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Members of The Writers' Room of Boston

Jennifer Barber's book Rigging the Wind won the Kore First Book prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Marlboro Review, Four Way Reader #2, the Massachusetts Review, Agni, Partisan Review, 96 Inc., Poetry, and Orion. She received a Bruce Rossley New Voices award in 1998, and a selection of her poetry appeared in Take Three: 3, published by Graywolf Press. She is founding and current editor of Salamander, a magazine for poetry, fiction, and memoirs.

Mary Bonina has had poems in ENGLISH JOURNAL, HANGING LOOSE and many other journals and magazines, as well as in three anthologies, including VACATIONS: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (Tall Grass Literary Guild and Outrider Press, 2006) and VOICES OF THE CITY, a project of the Rutgers University Institute on Ethncity, Culture, and Modern Experience (Hanging Loose Press, 2004). She was winner of Boston Contemporary Authors, a public art project, and her poem "Drift" was set in a granite monolith permanently installed outside Green St. MBTA Station on the Orange Line. She holds her MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. About her chapbook LIVING PROOF published in November 2007 by Cervena Barva Press, poet Mary Bane Campbell (author of TROUBLE, Carnegie Mellon Press, 2003) has said, "the voice of these poems knows death, luck, the mall, the hard edges of place, New England places, the violence of the world. It runs, very concretely and in many poems, past what its bearer sees as if standing still in deep attention. It is written so that he who runs may read, but it turns entirely inside out the terms and assumptions of that old insult. What a place this human world would be if we all ran at Mary Bonina's speed, what Flannery O'Connor once called 'the terrible speed of mercy.'"

Kentucky native, CD Collins follows the storytelling traditions of the South, both as a solo artist and when accompanied by musicians. As one of originators of the early '90s resurgence of spoken-word with live music, her work has been archived in two award-winning compact discs: "Kentucky Stories" "Subtracting Down." She had produced two videos based on tracks from her recent CD. The first, "Understory," chronicles the catastrophic steps of mountaintop removal to retrieve Appalachian coal. The other "City of Dreams" is based on a lyric love poem translated into several languages. This montage of images and voices weaves a tapestry of peace and hope and is a tribute to Women Waging Peace, a network of women peacemakers from conflict areas around the world. Her debut collection of short stories BLUE LAND is forthcoming from Polyho Press in March. For more information please visit her website at www.cdcollins.com

The poems of Rebecca Morgan Frank have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Many Mountains Moving, Calyx, Mid-America Poetry Review and Sojourner. She is co-founder and editor of the online literary journal Memorious: a forum for new verse and poetics. (www.memorious.org). She teaches creative writing and literature at Emerson College, Emmanuel College, and Grub Street, and she is the Associate Director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge.

Patricia Giragosian is a published poet and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Hampshire Review, The Classical Outlook, the Associated Press in Boston, and The Lowell Sun, among other publications. She has taught writing and English literature in Boston area colleges, as well as in public high schools in Massachusetts. Her first collection of poems was a finalist in the Poetry Chapbook Competition of Bright Hill Press, a cultural organization supported by the New York State Council of the Arts. She is currently at work on a new collection of poetry, a novel, an art book, and a local history.

Eric Grunwald is a fiction writer, translator (German), book reviewer, and occasional poet and playwright. He was managing editor at Agni from 2000 through February 2004, and his work has appeared in Edit Red, The MacGuffin, Two Lines, Partisan Review, The Boston Sunday Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Place, Two Lines, The Denver Post, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, The Improper Bostonian,and Agni. He is currenlty working on a novel and a story collection. He holds an MA in creative writing from Boston University and a BA in Russian and East European history from Stanford University.

Kathleen M. Henry, writer, singer, community-ordained priest, and liturgist, makes her home in Jamaica Plain. Henry is the Artistic Director of CREDO Liturgical Dance Company of Boston. She leads workshops in the Enneagram and sacred dance and performs as vocal soloist in local concerts. She serves on the board of directors of the Writers' Room of Boston and is vice-chair of the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. She serves on the Friends Committee of Project Hope. She has recently completed her third novel, Mass, and has begun a compilation of her poetry for a chapbook. Her nonfiction works, The Book of Enneagram Prayers, The Book of Ours: Liturgies for Feminist People, and Jesus Was the Goddess are available from Wovenword Press (books@wovenword.com).

The poems of Nancy Kassell have appeared in Kalliope, Spoon River Poetry Review, Southern Review, Feminist Review, Salamander, and in the anthologies Family Reunion: Poems about Parenting Grown Children and Verse and Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics. She is also the author of The Pythia on Ellis Island: Rethinking the Greco-Roman Legacy in America. She has been a member of The Writers' Room of Boston since 1993 and served as membership chair from 1996 to 2004.

Emily Lapkin is a writer and editor. After almost five years as a health director at America’s leading women’s website, she is working on a non-fiction book about the side effects of internet usage. She also writes for Shape, Fitness, Ladies Home Journal and HGTV.com. She lives with her husband in Beacon Hill.

Mo Lotman Visit Mo's website.

Stephen McCauley is the author of four novels: True Enough, The Man of the House, The Easy Way Out, and The Object of My Affection. His stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, Harpers, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Details, Travel and Leisure, (New York) Newsday, and many other publications. He has an MFA in writing from Columbia University and has taught writing and literature at Brandeis University, Harvard University, Wellesley College, and University of Massachusetts, Boston.

A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, Caitlin O'Neil has published fiction in the Faultline, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Bridge Stories and Ideas. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized by Glimmer Train and the William Faulkner Society. She has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center. Her non-fiction writing has been featured in the Boston Globe, Poets & Writers magazine, the Improper Bostonian, the Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Book Review and on pbs.org.

Lisa Heiserman Perkins has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and until 1993 was an English professor, a Keats scholar, and the author of several academic articles. Since then, she has been writing screenplays, short stories, and personal essays. Her day job is producing documentary films. She was associate producer of Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson--, which aired nationally on Independent Lens (PBS), and is currently writer/director/producer of Secret Intelligence: the Mind of Hedy Lamarr. She lives in Somerville, MA.

Diana Renn is currently working on a novel entitled Cascadia, which was a semifinalist in the 2004 Grub Street Novel Revision Contest. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the Indiana Review, the Crab CreekReview, the Santa Barbara Review, Writer's Digest, South American Explorer, the Beacon Street Review, and Cricket and Spider magazines for children, among others. She is also a freelance writer and editor of ESL (English as a Second Language) materials, and has written two ESL textbooks: Contemporary English (McGraw-Hill, 2003) and Strategies for College Success: A Study Skills Guide (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming Spring 2005). She teaches writing at Boston University in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program.

Maureen Rogers, a native of Worcester, has spent more than twenty years in the field of high-technology product marketing. She left a full-time corporate position in 2002 to forge a new career as a marketing consultant, a move designed to enable her to devote more of her time and energy to writing fiction (and creative nonfiction that has absolutely nothing to do with technology). She is working on a collection of short stories at the Writers’ Room. Her story, “At the Lake,” appeared in the anthology Next Parish Over: A Collection of Irish American Writing.

Gary Roma is a documentary filmmaker, comedian, and writer. His latest film, Puss in Books: Adventures of the Library Cat has been screened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC as well as having an extended run at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Off the Ground & Off the Wall: A Doorstop Documentary is Gary's first film. It won numerous awards; was screened at over two dozen film festivals in the United States, Canada, and England; and was broadcast nationally on Bravo and the Independent Film Channel. Gary is currently in production on his next film. FLOSS! A Meditation on the Possibility of Change is the story of how one man comes to grips with dental flossing--and so much more. Gary performs his unique brand of pun-filled standup comedy at conferences, schools, and libraries nationwide. His puns won him the talent contest on Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know? radio show broadcast on NPR. He appeared as a guest and performed his standup routine in June, 2003. He is writing a book of and about words that will include pun-filled stories, jokes, poems, and essays.

Mark Schafer is a literary translator, visual artist, and anti-racism activist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His translations from Spanish to English include novels, short stories, essays, and poetry by authors such as Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Virgilo Piñera, Jesús Gardea, Eduardo Galeano, and Antonio José Ponte. His most recent translation, Migrations/Migraciones, a bilingual edition of the Mexican author Gloria Gervitz’s epic poem was published in December 2004 by Junction Press. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno called Migraciones “one of the more important poetic texts to emerge from Mexico, or just about anywhere, in recent decades;” Jerome Rothenberg compared Gervitz’s poem to “Pound’s Cantos or Zukofsky’s A… the achievement of a great poetic talent;” and Marjorie Agosín wrote that “Migrations presents the unmistakable, majestic voice of Gloria Gervitz, one of the most powerful and original voices of contemporary Jewish Latin American literature, and Mark Schafer's translation does it justice.” (To read excerpts, go to http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/migrations.html.) In 2005, Schafer received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship to complete his translation of selected poems by the Mexican poet David Huerta. When not translating, Schafer reassembles the world and questions traditional notions of representation in his map collages. You can see what he's doing in art and translation at www.marksonpaper.us.

Amy Sutherland is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers (Viking, June 2003) and of Cookoff: Recipe Fever in America, (Viking October 2001). Sutherland was named a Barnes and Noble Discover writer for Cookoff, which was also included in Amazon.com's top 50 books of 2003 and Entertainment Weekly's Must Have list. She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and Cooking Light. She lives in Charlestown with her husband and two dogs.

Peter Thomson is a failed housepainter and waiter who is forever grateful and amazed that there is a field known as journalism through which he can channel his idle wandering, undisciplined curiosity and penchant for making glib observations into a more-or-less respectable living. His work over the last fifteen years or so has focused largely on the relationship between people and their natural and built environment, primarily through the vehicle of NPR's Living On Earth, at which he served in a variety of senior positions and won a sackful of minor awards after helping to launch the program as its founding editor and producer in 1991. Ten years later, he took advantage of a large hole being blown in his life by grabbing his younger brother and jumping a series of trains and boats for Alaska, Japan, Siberia, Lake Baikal and points ever farther west until they once again found themselves back in Boston, after which, not knowing what else to do, he blithely decided to try to write a book about the journey. The last couple of years have seen him holed up and mumbling to himself at such places as the Mesa Refuge in Pt. Reyes Station, California; the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy and this here Writers' Room of Boston. If he's lucky, Blue Crescent: A Journey to Lake Baikal, will be published later this year by Oxford University Press, after which he will once again have to get a real job.

Paul Zakrzewski (pronounced Zak-shef-ski) is the editor of the award-winning anthology Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge (www.lost-tribe-fiction.com). Published by HarperCollins in 2003, the book was inspired by his popular reading series at the celebrated KGB Bar in New York's East Village. His essays, reviews and features have appeared in many places including The Boston Globe, Time Out New York, The Forward, and elsewhere. He is presently working on a collection of essays and teaches memoir and personal essay writing at Grub Street.