Michael Correy is a Lead, Experience Design at BCGX where he applies human-centered research and design methodologies to uncover challenges and create thoughtful, engaging experiences. In a previous life, Michael was an Associate Director, Creative Strategy at Code and Theory. Michael originally hails from Indianapolis but currently lives in Brooklyn. He truly is a believer that immersive and empathetic research is vital to strategic, equitable, and impactful design solutions. If you happen to ever encounter him in the flesh, start the conversation off with the Muppets, basketball, or 90s R&B music.
Jennifer Irani is finishing a memoir about her experience in Phoenix House while publishing short stories, essays, poetry, and op/eds. She is a member of environmental groups, racial justice organizations, and political organizations. Her art and writing are acts of activism. Her website combines her fine art and writing and offers a broader picture of her work. The mannequin heads titled “We Will Be Heard” are inspired by the #MeToo movement and Dr. Ford. She resonates with Deep Adaptation philosophy. Despite the challenges we face, she makes room for the awe and wonders through her craft.
Kara Laurene Pernicano (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and poet. She captures resonances in the porous mind for art and healing, routinely working in erasure, collage, comics, improv dictation, and poetic monologue. Kara has an MFA from Queens College and a MA from the University of Cincinnati. She has performed for Poetic Theater Productions and the Poetry Society of New York. Her work has been exhibited in various literary magazines and galleries, including Waccamaw, Full Stop, the Whitney Staff Art Show, and LIC Artists’ Plaxall Gallery. She teaches at CUNY and curates a creative series Why Open Pandora’s Box.
Cathy Rose is a writer and clinical psychologist in San Francisco, CA. She holds an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Greensboro Review, Your Impossible Voice, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Fourteen Hills, Santa Clara Review, Deep South Magazine, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies, Flash NonFiction Food and Nixon under the Bodhi Tree and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction. Fellowship residencies have included Joya AiR, Obras Foundation, VCCA, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She is currently at work on a novel.
In 2022, Debra Thomas-Zasadzinski embarked on a new enterprise, retailing professionally printed greeting cards of her original artwork. Her florals are sold at Crème Bakery in Claremont, CA, as well as at local group art shows and sales. She is working on a new series of line drawings based on travels to France and will continue them this Spring.
Trapper Robbins is a multi-instrumentalist rock composer, keyboard player, and singer with a special interest in interwoven rhythmic patterns, creative lyrics & phrasings, and unexpected song transitions. His music moves seamlessly across genres including elements of progressive rock, fusion, funk, and jazz. Trapper has released 12 albums and periodically performs live. Trapper has also worked as a professional software developer and as a volunteer with the US National Park Service. He currently splits his time between Seattle and Stehekin, a remote mountain town in North Cascades National Park (WA).
Laura Farrell is a talented artist and musician who runs a decorative arts company in the dc area. She is an accomplished musician with a prominent solo career. Laura is a vocalist and guitarist and trained violinist. She performs throughout the DC metro area for private events and weddings as well as in local bars, restaurants, and music halls. Laura's talent for mash-ups and pop music on her acoustic guitar is sure to entertain.
Karina Muñiz-Pagán is a writer, literary translator, and organizer, born to a Scandinavian mother and Mexican father in San Francisco, California. She has an MFA in Prose from Mills College where she was the Community Engagement Fellow and taught creative writing to members of Mujeres Unidas y Activas; a Latina immigrant rights base-building organization where she also served as Political Director. As a result of the generative workshops, Karina co-founded the writers’ group, Las Malcriadas, and edited and translated the bilingual anthology Mujeres Mágicas: Domestic Workers Right to Write, published in 2019 by Freedom Voices Press. She has also earned MAs in Urban Planning and Latin American Studies from UCLA and has written and led campaigns focused on place-based storytelling and the power of understanding the social history of the built environment.
Leslie Johansen Nack’s debut, Fourteen, A Daughter’s Memoir of Adventure, Sailing and Survival received five indie awards, including the 2016 Finalist in Memoir at the Next Generation Indie Book Award. Before she started writing, she raised two children, ran a mechanical engineering business with her husband, took care of her aging mother, and dreamed of retirement when she could write full-time. She did everything late in life, including getting her degree in English Literature from UCLA at age thirty-one. Her first historical fiction novel The Blue Butterfly, A Novel of Marion Davies will be released on May 3, 2022.
Leslie Bevans creates in the written word, illustration, and music. She is the author/illustrator of family-friendly Beyond the Weakened Thread, an adventure that centers around the purpose of kindness. Leslie is currently working on the sequel to this 63-chapter novel. Her characters are painfully aware that she is also busy working on creative collaborations with her husband, Frank, and storybooks for children and their families to share. Leslie composes, performs, and teaches music. She is a flutist and vocalist, who loves to write poetry and prose, paint, draw, sew, build, bake … and share!
Bobbie Mandel was an artist before she even understood what it meant, making simple pencil markings on scraps of paper, even before she talked. She was recognized by those who taught her for her unusual artistic talent. She was encouraged to develop her own artistic voice throughout her education and her life. Her primary focus has been on the human face, creating emotional portraits that reveal interior spaces, and trying to portray the challenges of human existence. Her ability to use linear marks has continued but now is used to describe the emotion and form of the human face. She vacillates between paint, and printmaking, especially woodcuts as her medium of choice and has been influenced by German Expressionism.
Suzanne LaFetra Collier is a Bay Area writer. In 2022 she earned an MFA from Goddard College, where she was the recipient of the Engaged Artist Award. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals and publications including Creative Nonfiction, The Sun Magazine, Brevity, The Citron Review, Smokelong Quarterly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Lunch Ticket, and in fifteen anthologies. She directed and produced the documentary film FREE: The Power of Performance which was nationally broadcast on PBS in 2018. She is currently a BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stonybrook, where she is finishing a novel, a dark comedy about late capitalism.
Cindy Milwe is a writer and teacher who lives in Venice, CA. Her work has been published in many journals and magazines, including 5 AM, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry East, Poet Lore, The William and Mary Review, Flyway, Talking River Review, and The Georgetown Review. She also has poems in three anthologies: Another City: Writing from Los Angeles (City Lights, 2001); Changing Harm to Harmony: The Bullies and Bystanders Project (Marin Poetry Center Press, 2015) and Rumors, Secrets, & Lies (Anhinga Press, 2022). Her first full-length collection, Salvage, was published last year by Finishing Line Press.
Pam Woolway is a recovering journalist seeking redemption through poetry and pigment. Her book Short Order Poems is available on Amazon and is the product of time spent at art events typing poems to order for passers-by. Her memoir, Let It Shine, has a tentative publishing date of April 2024. To learn more about Pam visit ShortOrderPoet.com.
Kristine L. Schomaker is an Art Historian, Curator, Publisher, Art Manager, and multidisciplinary artist living and working at the Brewery artist complex in Los Angeles, California. She earned her BA in Art History and MA in Studio Art from California State University at Northridge. Kristine’s art practice includes painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, performance, and conceptual art based focused on body image and society’s perception of beauty. In 2014 Kristine founded Shoebox Arts to support and empower artists while building community and creating new opportunities. Kristine is also the publisher of Art and Cake, a contemporary L.A. Art magazine.
Composer Dale Trumbore is a Los Angeles-based composer and writer whose music has been called "devastatingly beautiful" (The Washington Post) and praised for its "soaring melodies and beguiling harmonies deployed with finesse" (The New York Times). Trumbore's compositions have been performed internationally by the Chicago Symphony's MusicNOW ensemble, Conspirare, and the Miró Quartet, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Modesto Symphony, and Pasadena Symphony. Her choral works have been commissioned for premieres at national conferences of the American Choral Directors Association, American Guild of Organists, Chorus America, and National Collegiate Choral Organization. Learn more about Trumbore’s music and writing at daletrumbore.com.
Judy Reeves is a writer and teacher who has published four books on writing including the award-winning A Writer’s Book of Days, and the critically acclaimed Wild Women, Wild Voices. Her work has appeared in the San Diego Reader; The Frozen Moment; A Year in Ink; Connotations Press; Serving House Journal; Waymark; Expressive Writing, Classroom and Community, and other journals and anthologies. She is also an editor and has edited manuscripts, journals, and chapbooks. She has been leading writing groups and teaching creative writing for 27 years at writing conferences internationally and at San Diego Writers, Ink, a nonprofit literary center she cofounded.
Vicky Hoffman lives and works in her home studio in Paso Robles, California. She holds a BA in Art from San Diego State University. Her work uses multiple mediums – oils, acrylics, watercolor pencils, encaustics, and various papers. In January 2023, Louis Stern Fine Arts selected Vicky’s work, upRooted, for the Glossary exhibit at Gallery 825. In 2021, the Los Angeles critic, Peter Frank, selected Vicky’s work, Untitled #4 (black), for the Open Show at Gallery 825. In addition, she has appeared in other exhibits at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, TAG Gallery in Los Angeles, and many more.
Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) is a professor of gender studies and core faculty with the American Indian Studies Interdepartmental program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mithlo’s curatorial work has resulted in nine exhibits at the Venice Biennale. Mithlo has taught at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Santa Fe Community College, Smith College, California Institute of the Arts, Occidental College, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her 2020 book Knowing Native Arts was published by the University of Nebraska Press. www.nancymariemithlo.com
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
Chad Michael Lange is a San Francisco-based fiction writer who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California. He has received two residencies at The MacDowell Colony, and The Jentel Foundation, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, Hambidge Center, and Osage Arts Community have also given him fellowships. He has been awarded grants from the California Arts Council and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Lange’s short fiction has appeared in Catamaran, fourteen hills, and ZYZZYVA.
Erica W. Jamieson was born in the Bronx and grew up outside of Detroit. She currently lives in Los Angles. A former lawyer, she writes fiction and personal essay. She facilitates writing groups, including an intergenerational program where young adults write alongside senior citizens to start conversations and create a community. Her work has appeared in Self Magazine, Lilith and published online, most recently in Minerva Press’ the Keeping Room. Her story Emends won the December 2021 StoryNosh award from The Braid Theatre, produced as a performed reading on YouTube.
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 in 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 Boisjoly Challenger Disaster Collection Curator, and is actively involved in the Center for American War Letters.
At 3 years old, Danni Hart knew she was going to be an author when she grew up. But at 11 years old Danni decided that she could not stand being vulnerable. So, Danni stopped writing . . . for a very long time. Danni is trying to reconnect with her three-year-old self and forgive her eleven-year-old self in the process. Danni IS a writer. She just needs to remember and reconnect with that.
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.
Michael Jon Fink is a composer/performer who resides in the San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles. For over forty years he has served on the faculty of the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts 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. He currently plays electric guitar with the Feedback Wave Riders (Free Improv), and Spectral Dawn Spirits (Hierophantic, somewhat metallic, post-psychedelic ambient instrumental music). His music appears on the Cold Blue record label.
Kristen Havens is a writer and poet living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in PANK, Atticus Review, Monkeybicycle, Necessary Fiction, Bending Genres, and Slipstream, among others. She has been a Finalist for the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize and a nominee for 2021 Best Small Fiction. A former marketer for a small press and reader for CRAFT literary magazine, she works as an IT contractor and developmental editor of technical and business books. She is currently writing a literary futurist novel about artificial intelligence. Dorland is her first residency.
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is author of Palm Springs Noir (Akashic). Her stories are in Orange County Noir, Coolest American Stories, 2022, USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, Rock, and A Hard Place, Dark City Crime Mystery Magazine, and Literary Hatchet. She received a Distinguished Instructors award from UC-Irvine and is adjunct professor of creative writing at Chapman University and Saddleback College. Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. For the last 24 years she has hosted Writers on Writing. For 23 of those years, the show broadcast on KUCI-FM.
BUZZFEED called Nona Caspers' novel The Fifth Woman, a book "Queers and Everyone Else Should Read." It was a LAMBDA Finalist, and Indies Book of the Year SILVER Winner in Literary Fiction. Her book of stories, Heavier than Air was honored with a Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction & Editor's Choice New York Times Book Review. Her work has received a Cultural Equity Grant and NEA fellowship, among other grants and awards. Journal publications include Kenyon Review, The Sun, and Glimmer Train. She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and lives in the city with her little dog Bora.
Sonja Schenk is a multi-disciplinary artist from Los Angeles. She began with video installations and has since turned to other types of installation, painting, and sculpture. Her work explores the intersection of humankind and the natural world through traditional, technological, and transformative processes. She exhibits both locally and internationally and she has created several large, site-specific installations. She has been an artist-in-residence at two colleges and the U.S. National Park system. Influenced by early mentors Allan Kaprow, DeeDee Halleck, and Manny Farber, her work relies on a strong grounding in conceptual thought that is then translated into various media.
Alyson Earnest is a 3rd generation creative and insatiably curious world traveler. Her passion for writing is grounded in more than 30 years of daily journaling where she believes she has gained much of her wisdom, and yet so much more from her solo travel journeying across the US by car and throughout 6 continents beyond. She is currently writing her first memoir based on what happened when she left her cul-de-sac in 2018 and began to discover the rich, vast, fascinating world beyond. Alyson is living her mantra that proclaims: She is going places she has never been.
Thea Gavin writes from and about her hometown of Orange, CA. Wild places near and far—explored sans shoes—are her favorite subjects. A retired professor, Thea aims to inspire others to “think outside the shoe” via her writing and workshops. She spent three life-changing weeks as Artist-in-Residence at Grand Canyon’s North Rim in 2011; her work has appeared in the anthologies New Poets of the American West; Fire and Rain: California Ecopoetry; Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon; On Foot: Grand Canyon Backpacking Stories; and in journals such as Rattle, Deep Wild, and The Hopper (“Hiking Across Grand Canyon Alone at Night Barefoot”) theagavin.wordpress.com & theaunravels.com
Elena Masi is an emerging artist based in Northern Michigan. In the years between drawing as a child and graduating from Kendall College of Art and Design with a BFA in Illustration, she has come to learn how to use art as her primary means of processing and connecting to the world around her. She utilizes both traditional and digital tools to create her wide breadth of work, ranging from large-scale acrylic paintings on vintage skis, to oil landscapes, to digitally rendered portraits and designs.
Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of seven books of fiction: How Not to Drown, Vanishing Acts, Wild Things, Shark Girls, Dream Lives of Butterflies, Climbing the God Tree, and Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile. Her books won the 2021 and 2018 International Book Awards, the 2021 NYC Big Book Award, CNY 2017 Fiction Award, Willa Cather Fiction Prize, Zephyr Prize, and an IPPY Gold Medal. Originally from Hawai'i, she is a Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Binghamton University-USA.
Sarah Louise Williams is writing a novel This Prairie Alchemy that examines her family’s 19th-century Irish and English roots, using stories of her family’s immigration to the U.S. and settlement as farmers and stonemasons in the Midwest as inspiration for fiction. Williams has published fiction in StoryQuarterly, Gargoyle, and Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women. She has published nonfiction in Vogue, Gargoyle, and Grand Street. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a B.A. in English Literature from Yale College. She lives in Maryland.
Ali Beheler is a poet and philosopher whose writing occupies the space between these disciplines. Her poetry aims to explore the entwinement of body, language, nature, and memory, as well as the entwinement of poetic and philosophical language and thought. Her philosophical work combines the work of non-philosophers and philosophers to address the above issues from a feminist lens. Published in both disciplines and recipient of an award for scholarship and teaching, she is currently a tenured Associate Professor at Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska.
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.
Kate Brody is a novelist, whose debut RABBIT HOLE will come out with Soho Press (US) and Bloomsbury (UK) in January 2024. She has published in Lit Hub, The Literary Review, Glimmer Train, and other magazines. Currently, Kate is at work writing her second novel, HEATHENS. She has an MFA from NYU. She writes and teaches in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and two children.
Edith Lynn Hornik-Beer is an author/journalist/lecturer whose writing has appeared in major magazines and newspapers both here and abroad including Elle magazine, New York Times, Denver Post, Toronto Star, and Neue Zuercher Zeitung (Switzerland). She enjoys writing monthly columns. She has had until recently a column in PRforPeople, an online magazine. Before that, she had a monthly column, The Young World, which appeared in suburban newspapers on the East Coast. While interviewing teenagers for her column, The Young World, she learned about the problems facing teenagers with alcoholic parents and was inspired to publish numerous books on the subject. Today she works as an investigative reporter and essayist, and lectures at various colleges on successful writing for mainline publishers and the new media. She continues to write books. She is in the process of completing her novel, Where I Belong.
AnnaLeahy 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.
Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review. She teaches at Chapman University. She is the author of The Loneliest Girl from the University of New Mexico Press and of seven books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press in 2014, and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis, which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.
Adrienne Roma Sacks (M.F.A. California State University, Northridge, 2021) was the 2019 recipient of the National Annual Award from Collage Artists of America for her assemblage sculpture. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Torrance Art Museum, Millard Sheets Art Center, and Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute. She has previously taught two-dimensional design, painting, exhibition design, and aesthetics at CSUN, CSSSA at CalArts, and Pratt-MWPAI. Her upcoming solo exhibition titled Museum of Ice Cream, curated by Jordan Bohannon opens at Pullproof Studio in Pittsburgh, PA in July 2023.
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.
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.
Composer and violinist Tommy Dougherty (b. 1990) is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is a composer of orchestral, chamber, and solo works. This year, Tommy is in residence at the Winterthur Museum as a Maker-Creator Fellowship Scholar. In 2021, Tommy received a joint commission from the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra and Laurel Arts to compose a work as a tribute to the people of Somerset for the 20th Anniversary of September 11th. He has since been commissioned to write a new work for the JSO’s 2022-2023 season finale. Over the past several years, his music has been performed by the American Composers Orchestra, the Modern Violin Ensemble (MoVE), Alarm Will Sound, and Kinetic Ensemble. As a violinist, Tommy currently serves as Acting Section Violin with the San Diego Symphony.
John Wuchte has been an actor/writer/director/theater creator for more 35 years. He started his acting career in NYC in the 80s and wrote and directed his first play Vivian Vance is Alive and Well in '91. He was Artisitc Director of RAKKA-THAMM!!! theater for 10 years, notable for adapting/staging Greek tragedies outside in Washington Square park. Moving to Los Angeles in 2000 he has been part of Sacred Fools Theater for 20 years. Last year he created Scarlett Fever, a physical theater movement piece that was the hit of the Hollywood Fringe festival. His latest work Housewife 1952 was derailed due to pandemic.
Ja'net Danielo is the author of This Body I Have Tried to Write, winner of the MAYDAY 2022 Poetry Micro Chapbook Editors' Choice Award, and The Song of Our Disappearing (Paper Nautilus, 2021. A recipient of a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council for Long Beach and the Fischer Prize, her poems have appeared in Frontier Poetry, Mid-American Review, GASHER, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja'net teaches at Cerritos College and lives in Long Beach, CA, where she facilitates Word Women, a free poetry workshop series for cancer patients and survivors.
Susan Davies is a painter working mainly in oil and acrylics. She received a BA in Art and Education from Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN (1982) and a MA in Curriculum Design from St. Mary’s University of MN (1995). She also studied at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, Rome, Italy (1981); at the Women’s Art Institute, Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2004). Susan is interested in our connection to our natural surroundings with a special focus on water and water preservation. Davies is represented by Artactile Gallery and Everett & Charlie, both in Minneapolis.
Mike Brosnan is a Los Angeles native and received his BA at Cal State University, Northridge in film with a minor in journalism. After long stints writing scripts and poetry (he studied under Eloise Klein Healy - named LA’s first Poet Laureate in 2012), he turned his eye towards fiction. Mike has worked at the UCLA Film and Television Archive and was for a time in the development departments of producer Edward R. Pressman, producer/director Oliver Stone and Miramax. He is currently employed at The Walt Disney Co. His essay on Irene Adler, a character found in the Sherlock Holmes canon, can be found in the book, Ladies, Ladies: The Women in the Life of Sherlock Holmes, Aventine Press, 2007. In addition to his writing and movie industry endeavors, he has been a wine director, wine bar manager and owned his own wine event planning business.
Sheryl Stradling is an author and artist. Her book, Faith, Power, Joy: Spiritual Guidance from 5 Generations of Remarkable Women, a multi-generational memoir, won the 2018 Body Mind Spirit book award for Spiritual Healing, and a Readers’ Favorite Five Star award. She contributed to Journey of an Empath, a compilation of stories, and to Akasha: Spiritual Experiences of Accessing Our Soul’s Infinite Intelligence, to be published in August. A mixed media abstract artist, Stradling’s work is inspired by nature and Asian culture. She studied fine art at Western Washington University and printmaking at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle, Washington
January - March 2023 Residents
Frank Bevans, a native son of California, has been a commercial photographer for over forty years, working for Fortune 500 companies, producing books and magazine covers, billboards, editorial content, and promotional materials of all sorts, all over the world. He loves teaching photography workshops and is currently working on a new educational publication: “The Spirit of Your Subject.” Frank creates award-winning nature and fine art imagery. He is a curious and driven artist, musician, craftsman, audio engineer, and videographer.
Hannah Keefe is a metalsmith and visual artist known primarily for her one-of-a-kind handmade jewelry pieces. With a fine arts education and years working in the visual arts, she approaches her studio jewelry-making with a sculptor’s eye. For the past 2 decades, Hannah has maintained a rigorous studio practice concentrated around the material exploration of brass chain and silver solder. Her jewelry is sold at galleries and boutiques around the world.
July - September
Tony Eprile is a South African writer & photographer now living in Vermont. His novel, The Persistence of Memory, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, longlisted for the Dublin Impac Prize, and won the Koret International Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His writing has appeared in O Magazine, The New York Times, Details, The Nation, Gourmet, and the Washington Post. His photographs have appeared in Discover Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, National Geographic (online), Gourmet, Pacific Standard, and elsewhere. Awards include National Endowment for the Arts, Ingram Merrill Foundation, Djerassi Foundation, MacDowell Colony and other fellowships.
Jean Toner is a retired clinical social worker and social work educator. In retirement, she has shifted from academic and professional writing to creative writing. She is working on a non-fiction book that weaves mythology, autoethnography, poetry, and vignette into a path to healing trauma. She is also working on bringing years of poetry together into a thematic whole.
April Dávila received her undergraduate degree in biology from Scripps College before going on to study writing at USC. She is a mindfulness meditation instructor (certified by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley), creator of the unique Sit Write Here writing coaching program and co-founder of A Very Important Meeting. In 2019 her short story “Ultra” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2020 her debut novel “142 Ostriches” was published by Kensington Books and went on to win the 2021 WILLA Award for Women Writing the West. A fourth-generation Californian, she lives in La Cañada Flintridge with her husband and two children. She is a practicing Buddhist, a half-hearted gardener, and an occasional runner.
RESIDENTS: 2023
Moira Donohoe: My Paintings are driven by a passion for the mountains, particularly the Yosemite Sierra. I never tire of pulling apart and remixing various elements of Yosemite. Namely, light, color, rock, flora, fauna, and spirit. Yosemite is a thin place, very close to another dimension, a sacred one. Indeed, there are certain spots away from the crowded central areas where I can feel another essence, a spiritual one. I describe that essence through physical media. Growing up in a large Irish family encouraged the worldview of the sacred in all things. Lately, I have been working on a tree series. Trees are sentient Beings, and Yosemite is home to many. My Celtic roots honor trees in ritual and tradition. I want to keep that tradition.
Natalie Sudman worked as an archeologist for sixteen years before accepting a position managing construction contracts in Iraq in 2006. After being injured in Iraq, she retired from government service to concentrate on art and writing. Her nonfiction book Application of Impossible Things was published in 2010. Poetry and essays have been published in national journals throughout the 1990s. Sudman's artwork has been shown internationally. Raised in Minnesota, she has lived most of her life in eastern Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota. She currently resides in Minnesota.
Joshua Dysart is a New York Times bestselling writer of graphic novels and prose. His work often centers on real-world narratives backed by extensive research. He has traveled with child soldiers in Uganda (2007), convoyed across Iraqi Kurdistan interviewing Syrian refugees and victims of Da’esh (2014), and traveled across South Sudan researching human migration due to drought and war (2016). He has worked with the World Food Programme, Deepak Chopra, and musician Neil Young. In 2018 he led a college speaking tour across Pakistan for the “Comics for Peace” project. He has been published in seven languages, including Arabic.
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.
Laura Schmitt (she/her) is a multiracial writer with roots in Hawai’i and the Midwest. Her fiction can be found in the New England Review, The Pinch, Boulevard, Indiana Review, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the New England Review‘s 2021 Award for Emerging Writers, received a 2019 Hedgebrook residency, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Laura was born in Southern California and currently lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a novel and a collection of stories.
Ellen Yaffa tiptoed into flash narrative in 2008 and has been hooked on short-form writing ever since. She is an active, enthusiastic member of weekly writing practice groups and an alumna of workshops emphasizing flash narrative and “short shorts.” Her work has been published in anthologies such as "Dime Stories," "A Year in Ink," and "University of Hell Press," as well as The Sun Magazine. Ellen also creates multi-media art on paper and canvas and has exhibited at Expressive Arts San Diego. "Through My Eyes," her first book, is a collection of flash narratives and original art, available on amazon.com.
April - June
Vicki Moran is a watercolor artist living in Hemet, California. She began her watercolor study in 2014 upon retiring from a career in book publishing. At Hemet Valley Art Association, she has enjoyed classes by Joyce Thomas and Betty Pilley and has attended watercolor workshops by Janice Cipriani-Willis and Susan Keith. She continues to study under Betty Pilley and, at Dorland, Robert Willis. Vicki has won three Best of Show awards at HVAA, shown at Redlands Multi-Media show, Brandon Gallery, The Merc in Temecula, and at Dorland. Her current focus is portraits.
James Bennett is a writer and translator from San Diego, California. He is a former U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Mozambique, as well as the recipient of Fulbright grants to Mozambique (2017) and Portugal (2021). He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and is currently working on his first novel.