeastern Tennessee and now lives in Cambridge Massachusetts, where she spends her days (and sometimes nights) building open-source electronics. She is a graduate of the 2015 Clarion Writing Workshop, and her work has recently appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. You can find her online at www.jess-barber.com.
Mary Battenfeld taught American Studies at Wheelock College for nearly 25 years before it closed and merged with Boston University (which now employs her) in May, 2018. Working at Wheelock and being a mother of three and a Boston Public Schools parent drew her to writing about public education, and children’s literature. Mary has published numerous op-eds about public schools, and civil rights and education, and a recent book (co-written with Andrea Libresco and Jeannette Balantic), Notable Books, Notable Lessons: Putting Social Studies Back in the K-8 Curriculum (ABC-CLIO, 2017), partially written in the WROB. She also writes fiction, including a story that was a finalist for the JP Reads Flash Fiction contest, and is working on an historical fiction middle grade novel about a 19th century Irish orphan in Boston.
Mary Bonina is the author of My Father’s Eyes: A Memoir (2013) and the poetry collections Clear Eye Tea (2010), Living Proof(2007) published by Cervena Barva Press, and Lunch in Chinatown, a poetry chapbook inspired by teaching English to recent immigrants. Winner of the Boston Contemporary Authors UrbanArtsAward, her poem “Drift” is a public art installation in the City, carved in a granite monolith and permanently installed outside Green St. MBTA Station on the Orange Line, Jamaica Plain. Commissioned by composer Paul Sayed, she wrote a set of three poems, Grace in the Wind, which inspired Sayed’s composition for piano, cello, and soprano voice; the piece had its premiere November 2012 at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, Cambridge, MA. Bonina’s poetry and prose has been featured in Salamander, Hanging Loose, English Journal,Gulf Stream, The Worcester Review, in many other journals and anthologies, including Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo. Bonina has had a residency at Vermont Studio Center, and she has been a fellow at VCCA since 2001 when she was named finalist for the VCCA Goldfarb Fellowship in non-fiction. She works as a narrator for Talking Books for the Blind at the Clive V. Lacey Recording Studio at the Perkins School in Watertown, MA. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and she serves on the Board of Directors of the Writers Room of Boston, where she is at work on a novel.
Debka Colson was the 2013 Ivan Gold Fiction Fellow and is now the Program Director for the Writers’ Room. Debkawrites fiction, poetry, essays and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus,Folio, Slab, North American Review, GAMBAZine, Construction, and Roar, among others, and in two anthologies. Debka coordinates the Flash Fiction Contest for JP Reads, an annual community literary celebration in Boston and has taught creative writing at Emerson College, the Boston Public Library, Brookline Adult & Community Education, and the Urban Scholars Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She can be found at: www.debkacolson.com/
Robert Dall is a fiction writer from Cambridge, Massachusetts. His short stories have been published in Hunger Mountain, the Evansville Review, the Blue Moon Review, Acorn Whistle, and the Beacon Street Review. He received his MFA from Emerson College, has completed two residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, and has been a member of the Writers’ Room of Boston since 2001 (and a board member since 2009). Currently, he is working on new pieces of short fiction while hoping to find a home for his novel In the Box, the dystopian tale of a New England fishing town that decides to mix 17th-century punishments with 21st-century media saturation.
Alexander Danner is co-creator of the serial audio drama Greater Boston and sound designer for the audio drama What’s the Frequency?. He also writes comics and prose fiction, with stories appearing in The Cantabrigian, Rivet, Event: Poetry & Prose, and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as the Machine of Death anthology. He is co-author of two textbooks about comics: Comics: A Global History, 1968 — Present with Dan Mazur (Thames & Hudson, 2014) and Character Design for Graphic Novels with Steven Withrow (Rotovision/Focal Press, 2007). He is founder and director of PodTales: a festival of audio drama and fiction podcasting. Alexander joined The Writers’ Room in 2005 and is a past recipient of the Ivan Gold Fellowship.
Camille DeAngelis is the author of the crossover-YA novel Bones & All as well as two novels for adults, Mary Modern and Petty Magic. She wrote and revised her forthcoming novel (tentatively titled Immaculate Heart, coming 2016) at the Writers’ Room. Camille is also a certified vegan lifestyle coach and educator, and veganizing an 18th-century Scottish cookbook is one of her pet side projects. Camille also serves on the Board for the Writers’ Room.
Kate Gilbert is a nonfiction writer and children’s fiction writer who also works as a freelance editor for works on premodern history. Her publications include a historic preservation activity workbook for children and an English village history, and her work in progress is a middle-grade historical novel set in medieval Scandinavia. She has also worked as an AM-radio DJ, a janitor in an English boarding school, a children’s librarian, and a high school Latin teacher. Kate can be found as a blogger at www.readersunbound.com. She is a member of the Writers’ Room Board of Directors.
Elizabeth Herlihy (Beth) is primarily a fiction writer and is currently working on her first novel. She has a Bachelor’s from the University of Vermont and is an MFA candidate in fiction at Emerson College, expecting to graduate in May of this year. Beth spent over twenty-five years working in marketing communications for commercial real estate and real estate investment firms. She continues to consult in this capacity, so she can pay her mortgage and put food on the table while focusing on finishing her MFA and her novel.
Anu Kandikuppa worked as an economics consultant for many years before she began to write fiction. Her short stories have appeared or will appear in The Florida Review, Salt Hill, The Normal School, Juked, Another Chicago Magazine, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Anu was awarded the 2016 Gish Jen Emerging Writers’ Fellowship at the Writer’s Room of Boston. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College as well as a Ph.D. in Finance from Michigan State University. Her website is www.anukandikuppa.com.
Karen Winn received her MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Grey Sparrow Journal, and jmww, and others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Karen is the former Co-Chair of the Writers’ Room of Boston, and her debut novel, OUR LITTLE WORLD, is forthcoming from Dutton (Penguin Random House) in spring 2022.
Rebecca Givens Rolland is a writer, educator, photographer and consultant. She has a doctorate from Harvard in Human Development and Education and is also a speech-language pathologist and learning specialist, with a focus on early childhood. She won the 2011 Dana Award in Short Fiction and has fiction published or forthcoming in The Literary Review, Slice, and Hobart. Her nonfiction has appeared in Brain, Child Magazine, The Harvard Education Letter, and is forthcoming in Education Week. Her first book of poetry won the May Sarton New Hampshire First Book Award and was published by Bauhan Publishing.
Lukas Tallent was born and raised in southeast Tennessee, and received his MFA in fiction from Emerson College. His work has previously appeared in One Teen Story. Recently, he was a professor at Pellissippi State in Knoxville, Tennessee, and currently, he is at work on a collection of stories and a novel.
Mike Sinert was the Writers’ Room 2016-2017 Fellow in Nonfiction. A graduate of the Memoir Incubator at GrubStreet in Boston, his current project is a memoir on 20 years of life and almost death with binge eating disorder. His most recent essay, The Insanity of Eating, appeared in The Rumpus (therumpus.net). Mike has been a general contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. He serves as Co-Chair of the Board of the Writers’ Room.
Laura van den Bergis the author of the novel Find Me, longlisted for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize and selected as a best book of 2015 by Time Out New York and NPR, and two story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, both finalists for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. She has taught fiction at institutions including Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. At present, Laura is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge with her husband and dog.
Brent Whelan retired recently after many years of teaching high school
English at Commonwealth School in Boston in order to devote himself to writing fiction. He joined the WROB in the fall of 2015, and has completed a very rough draft of a novel there, along with a number of short stories. He is married with three grown children. He also writes blogs on various political and cultural matters, most recently at whatsleft2016.blogspot.com.