Featured Fiction Writer: George Saunders is the author of the story collections Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, both of which were New York Times Notable Books, and a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, a New York Times Bestseller. He teaches at Syracuse University.
Featured Poet: Hal Sirowitz is the author of six books of poems, including Mother Said, My Therapist Said, Before During and After and Father Said. He is the recipient of a Frederick Delius Award and The Susan Rose Recording Grant for Contemporary Jewish Music. Garrison Keillor has read his work on NPR's Writer's Almanac. Sirowitz has performed on MTV's Spoken Word Unplugged, PBS's Poetry Heaven, and NPR's All Things Considered. Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a 2003 New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Sirowitz is also the best selling translated poet in Norway, where Mother Said has been adapted for the stage and has been made into animated cartoons. Hal is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. He worked for 25 years as a special education teacher for the New York City public schools. Hal is married to the writer Mary Minter Krotzer.
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Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director and worked as an art dealer when he couldn’t earn a living in the theater. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver.
His poetry has been published in dozens of literary journals. His chapbook The Conquest of Somalia will be published by Cervenabarva Press. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway and toured colleges and outdoor performance venues. He currently lives in New York City, where he’s busy writing fiction and his short stories have recently appeared in numerous literary magazines.
Mary Christine Delea is originally from Long Island, New York. Her first full-length book of poems, The Skeleton Holding Up The Sky, was published by Main Street Rag Press in 2006. She is a professor at Eastern Kentucky University.
Siobhan Galvin: I was born in London in 1962 of immigrant Irish parents. The family returned to Dublin in 1967 on a wave of returnees to a prospering Ireland. I had a conservative Catholic, traumatic upbringing, the inspiration for much of my writing, and studied Spanish and Politics at University College Dublin, graduating in 1983.
I live in Málaga, in the south of Spain and, as life would have it, have spent almost all my adult life in this country. In 1985, like my father 30 years earlier, I took the mail boat from Ireland to England. But latin men were more appealing to me and in August of the same year, fed up with fog and palid faces, I got on a plane to Madrid with little money, no job, nowhere to stay and no contacts. A true adventure.
In November I met Roberto Vicente Melero, my husband of 20 years and father of my 3 children, Ana, David and Isabel. We met, fell in love and moved in together after 3 weeks. Mad altogether. We cared about nothing but passion and here we are, 21 years later, intensely linked by calamities, complications and loving.
Margaret Lubalin has been a copywriter and advertising Creative Director for over 20 years. She is also a poet, book artist and general life observer. Margaret has taught writing and book-making classes at the Society of Scribes, The Ink Pad and the Reading Program at P.S. 96. She currently leads a NYWC writing workshop at Inwood House, a residence for pregnant teens. She studied creative writing at The New School, in a variety of writers groups and at the New York Writers Coalition. She has authored and self-published two books of poetry, Openings and Harvest and also has the rare distinction of inventing the "poem mobile."
Dorene O’Brien’s fiction has appeared in the Connecticut Review, New Millennium Writings, Cimarron Review, the Chicago Tribune and others. She is the 2000 winner of Red Rock Review’s Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, the 2002 winner of New Millennium’s Fiction Award, and a 2003 winner of the Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award. She has won the 2004 Bridport Prize and has received a creative writing fellowship from the NEA. Her short story collection, Voices of the Lost and Found, is forthcoming from WSU Press in May. She teaches writing at the College for Creative Studies and at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Whether Christine Wilborne is writing about AIDS in Africa, violence against women or the brothers on the block, she puts her own eclectic spin on subjects that may be ignored by the average bustling mother of two. Christine was born and raised in New York City.
She has received honors from Emerson College, Fresh Meadows Poetry Society, Queensborough Community College and Barnard College for her writing and commitment to the craft. Her works are also being published in the Langston Hughes Community Library’s Anthology Same Muse Different Views this spring.
