Nancy Campana is a visual designer and writer. She founded Campana Design in 1996 and has produced award-winning designs for over 20 years. Her clients range from nationally-known book publishers and destination cities to innovative start-ups. Nancy’s writing consists of poetry, short stories, a memoir (Waiting for My Eyes to Adjust) and a novel (Scavo), all in the process of completion. She is also the creator of a story-telling product that she plans to launch in spring 2018. Nancy attended Chico State University and CCA in Visual Arts.

Mailing address: P.O. Box 6, Temecula, CA 92593  ~  Physical Address: 36701 Highway 79 South, Temecula, CA 92592
(951) 302-3837 ~ www.dorlandartscolony.org ~ info@dorlandartscolony.org
A California 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization

Phyllis Mauldin is a visual artist. She has her BFA from Oregon State University. Her medium is in 3 dimensional art using stone (soap stone and more), bronze and clay. she is now teaching basic bookbinding at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and is continuing to take classes in live study with clay. 

Suzanne Boyle McCrory - Writer

Steven Forry - Writer

Christoph Sturm - Musician

Renie Oxley - Writer

Jonathan Smith received his BFA in painting from the University of New Hampshire and MFA from City University of New York – Brooklyn College.  He has been teaching painting, printmaking, and figure drawing at an independent secondary school in Concord, Massachusetts since 1989.  As a resident studio artist and current board member of The Umbrella Community Arts Center in Concord, his creative pursuits have led him to the development of numerous works of art centered around two specific themes: abstractions of human bones and abstractions of aerial views of the land.  It is through this latter theme Jonathan intends to develop several “abstract portraits” of the Temecula area.

Monica J. Brown is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersections between visual art sound, movement, poetry, prose and performance. Her visual art has been exhibited widely throughout Chicago, including ARC Gallery, the DuSable Museum, and the Museum of Science and Industry. She has also exhibited nationally and internationally including Juijiang University in China. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles; and an MA from Columbia College Chicago. Monica has participated in performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and presented her solo performance Branch & Bough at Prop Theatre in Chicago and the Columbus Performing Arts Center in Ohio.

Winnie Swalley, founder of Mission Jazz, is a polymath educator, musician, screenwriter, and production, interface and interior designer who studied her curiosities at Columbia University, UCSB, UCLA, LA Film School and a decade in the private vocal arts studio of the great Mrs. Elizabeth Mannion. She enjoyed a short career as a concert singer, but preferred a quiet life where she could teach, raise children and build a large range of other artistic projects.  She has designed mobile apps, written screenplays, and produced, designed and directed short films and documentaries.

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is founder and host of "Writers on Writing," which airs every Wednesday morning at 9 a.m. PT on KUCI-FM. She's author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within (Harcourt) and has stories in Orange County Noir and USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series. She's also written essays and articles for the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, The Writer, Writers' Digest, The Authors Guild Bulletin, Orange Coast magazine and more. She teaches an online class for Gotham Writers Workshop, and two private workshops in Southern California where she lives with her husband and son, both musicians, and 13 typewriters, and counting.  

Edan Lepucki is the bestselling author of the novels California and Woman No. 17, as well as the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Esquire Magazine, and McSweeney's, among other publications. She is a contributing editor to The Millions and the founder of Writing Workshops Los Angeles. 

Sy Safi is a national and international award-winning sustainability designer and progressive builder in both residential and commercial. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in Civil & Environmental Engineering and started GCCM Construction Services in 2006 to better focus on advancing the construction industry to the 21st century by supporting and encouraging excellence in health focused design that is resilient and regenerative while restoring our natural ecosystems. Sy has adopted the most stringent third-party programs in the Living Building Challenge, Passive House and the WELL Building Standard, while becoming a Department of Energy Zero Energy Ready Home Partner, a Certified Passive House Consultant, Passive House Institute US Certified Builder and a WELL Accredited Professional. He shares the International Living Future Institutes mission with every project, which is to be socially just, culturally rich and ecologically restorative—where his focus on affordable housing and temporary shelters, regardless of one’s socio-economic status, should be resilient, safe, healthy and self-sufficient.

A native of the Washington, D.C. area, D. Gause currently resides in Las Vegas. Performer, composer, educator, writer, consultant, advocate, grant writer, coach are some words to describe her 
daily work. In her spare time, she reads, cooks, bakes, and volunteers.

“I am a sphere, not a slice.” ~D.G.

JoBeth McDaniel is an author and journalist with work published in LIFE, AARPMagazine, House Beautiful, Veranda, Islands, Reader’s Digest, Newsweek and Business Week.  She wrote for LIFE under five managing editors, operating LIFE’s LA bureau. She was a Working Woman columnist for four years, and Investors BusinessDaily columnist for three. Her bestselling biography A Special Kind of Hero (Doubleday, Dell) was named a Library Journal “Best Book” and a Literary Guild selection. JoBeth’s essays appear in several anthologies. Two were selected for college textbooks.


Amy Loftus is passionate about hosting her podcast "Something Better" and creating music for film and television. Originally from Chicago, she did improv at the legendary Second City.  She has  seven albums on iTunes and toured solo while living in Nashville. Now she sings while cooking or driving her kids to Lacrosse, but is still known to go play a show because it is her absolute happy place. In somewhat stolen moments, she's been working on a novel and is looking forward to being able to focus on it completely at Dorland.

Sheryl A. Stradling is an award-winning artist and author. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest and is descended from Washington State pioneers. She is passionate about igniting personal growth through understanding generational family patterns. She was inspired to write a family saga by her desire to heal lingering family issues. To her surprise, she uncovered the spiritual gifts of generations of women who transformed challenges into opportunities. She is the author of Faith, Power, Joy: Spiritual Guidance from 5 Generations of Remarkable Women, and a contributor to Journey of an Empath.


Meredith Kunsa has published her poetry in print and online literary journals and is currently revising her first yet-to-be published manuscript, while also working on a chapbook format. She holds a MFA in Public Administration and a MFA in Creative Writing, both from San Diego State University. A former independent agent for corporate speakers in venues around the world, she is currently retired and resides in San Diego, California.

Bruce Trinkley taught composition and orchestration and conducted the Penn State Glee Club from 1970 to 2006, and was music director for Penn State's Centre Stage from 1970 until 1995. He received degrees in composition from Columbia University where he studied with Otto Luening, Jack Beeson and Charles Wuorinen. Professor Trinkley's music has been performed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and China

Recent works include The Last Voyage of Captain Meriwether Lewis, a cantata for men's voices; One Life: The Rachel Carson Project, a multi-media work for women’s chorus, soloists, and instrumental ensemble; and York: the Voice of Freedom, a music drama about the life of the only African American on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. His operas for young people include The Prairie Dog That Met the President and Chicken Little.

Thea Gavin is a native of Orange, CA, where she never gets tired of shoelessly exploring--and writing about--the local coastal sage scrub and chaparral communities. She recently retired from twenty years of teaching creative writing at Concordia University Irvine to have more time to wander and write. She has led summer creative writing workshops for the Grand Canyon Association Field Institute since 2014. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals (Rattle, The Formalist, The Evansville Review, GRAPHfeeties) as well as in a variety of anthologies including Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon; On Foot: Grand Canyon Backpacking Stories; New Poets of the American West; and Manifest West: Eccentricities of Geography. Via her blog, Barefoot Wandering and Writing, Thea hopes to inspire others to appreciate their own local wild lands--with or without shoes. 

Julia Mary Gibson grew up by the magical lakes of the North American Midwest, or occupied Anishinaabe territory, where her novel COPPER MAGIC takes place.  She writes about the ways that human civilization intersects with mysterious wild nature and the sacred responsibilities we have to each other and to the planet.  Dorland has been an instrumental element in manifesting her work.  She lives in Hollywood, California, surrounded by her extended family of poets, thespians, dancers, illustrators, filmworkers, and urban farmers. 

Robert E. "Bob" Ingle is a New York Times Best Selling Author, veteran, award-winning journalist, radio talk show host, Radio/TV News Analyst. His first NYT Best Seller, "The Suprano State" was made into a motion picture that premiered in New York. His column/blog (bobingle99.com) is read in 75 countries. He also has a huge following on Facebook and Twitter, especially among other authors and people connected to the news media. He currently is working on finishing a book and doing prep work for a second. He can be heard on radio over the air in the Northeast and on Internet around the world. The show has been broadcast from the African bush, Paris, Rome, London, middle of the Atlantic and San Francisco cable car, among others. 

Suzanne Boyle McCrory - Writer

Wicki Van De Veer - Writer; Visual Artist

Jackie Clarke - Screenwriter

Alan Kiel - Screenwriter 

Sharon OBrien teaches creative writing and American Studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.  She has long been drawn to life stories and the process of storytelling.  Her first book was a biography of Willa Cather (Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, 1987) that was the first to explore this writer’s life from a feminist point of view.  Her second book, The Family Silver (2004) was a memoir of family and depression that explored the concept of inheritance in a cultural context.  Recently she has been writing personal essays that address such topics as the American cult of productivity, the politics of the food industry, and American attitudes toward grief.  She is working on an academic memoir that explores how academic writing is shaped by history and politics.

Allie Vernon is a current dual degree student at Chapman University pursuing an MA in Literature and MFA in Creative Writing. Her fiction focuses on gender performance and expectations of femininity and masculinity across broad contexts (religious, institutional, domestic, etc.), and her creative work has been published in journals such as AdSum and Calliope. Allie's scholarly interests include her role as Academic and Nonfiction Editor of Anastamos Interdisciplinary Journal and Instructor of Written Inquiry, a freshman class in Writing and Composition at Chapman, as well as her individual research relating to the theory of racial capitalism in literature.

 

July- September 2018

Marissa Candy Raigoza's secret identity is that of a self-described wild writer.  She can't pick just one genre so she writes a little bit of everything-poetry, plays, essays, and detentions. Her full-time identity is that of a teacher for both high school and college students, so she doesn't have much quiet time to write. Luckily,  a residency at Dorland brought her out of writing retirement in 2016 and she likes to return there where she sips wine with her imaginary friends who encourage her to "write this down!"  Her latest accomplishments are completing and submitting a chapbook of her poetry titled A Pocket Full of Love, Hope, and Madness to a press that she admires and she read for Fresno's LitHop this past April. 

Violinist Jeff Thayer is currently the concertmaster of the San Diego Symphony as well as concertmaster and faculty member of the Music Academy of the West (Santa Barbara). Previous positions include assistant concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, associate concertmaster of the North Carolina Symphony, and concertmaster of the Canton (OH) Symphony Orchestra. He is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Eastman School of Music, and the Juilliard School Pre-College Division. His teachers include William Preucil, Donald Weilerstein, Zvi Zeitlin, and Dorothy DeLay.  Awards include the Stephen Hahn/Lillybelle Foundation Award in Violin from the Music Academy of the West, the Starling Foundation Award, the George Eastman Scholarship, and the Performer's Certificate from the Eastman School of Music.

Kala Pierson is a composer and sound artist. Vivid, expressive, and full of bold colors, her music has been performed in more than 30 countries on six continents, widely awarded and commissioned, and published by Universal Edition. Her music's "seductive textures and angular harmonies" (Washington Post) build into "massive chords throwing out a wall of sound, like a modern-day Gabrieli" (San Francisco Classical Voice), and her focus on setting documentary and culturally resonant texts leads to works of "marvellous political power" (Louis Andriessen). She's held season-long composer residencies with American Opera Projects, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and San Francisco Choral Artists. Her other residencies include Yaddo, MacDowell, Hambidge, I-Park, and the Britten-Pears Foundation. She lives in Philadelphia with her spouses and son. 

Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of three novels and three story collections: Vanishing Acts, Wild Things, Shark Girls, Dream Lives of Butterflies, Climbing the God Tree and Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile. Her work has won the CNY 2017 Book Award in Fiction, Willa Cather Fiction Prize, Ian MacMillan Fiction Prize, IPPY Gold Medal, Isotope Fiction Prize, and the Jane’s Story Prize. She is Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY, Binghamton University.

Elisabeth Refn

Jessica Danger

Tammy Harris

Abigail Yentis

Anna Leahy & Doug Dechow

Beatrice Nkundwa

Michael Gordon

Mary Proenza

Erin Schalk

Kristen Daniels

Darcy Vebber

Jane Culp  The rugged mountains, desert and wild lands of Southern California are mirrored in Jane's paint handling, and even in her approach to paper and canvas. "When working outside in the desert, with its overpowering winds and relentless sun," the landscape painter writes, "I strap my easel to my legs.... When I work a watercolor, it is [held to] the ground with either my knees or my feet.

Jen Bergmark's short fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, Puerto del Sol, Harpur Palate, The Drum, Cream City Review and other journals, and in the anthology New California Writing (Heyday Books). She received the John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction, the Goldenberg Prize for fiction (honorable mention), and was a finalist in Poets and Writers Magazine California Exchange Award competition. She was a featured artist in the New Short Fiction Series, a Los Angeles spoken word series in its 19th season, and she’s been a resident at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and lives in Los Angeles. She’s currently working on a novel. 

Nan Busse tries to be a good girl, but can’t help coloring outside the lines.  Most recent work, “A sentence is inside itself....”  (Best of SF Fringe) is a meeting of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett illustrated in music, movement and text.  A dancer by trade, she is passionate about the unity of movement and text, improvisation with New Music and the performance/creation of movement scores.  M.F.A. from UC-Irvine;  proudly based in Oakland, CA.

Kristen Daniels studied creative writing at USC with T.C. Boyle and Aimee Bender, at UCLA Extension with Les Plesko, and at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She lives in Encinitas, CA with her husband and two daughters.

Denise Howard Long’s short fiction has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, The Evansville Review, Blue Monday Review, and elsewhere. Her short story "Recuerdos Olvidados" was runner-up for the Larry Brown Short Story Award, and her story "Where It's Buried" won Five on the Fifth's Annual Short Story Contest. Denise is working on her first novel and lives in Nebraska, with her husband and two sons. 

Tammy Harris is an artist at heart, only lacking a few credits towards an art major in addition to her masters in special education. She is a prolific writer, artist, and photographer. Her passion for using her expertise to help others led her to create a thriving blog called TammysTeachings.com. Tammy will use this plethora of writing as a stepping stone towards her dream of authoring a book that will serve as a resource for parents and teachers throughout their journey of raising successful children.

Leslie Knowlton is a journalist and essayist whose work has been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines including the Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Newsday, Boston Globe, Cosmopolitan and Fitness. For more than a decade, she worked primarily for the Los Angeles Times in California and New York City, writing about everything from gold mining in Alaska to the AIDS crisis in Manhattan. With an MA in psychology from California State University, she is now pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives with her husband in Englewood, New Jersey and Deer Isle, Maine, where she is working on a collection of essays focusing on place and notions of home. 

Website is http://www.leslieknowlton.com but it hasn’t been updated in past 10 years.

Jennifer Vandever is an author and screenwriter living in Los Angeles where she teaches at Emerson College.  She is the author of the novels THE BRONTE PROJECT and AMERICAN TANGO and was the co-screenwriter and associate producer of the film JUST ONE TIME.  Her work has appeared in First City, Redbook, The New York Times and The Village Voice.

Debra Thomas-Zasadzinski is an emerging southern California artist with a background in figurative and representational art. Her subject matter is inspired largely by the everyday. “Life is filled with ordinary interactions that become extraordinary through the process of painting,” she states. She sees the act of painting as relationship between artist and subject, and seeks to engage the viewer in that relationship, as well. Debra’s oil paintings are exhibited in Claremont, California galleries, and will be featured on the June cover of the “Tahoma Literary Review.” She paints for clients and teaches drawing in her studio, as well as at the annual Los Angeles Suzuki Institute at Pitzer College. You can see her work at Instagram@debrazart.

AletaBarthell (playwright) was a finalist for the 2016 HUMANITAS/CTG Playwriting Prize for her play, WINDOW OF SHAME.  She is currently developing a television series about the 12th century queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, for which she received a grant to study source material in Paris through the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  She is a teaching artist with Playwrights Project and founder of the youth theater education program, Kids Act, at New Village Arts Theatre. She holds a B.S. from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and has trained at BADA (Oxford, England); Shakespeare and Company (Lenox, MA). She studied playwriting and screenwriting at UCSD with Allan Havis.  Associate member Dramatists Guild. Member SAG/AFTRA. 

Michael Jon Fink is a composer/performer who resides in the San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles. For over thirty years he has served on the faculty of the Herb Albert School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts where he teaches Composition, Orchestration and Analysis. He has composed concertos for soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, violin and cello as well as incidental music for two plays by W.B. Yeats and four by Wajdi Mouawad. M.J.F. is a member of experimental and new music groups that have included the Negative Band, Musica Veneris Nocturnus, Stillife and Ghost Duo; and currently plays electric guitar with the Feedback Wave Riders (Free Improv), Trio Through the Looking-Glass (Jazz-inflected) and Spectral Dawn Spirits (Hierophanic, somewhat metallic, post-psychedelic ambient instrumental music). His music appears on the Cold Blue, Contagion, C.R.I., Trance Port, Raptoria Caam and Wire Tapper labels.

Born Charlotte Denise Watson, in Seattle (Washington).  Published a collection of short fiction, Killing Color, Calyx Books (1992); a novel, One Dark Body, HarperCollins (1993); an anthology, Sisterfire: Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, HarperCollins (1994); another novel, Touch, HarperCollins (1995), and a children's book, Eli and the Swamp Man, HarperCollins (1996). KNEEL: An Anthem appeared in the group exhibition, Manifesto: A Modest Proposal, at Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA., January 20-March 29, 2018. A picture book, Brown Sugar Babe, is forthcoming from StarBerry Books.

Janet Stilson’s sci-fi film script JAGUAR TRAIL won the competition for the Writer's Lab for Women, sponsored by Meryl Streep and organized by New York Women in Film and Television.  Janet executive produced, wrote and played a role in the short film THE BEAUTY OF DISASTER, a dark-edged comedy, which is a proof of concept for a feature film of the same name. The short  won a Best Shorts Competition award, screened several times in New York and Los Angeles and has been licensed to a cable channel. Her creative writing benefits from many years working as a journalist. Like the reporter in JAGUAR TRAIL, she’s learned how to dig down deeply into the topics she researches and feels most passionately about. Her articles have appeared in many publications, including The San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and Variety. Her scripts – and a novel she’s currently writing – largely fall in the grounded sci-fi realm and a genre she likes to refer to as “magic.” They feature strong roles for women and are often touched with romance and strange mysteries.

Cynthia Weiner lives in NYC, where she's the Assistant Director of The Writers Studio. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Open City, among others, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She's currently working on a novel.

Writing in the interstices between cultural studies, memoir, and environmental history, Lesley Stern expands the ways we see multispecies worlds. She has published three books, and hundreds of articles. Her dreamlike work The Smoking Book (1999) has been described as “an innovative, hybrid form of writing . . . at once intensely personal and kaleidoscopically international.”

Tobey Kaplan, originally from New York City, with degrees from Syracuse and San Francisco State Universities, has been teaching community college language arts in the San Francisco Bay Area for just about 30 years.  As an active member of California Poets in the Schools and Associated Writing Programs,  Ms. Kaplan has given readings, workshops and presentations throughout the country regarding creative process, literacy and social change. Ms. Kaplan has received grants from the California Arts Council to serve as poet in residence at community mental health centers and has also taught through Contra Costa County Schools in the county jails. Her honors include: Crazyhorse poetry prize,  honorable mention, an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, as well as the recipient of a Bay Area Award (New Langton Arts, 1996).  A previous Dorland Fellow, her full-length book, Across the Great Divide is still available and more current work is contained in numerous literary anthologies, most recently Kestral out of Fairmont State, W.Va.  She has appeared as a 30/30 poet selected by Tupelo Press.  Tobey Kaplan regularly collaborates with performers and musicians.

Katharina Holstein, was born in 1968 in Hamburg, studied Graphics Design in Würzburg and spent time as a resident artist in London with the Shoreditch Photobiennale. She is a member of the German Artists Association BBK and of GEDOK, the German women's artist association and has had numerous exhibitions in Germany and Europe. She lives and works in a small village close to Hamburg. Her work can be seen in the US at the JCO Gallery in Los Gatos.

Anna Leahy is the author of the nonfiction book Tumor and the poetry collections Aperture and Constituents of Matter and the co-author of Generation Space: A Love Story, Conversing with Cancer, and What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing. Her essays have appeared at The Atlantic, Pop Sugar, The Southern Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere and won the top awards from Ninth Letter and Dogwood in 2016. She directs the MFA program at Chapman University, where she edits the international journal TAB and curates the Tabula Poetica reading series. Read Anna's latest book review in Entropy here.

October- December 2018

Alan Kiel, retired from his first career as a federal law enforcement agent, went to the UCLA professional screenwriting program and earned a certificate in screenwriting in 2004.  The title of the screenplay he is working on is The Lost Museum of the Vatican.

Joan Bien: is a general assignment reporter for print and online publications. She has been self-employed as a writer for seven years. Although she can write about most topics, from medical issues to 3D printers to politics, her strength is in health and mental health. Having had 250+ articles published, she has written about a wide selection of subjects. She says, "It is all about the challenge of informing readers in plain English about important issues."

Phoebe Merten is a poet and fiction writer who grew up in the Oregon woods and now lives in the urban California desert. Appreciation for the unidealized aspects of nature and biology is a recurring motif in her work. Her residency at Dorland comes shortly before her final year at Chapman University's MFA program, and therefore will focus on progress toward completion of her thesis project, a cross-genre work exploring inner/outer worlds, thanatos/eros, and human/nonhuman connection. Her writing has appeared in Vine Leaves literary journal and on Splickety's Lightning Blog.

Anita Cabrera is San Francisco-based teacher and editor whose short stories, creative nonfiction and poetry examine the themes of family, addiction, and redemption. Her work has appeared in The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Colere, Brain, Child Magazine, Acentos Review, Squaw Valley Review, and RavensPerch. Her story, That Thing, written while Cabrera was a writer-in-residence at the Ragdale Foundation, was selected as winner of The New Guard’s 2017 Machigonne Fiction Contest. She is grateful to her family who supports her need to disappear at irregular intervals to write.

Kayla Allen’s writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, The Christian Science Monitor and Purple Fiction, among other anthologies.  She’s also a PEN USA Emerging Voices fellow.  She’s nearing completion of her novel, Rapture Dummy, a fictional account of her years as a child evangelist ventriloquist in Louisiana.  She lives in California with her husband and three children, and she’s obsessed with jazz accordion

Casey Dressell is a practicing painter and installation artist living and working in Cincinnati, Ohio. Casey is interested in the intersections of art, nature and the built environment. She will be teaching 2D Design Foundations and drawing at The University of Dayton this fall semester. Dressell studied painting at The University of Cincinnati (BFA, 2015) and Miami University (MFA, 2018). She has exhibited her work nationwide in shows in California and Massachusetts, and locally in Cincinnati, including the Clifton Cultural Arts Center and the Contemporary Arts Center. In addition to her studio practice, Dressell is passionate about helping the underprivileged in her community.

Robin Mullery infuses tenderness into the abstract images/objects she makes with rough industrial materials such as mortar, roofers cement, and hardware cloth. Working from her background as a therapist she probes her experience of vulnerability giving shape to what it means to be human: to feel fragile and strong, complete and incomplete, damaged and healed. She represents the psyche in tactile, layered textures, inviting a multisensory viewing that feels both deeply familiar and new. Self taught in visual art with an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Psychology Mullery is unrestricted by traditional modes of artistic expression. Since taking up visual arts three years ago she has been awarded residencies at Centrum in Washington State and Arts Letters and Numbers in NY and has been in several group shows in Redwood City and San Francisco, CA.

Windy Lynn Harris is the author of Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays: The Essential Guide to Getting Your Work Published (Writer’s Digest Books). She’s a prolific writer, a trusted mentor, and a frequent speaker at literary events. Her long list of short stories and personal essays have been published in literary, trade, and women’s magazines across the U.S. and Canada in places like The Literary Review, The Sunlight Press, and Literary Mama, among many other journals. Her articles for writers can be found at The Review Review, the 2018 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market (Writer’s Digest Books), the 2018 Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market (Writer’s Digest Books), and many industry blogs.

Maureen McHugh has published four novels and two collections of short fiction, including After the Apocalypse, which was one of Publishers Weekly's ten best books of the year.  She works in new media and teaches interactive storytelling and screenplay writing at University of Southern California.  She worked on her fifth novel (working title Hinge) while at Dorland Arts.

Laura Villareal is from a small town in Texas with more cows than people. She earned her MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee, The Boiler, Breakwater Review, Reservoir, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. She has received fellowships and scholarships from VONA/ Voices, Key West Literary Seminar, and The Highlights Foundation.

Angela Morales, author of The Girls in My Town, is winner of the 2016 PEN Diamonstein Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and the River Teeth Book Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, The Harvard Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. Currently she is working on her second collection of essays. 

Marlene McCurtis is writer, filmmaker, and mother living and surviving in Los Angeles.  She recently received a MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.   Her latest film “Here to Stay” is documentary short about a coalition of civil rights and Latino activists fighting for immigrant rights in Mississippi.  The film is currently on the film festival circuit.   She is in post-production on “Wednesdays in Mississippi”, her first documentary feature film about a little known interracial alliance between women during the Civil Rights movement. Marlene works as a teaching artist for TheatreWorkers Project where she teaches creative writing to formerly incarcerated men and women.  She is a member of the Mount Washington Writers Workshop and an alum Fellow of the Firelight Producers’ Lab.

Michael Clark is a professor of literature and law at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where he has been teaching since 1997. From 2013 to 2016 he was director of the the Portland State Center for the Humanities. He writes essays, short and long fiction, and poetry. His work focuses on the intersections of law and everyday life. 

Lauren M. McKeever has been writing professionally for decades. With more than 300 published articles to her credit, the focus of her writing today is to help protect irreplaceable natural resources and vulnerable aspects of our culture.  Based in the northern Rockies, she’s written on Native American’s struggling to preserve their native language, and the threat to the existence of American ranches and cowboy culture.  Her work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Salt Lake Tribune, Newsweek and many other publications. Her writing was included in the anthology, Wyoming Fence Lines. She's working on her first book of essays about life in the still wild American West.

January-March 2018 Continued 

Johanna Tarkkanen is a Finnish artist, composer, pianist and kantele player from Helsinki. Her music evolves from a deep connection with nature and old Finnish folk tradition. She is currently working on ecofeminin music, ecomusicology, overtones, live piano concerts, and film music.

Photo by Hanne Larsen.

Composer Dale Trumbore has been called “a rising star among modern choral composers” (AXS), and her works have been praised for their “soaring melodies and beguiling harmonies” (The New York Times). Trumbore's music has been commissioned and performed by organizations including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Los Angeles Children's Chorus, Northwest Symphony Orchestra, Pasadena Symphony, and The Singers – Minnesota Choral Artists, among many others. Recently, Choral Arts Initiative released How to Go On, an album devoted entirely to Trumbore's choral works, which was a #4-bestselling Classical album on iTunes. Trumbore's compositions are available from Boosey & Hawkes, G. Schirmer, and MusicSpoke. Hear her music at daletrumbore.com

Nathan Rivera is a native of the Writing words and music on the accordion, guitar, voice, piano, what else? Traveling to share the gift of music with those willing to accept it. Spreading positivity and joy one note at a time. 

Tony Eprile is a South African writer now living in Vermont in the United States. He is the author of Temporary Sojourner and Other South African Stories (1989), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Persistence of Memory (2004), which won the Koret Jewish Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was listed as a best book of 2004 by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at Northwestern University, Williams College, Bennington College, Lesley University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop

In 2011, after working for the U S Postal Service as an Executive in Washington D.C for 30 years, Jim Schlett "refocused” on his love for the National Parks and photography.   One of his images was displayed in the Art Takes Times Square Exhibition in New York City in June 2012 and he was the Artist in Resident at the Whiskeytown National Recreational Area in northern California in 2016.   in 2018, he was selected as the Artist-In-Residence at three different National Park Service sites; Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland, Manassas National Battlefield in Virginia and the Homestead National Monument in Nebraska.  Since his first residency at Dorland was so productive and yet restful, this will be his second residency.

Heather King is an essayist, memoirist, blogger and former lawyer. Raised on the coast of New Hampshire she struggled for many years, got sober in 1987, and converted to Catholicism in 1996. She has written and recorded several slice-of-life commentaries for National Public Radio and is the author of numerous essays[3] and three memoirs. She lives in Los Angeles and contributes to the Catholic magazine Magnificat and the Catholic portal of Patheos and her column "The Crux" appears in Angeles. One of her essays in Magnificat, "The Sacred Heart of Jesus", received Honorable Mention in 2014 from the Catholic Press Association. She is the author of the books Parched, a memoir, Redeemed, and Shirt of Flame.

Catherine Keefe is a poet, essayist and former journalist. She’s the Founding Editor of dirtcakes, a literary journal dedicated to exploring themes suggested by the UN Millennium Development goals to end extreme poverty. Catherine’s poetry and essays have recently appeared in Gettysburg Review, Lunch Ticket, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Pirene’s Fountain, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Zocalo Public Square, and Time. She’s been anthologized in Forgotten Women: A Tribute in Poetry, (Grayson Press); Best of the 30/30 Project, (Tupelo Press), and Imagine This! An ArtPrize Anthology, (CWG).Catherine’s essay “Ka Qua Craft,” co-written with Traci Brimhall, was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short story, Delivery Day won the John Fowles Center Award. 

Elissa Lieberman is a San Diego Based painter and owner of the San Diego Art Loft, a teaching studio in San Diego. Elissa received her M.F.A from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002. She taught painting, drawing, and design at many colleges and universities as well as local studios and ateliers. Elissa managed the Art School for the San Diego Museum of Art in 2007/2008. Elissa opened the San Diego Art loft in 2015. A solo project, it was nominated in the top 5 art schools in San Diego by San Diego City Beat Magazine. Elissa’s paintings and drawings are loosely autobiographical. Her writing practice informs contemporary narratives and portraiture that offer her a subject matter that connects deeply with viewers. 

Shine Delphi - travels this world with a resonator guitar and a few words to share. Born in Pennsylvania, raised in California, and rebirthed in the crescent city of New Orleans. Shine is a performer that will leave you feeling good and wanting more. From his technical ability on the guitar to his simple yet touching lyrics, he is an act that spans many genres and all ages. He has opened for such bands as The Carolina Chocolate drops, Reverend Peyton's big damn band, and The Tony Rice unit just to name a few. Oh yeah, and there's also that laugh... you can't forget that! HA!

Linda Saslow is an artist and writer working and living in Fullerton, California. Linda has a bachelor's degree in World Arts and Cultures from UCLA and a master's degree from the Professional Writing program at USC. Linda teaches reading and writing to students of all ages. She is a docent at the Fullerton Museum Center where she teaches elementary school students to be passionate about their own creativity. She is currently at work on a novel set in North Orange County. Her passions are yoga, meditation, gardening and art. Linda, the mother of two adult daughters, lives with her husband of 23 years Rob Saslow. 

Douglas DeChow is the co-author of Generation Space: A Love Story and The Craft of Librarian Instruction and the co-editor of Intertwingled: The Life and Influence of Ted Nelson. His writing has appeared at The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Post Game, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Curator, and others. He is the Digital Humanities and Science Librarian at Chapman University, the Curator of the Boisjoly Challenger Disaster Collection, and actively involved in the Center for American War Letters. 

Sami Lange is an artist living and working in Sonoma County, CA. She has a BFA in Printmaking, graduating with Distinction from Sonoma State University. She has shown prints and drawings throughout the United States for the past fifteen years. She has been included in over 25 juried and solo exhibits and is in permanent collections across the United States, Japan and New Zealand. Her works on paper are created by stitching together small detailed drawings that often give the appearance of intricate paper quilts. Her drawings focus on the details found in everyday life highlighting the importance of patterns, habits and the ‘small things.’ The places she travels, the relationships she nourishes and the choices she makes are abstractly represented in the work. 

Angela Cybulski is a writer, editor, and teacher who lives in Southern California. She is currently  the Managing Editor for Wiseblood Books, a small literary press specializing in works of fiction, criticism, and non-fiction that seeks to find its aesthetic bearings in the great literary tradition of the mid-twentieth century. Angela teaches English and creative writing and is also an experienced literacy and special needs consultant/advocate. She is helping to develop the fine arts program at St. Michael’s Preparatory School and will teach drama there next year. Her writing appears on the blogs Persephone Writes, one tiny violet, Dappled Things/Deep Down Things, and Wiseblood Books. During her residency, Angela is revising her first novel The Spectre of a Rose, a retelling of the Persephone myth, and completing work on a personal essay about getting her first tattoo.

Natasha Harrison uses glass as a medium to express feelings about fear, fragility and intensity present within relationships. She is also the Executive Director of the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Paradise Valley, Middletown, Rhode Island. 

Optimism One’s essays have been published by In Fact Books and The Normal School, among others. He earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sierra Nevada College and teaches writing full-time at Modesto Junior College in California. He’s currently working on a memoir called Goodbye, Suicide.

Ellie Hollinshead - Visual Artist

Sheryl Stradling

Roripaugh Board

Mary Camarillo is working on a novel and a collection of short stories. Her fiction has been published in A Daily Dose of Lit, Lunch Ticket and The Ear. She lives in Huntington Beach, California with her husband who plays ukulele and their terrorist cat.

Amanda Hawkins holds a MA in theological studies from Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. Her poetry can be found in Tin House, Poets.orgThe Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Flyway, Ruminate, and Orion. She has received scholarship and awards from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference,  Ruminate, Flyway, Arkana, and BellinghamReview. She teaches writing in Northern California and advises the undergraduate-run literary journal, Metonym. Read some of her work on this page of The Academy of American Poets.

RESIDENTS: 2018

Photo Credit: Trina Wood

Veteran journalist Pamela K. Johnson is Digital Content Editor for the National Writers Union. As a freelancer, her work often focuses on health. As an author, she co-wrote Santa & Pete, a novel based on a legend that Santa had a partner. It was adapted into a CBS-TV movie starring James Earl Jones and Hume Cronyn. Pamela co-edited Tenderheaded: A Comb Bending Collection of Hair Stories. The book became the basis of a stage play. She was a grand prize winner in the International 'Write Beijing' Competition, where she received $10,000 to shoot her short film “Morning Song” on location in Beijing, China. 

April- June 2018

Kim Fay is the author of the historical novel, The Map of Lost Memories, an Edgar Award finalist for Best First Novel by an American Author, and the food memoir Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam, a Gourmand World Cookbook Award winner. She created and served as the series editor for the "To Asia With Love" guidebooks, and has been the Hotel Editor for the travel, food and lifestyle website, Gayot.com, since 2003. In addition, she regularly reviews crime fiction in translation and works by Los Angeles authors for the Los Angeles Review of Books. After living in Viet Nam for four years, she currently resides in Los Angeles where she is working on a novel about women in Vietnam from the 1930s to the 1980s, as well as a mystery series set in L.A. in the 1970s.

January-March 2018