Faculty for the 4th Annual Writers' Conference:
Dianna Hutts Aston is the author of many children’s books, including the awarding-winning bestsellers AN EGG IS QUIET and A SEED IS SLEEPY, both illustrated by Sylvia Long. Once upon a time, she was a journalist who was certain it would be easy to whip out publishable manuscripts for children. After all, she had some wise moral messages to share with children, who need to revel in such righteousness. Editors called her first attempts “coy” and “didactic,” if they called them anything at all. Four years after she submitted her first awful manuscript, she sold a good one: WHEN YOU WERE BORN, illustrated by E.B. Lewis. www.diannaaston.com
____________________________________________________________________________
 Instructor: Nina Burleigh
Non-Fiction
Nina Burleigh is the author of three nonfiction books and is currently writing about a Bible relic forgery case in Israel, and the intriguing world of Biblical archaeology and relic collectors. Her newest book, Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt (Harper Collins, 2007), chronicles the first large-scale interaction between Western civilians and Islam in the modern era. Previous books include The Stranger and the Statesman, (Morrow, 2003) about the mysterious life of 18th Century scientist James Smithson and his bequest to the nation, and A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Mary Meyer, (Bantam 1998), the true story of the unsolved murder of an American aristocrat in 1964, set in the bizarre and exclusive world of the wives of the Cold Warriors in Washington, D.C.
She is currently a staff writer at People Magazine in New York covering human interest stories, and an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University. http://literati.net/Burleigh/
____________________________________________________________________________
 Instructor: Judyth Hill
Poetry
Judyth Hill is a stand-up poet and teacher of poetry, living in beauty where the Rockies meets the Plains, near Las Vegas, NM. She received a 2006/7 and again, a 2007/8 Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation grant to create and direct Poetry AField, a place-based poetry/theatre program for Las Vegas, NM elementary and high school students, and has been selected as a New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities “Road Scholar”, touring her lecture, “Dharma Lineage of American Poetry”. Her six published books of poetry, include Baker’s Baedeker, The Goddess Cafe, Hardwired For Love, Presence of Angels, Men Need Space, which is in its second printing, and Black Hollyhock, First Light. Visit her website, www.Rockmirth.com for more details.
____________________________________________________________________________
Instructor: Fred Hills
The Role of an Editor
Fred Hills was the Editor-in-Chief of McGraw-Hill and subsequently Vice President and Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster. He was Nabokov's editor in the last decade of his life and worked on The Annotated LOLITA (1970) and LOLITA: A Screenplay (1974), as well as seven other works including novels, short stories, and essays.
____________________________________________________________________________
Margaret Howard is a registered dietitian and food consultant to government and industry. She has worked in the food industry for many years, most recently as Consumer Services Manager for Thomas J. Lipton in Toronto, Canada.
She has written or co-authored more than 15 cookbooks on topics including books for people with diabetes, barbecuing, preserving, and a 4-ingredient cookbook. She will have copies of these books available for sale in the bookshop at the conference.
____________________________________________________________________________
Lauded by Time magazine as "one of the new generation of intrepid young female travel writers," Laurie Gough is author of the recently released Kiss the Sunset Pig and Kite Strings of the Southern Cross, shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and silver medal winner of ForeWord Magazine's Travel Book of the Year in the US. Eighteen of her stories have been anthologized in various literary travel books, including Salon.Com's Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance; AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds; Sand in My Bra: Funny Women Write From the Road; Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I know Why: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure; and A Woman's Passion for Travel. She has written for salon.com, The L.A. Times, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Outpost, Canadian Geographic, and numerous literary journals.
____________________________________________________________________________
Sandra Gulland is author of four historical novels. Her latest, Mistress of the Sun, isset in the French court of the charismatic Sun King and is inspired by the life of Louise de La Vallière, an extraordinary equestrian and mistress of the king. It has received glowing reviews since its publication in February of 2008, landing on a Canadian best-seller list four months. Gulland's previous publication was the Josephine B. Trilogy, internationally best-selling novels based on the life of Josephine Bonaparte. The Trilogy is now published in fifteen countries and has sold over a million worldwide.
An American-Canadian, Sandra Gulland was born in Miami, Florida, and lived in Rio de Janeiro, Berkeley and Chicago before immigrating to Canada in 1970 to teach in an Inuit village in northern Labrador. Settling in Toronto, she worked as a book editor for a decade before moving with her husband and two children to a log house in northern Ontario, where, in 1985, she began writing full-time. She and her husband now live half the year in Ontario, and half in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
For more information about the author, her research and work, go to www.sandragulland.com.
___________________________________________________________________
Susan McKinney de Ortega is a Philadelphia-born writer living in San Miguel since 1992. She writes about raising a bicultural family with her Mexican husband in the upcoming One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Househusbandry, Mixed Marriage, Open Adoption and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love, edited by Rebecca Walker (Riverhead Books, 2009). Selections from her memoir-in-progress are included in Mexico: A Love Story, (Seal Press, 2006); Not What I Expected, The Unpredictable Road from Womanhood to Motherhood,( Paycock Press, 2007); salonmagazine.com; elevenbulls.com and upcoming on sportsliterate.com (2009). Also, personal essays and fiction appear in The Hawk Will Never Die, Tales from St. Joseph´s Hardwood,( 2005); Philadelphia Stories,(2006) and the San Miguel Writer, (1994). An essay on bicultural living was broadcast on National Public Radio, (2000).She has also written for various magazines and newspapers.
________________________________________________________________
CM Mayo is the author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, a work lauded by the Los Angeles Times as "luminous" and the Interamerican Studies Institute as "perhaps the best new book about Mexico in many years". She is also the author of Sky Over El Nido, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her many other awards include three Lowell Thomas Awards for travel journalism and three Washington Writing Prizes. An avid translator of Mexican literature, Mayo is the founding editor of Tameme, a bilingual (Spanish/ English) literary journal now operating as a chapbook publisher. www.cmmayo.com
 Instructor: Sally Shields
How to Become an Amazon.com Bestseller
Sally Shields is an author, speaker, award-winning pianist and composer. She is the recipient of the Editor's Choice Award from the International Library of Poetry, and a frequent contributor to various magazines. Winner of the 17th annual Great American Jazz Piano Competition, her first book, Modern Jazz Piano, is the standard theory manual for several music programs, including Princeton University. She performs worldwide, most recently with bestselling author and musician James McBride. Shields was a finalist in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and her music is currently featured on the ABC TV daytime drama All My Children. Her first Amazon.com bestseller was THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW RULES: 101 Surefire Ways to Manage (and Make Friends with) Your Mother-in-Law! Her current book is: THE COLLABORATOR RULES: 101 Surefire Ways to Manage (and Stay Friends with) Your Co-Author! www.sarahjanecion.com
____________________________________________________________________________
Previous & Current Faculty for the Writers' Workshops:
Instructor: Beverly Donofrio
Memoir Writing
Beverly Donofrio studied literature at Wesleyan University and received an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. The author of two memoirs as well as numerous personal essays that have been included in books and national magazines, her first memoir, Riding in Cars with Boys, became a cult classic, which was made into a movie directed by Penny Marshall and starring Drew Barrymore. Her second memoir, Looking for Mary, was published to critical acclaim and is also on its way to becoming a cult classic. Beverly is president of the English speaking chapter of PEN in Mexico and has given lectures around the United States. She has written for PBS, network TV, and National Public Radio, where her personal essay/documentaries have won awards. In the eighties Donofrio taught writing at New York University and more recently at the University of Wyoming. Teaching writing is a new focus and passion in her career, for which she has received thanks and enthusiastic praise. www.beverlydonofrio.com
Instructor: Kaylie Jones
Fiction Writing
Born in Paris to novelist James Jones, Kaylie Jones studied language and literature at Wesleyan University and received an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. She is the author of five novels including A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, which was made into a Merchant Ivory Film directed by James Ivory and starring Kris Kristofferson and the critically acclaimed novel, Speak Now. Kaylie also worked at Poets & Writers, Inc. in the Readings/Workshops Program and later as the assistant to the Director of Development. She taught fiction workshops at The Writers Voice, then became involved in the creation of the MFA Program in Writing at LIUs Southampton campus, where she still teaches Literature and Fiction Writing. In addition, Kaylie chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 yearly to an unpublished first novel. In the last ten years, seven of the winners have been published to impressive critical acclaim. www.kayliejones.com
Instructor: Tony Cohan
Travel Writing
Tony Cohan is the author of the bestselling travel memoir On Mexican Time. He has taught courses in Travel Narrative at the yearly Book Passage Travel Writers Conference. His recent memoir Native State was a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the year. His articles, essays and reviews have appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The London Times, and many other publications. His novel Opium was a Literary Guild selection, his novel Canary a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Reviewers have said of On Mexican Time: “Terribly seductive, an enticing and intoxicating vision of Mexico.” (Denver Post) “Chapters read like carefully crafted short stories.” (Washington Post) “One of those rare, delightful books that allows the reader to enter the author’s mind and float effortlessly from place to place, thought to thought.” (Albuquerque Sunday Journal) His newest travel memoir, Mexican Days, was published by Broadway/Random House in 2006 to equally rave reviews.
Instructor: Wayne Greenhaw
Memior/Poetry
Wayne Greenhaw, 2006 recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing, has published 18 books. In 2005, Greenhaw was recipient of the ninth Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction, given annually by the University of Alabama’s College of Communication, joining such distinguished writers as Gay Talese, Rick Bragg, Diane McWhorter, and Howell Raines. A native of Alabama, he first traveled to San Miguel on the train in 1958. Greenhaw's short story, "The Old Guy," won first place in the Hackney Literary Awards at Birmingham Southern College's 2007 Writing Today conference. His first book of poetry will be published in April by River City Publishing who will also issue a paperback edition of his 1993 novel, KING OF COUNTRY. At that time Chicago Review Press will also publish his last book, THE THUNDER OF ANGELS: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People who Broke the Back of Jim Crow, in paperback. www.waynegreenhaw.com
Instructor: Laura Fraser
Memoir & Personal Essay / Food Writing
Laura Fraser is the author, most recently, of An Italian Affair, a travel memoir, which was a New York Times bestseller and translated into five languages. She is a contributing editor to More magazine, and writes for Gourmet, O the Oprah Magazine, the New York Times, and many other national magazines. Her articles have been collected in numerous anthologies, including Mexico: A Love Story, Best Food Writing 2004, Italy: A Love Story, Best Women’s Travel Writing 2005, and The Kindness of Strangers. Her first book, an expose of the diet industry called Losing It, landed her on the Today Show, Good Morning America, MTV, CNN, and NBC Nightly News, and the cover story in Newsweek. She has taught writing at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Aspen Summer Words, and other venues. She is a long-time member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, a literary collective. www.laurafraser.com
Instructor: Sarah Lovett
Memior/Fiction Writing
Sarah Lovett's five best-selling novels have been translated into 11 different languages and have been optioned for film and television. They include Desperate Silence (Villard; February 1998), Dantes' Inferno, (Simon & Schuster; April 2001), and most recently Dark Alchemy (Simon & Schuster, March 2003). Her new novel, When It's Raining in the Milky Way, is the first of a trilogy set in the California Delta. She has studied writing for page, stage, and screen with Sam Shepard, Robert McKee, Christopher Vogler, Irene Fornes, Natalie Goldberg and Miriam Sagan. In addition to her best-selling fiction, Sarah's non-fiction books include the award-winning "Extremely Weird" children's series, which aired as a television special. Her short fiction and how-to pieces are included in anthologies, and she has worked as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines. She also teaches writing and works privately as a writing consultant and coach in Santa Fe where she lives with her husband Michael, their daughter Pearl Xing, and their two dogs. www.writingcoachsarah.com
Instructor: Gina Hyams
Travel Writing
Gina Hyams, author and editor, specializes in mysterious and confounding subjects. Some of her books include Pacific Spas: Luxury Getaways on the West Coast (2006), In a Mexican Garden: Courtyards, Pools, and Open-Air Living Rooms (2005), The Campfire Collection: Thrilling, Chilling Tales of Alien Encounters (2005), Incense: Rituals, Mystery, Lore (2004),– all published by Chronicle Books. She is also co-editor of the recently-published anthology, Searching for Mary Poppins: Women Write About the Relationship Between Mothers and Nannies (Hudson Street Press/Penguin U.S.A.). Gina's essays and articles have appeared in national magazines as well. www.ginahyams.com
|
|
