Rebecca Johnson

Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020). Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

Bex O’Brian

Bex lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother. Read an excerpt from Radius on our DPA+ page, here.

Michelle Anderson

Michelle is the co-founder of La Porte Peinte Centre pour les Arts in France, an artists’ residency programme. A writer, artist, and editor, she wrote and illustrated The Japanese Way of Beauty and Awaiting a Lover and was formerly Editor in Chief of the Paris-based magazine Bloom. Her work has been published in literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and magazines in the USA, Japan, Italy and France. See here for more info.

Abigail Thomas

Abigail has four children, twelve grandchildren, one great grandchild, two dogs, and a high school education. Her books include Safekeeping; A Three Dog Life; and What Comes Next and How to Like It. She lives in Woodstock, NY.

Photograph by Jennifer Waddell

Eve Marx

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child. Follow Eve on Twitter here.

Marion Winik

University of Baltimore professor Marion is the author of First Comes Love, The Big Book of the Dead and many other books. Her award-winning column appears monthly at Baltimore Fishbowl and her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and elsewhere. A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she reviews for People, Newsday, The Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews; she hosts The Weekly Reader podcast at WYPR. More info at marionwinik.com.

N. West Moss

N. West has a memoir: Flesh and Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life out right now from Algonquin. In addition to her short story collection, she also has a middle grade novel forthcoming from Little, Brown.

Danielle Truscott

Danielle is a former poet, journalist, newspaper and book editor who currently divides her time between New York City and upstate New York. She is the author of a forthcoming memoir. When she’s not writing or taking care of daily operations, she boxes, swims, takes long walks, reads, and spends as much time as she can with her busy, adventurous teenage son, Dash. 

Ann Patty

Ann is the author of LIVING WITH A DEAD LANGUAGE; My Romance with Latin (Viking/Penguin, 2016) . Her essays have been published in The Wall Street Journal, Linga Franca, Society for Classical Studies, Oprah.com, The Bucket, Publishers’ Weekly, and The Toast.  She was the founder and publisher of The Poseidon Press and an executive editor at Crown Publishers and Harcourt. She currently rusticates in the Hudson Valley, with her husband and dog.

Debra Ryll

Debra is a TEDx Monterey speaker, the author of two children’s books and Religomania, a musical about two Moms on a mission… to take down organized religion. Her essays have appeared in the Manifest Station and the San Francisco Chronicle, and she has just completed a memoir, Blue Cake, True Tales of an Accidental Outlaw, chronicling her misadventures as a drug and diamond smuggler.

Linda Button

Linda spent 20 years running an award-winning agency and romping across six continents to speak on creativity and writing. Her essays on relationships have appeared in the New York Times Modern Love and Boston Magazine. She completed the Memoir Incubator at Grub Street and is working on a memoir about marriage, madness, and how martial arts saved her. https://lindabutton.works

Claire Lawrence

Claire a Professor of Creative Writing at Bloomsburg University. She has a PhD in Creative Writing: Fiction from the University of Houston and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Utah. She has published fiction, poetry, and memoir in numerous magazines including Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly, Event Magazine, Terra Nova, Western Humanities Review, Lunch Ticket and Juked. Claire lives in the forest with my husband, children, and two Pekingese named Mushu and Kung Pao.

Kimberly Diaz

Kimberly is a survivor of two marriages trying to stay sane in the crazy state of Florida. Her work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Entropy, Montana Mouthful, Sunspot Literary, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and other lit mags, and anthologies. She’s currently working on an essay collection and a memoir

Holly Peppe

Holly has taught English in the U.S. and Italy, worked abroad with a medical nonprofit, and managed a PR firm in Manhattan. She has been writing about the Jazz Age poet Edna St. Vincent Millay since the 1980’s, when she lived with the poet’s sister, then 92, at Millay’s former home in upstate NY. Her essays about Millay’s life and work appear in the Penguin Classics, Harper Perennial, and Yale University Press collections of her poetry. She is also co-author of two Scholastic YA books and the memoir of Eve Branson, mother of the colorful British entrepreneur. 

Deirdre Mendoza

Deirdre is the author of the story collection, Real Lives of Married People (8foldOccasional Press Feb., 2022). Her arts and culture writing has been published in Ms.com, The L.A. Times, WWD, Variety, Thebeet.com, and Miami New Times. She teaches writing at Woodbury University and Glendale College.

Angie Wright

Angie has always liked starting trouble—good trouble, as John Lewis called it. She has spent her life fighting against hate in the South as an activist and pastor, while trying to avoid the temptation of hating the haters. Angie has written a book, Loving My Enemies: A Memoir Of Outlandish Pursuits, which she hopes to see on bookstore shelves in the not-too-distant future. Angie was the editor and lead contributor to Love Has No Borders, a book about the struggle for immigrant rights in Alabama. Her essays have been published in Santa Fe Writers' Project Quarterly, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Wraparound South and others.

Sue Zarco Kramer

Sue is an accomplished Filmmaker & Screenwriter, CEO & Creative Director. She attended UCLA Film School, and founded her production company Bella Films. Sue has written & directed extensively for film and TV. Her film "Gray Matters" is now on Amazon Prime. Always a storyteller, Kramer writes for many magazines, blogs and online media outlets, and directs and conceives campaigns for numerous brands & causes including "Be Dope. Vote" and "Erase Hate" and "YouVoteVideo.”
Sue is the creative force behind her boutique, branding agency connectingdotsguru.com, using her filmmaking lens and screenwriter's pen to brand businesses & individuals through a very unique, cinematic POV.

Patricia Mulcahy

Patricia formed the editorial consulting service Brooklyn Books (http://brooklynbooks.com) after over twenty years in book publishing. She started as a temp at Farrar Straus and Giroux and left as Editor in Chief at Doubleday. Her authors included bestselling crime writers James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly.

She is the co-author of It Is Well with My Soul: The Extraordinary Life of a 106-Year –Old Woman, by Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson (Penguin, 2010) and Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! on PBS by Rebecca Eaton (Viking 2013). Her writing has appeared in Publisher’s Weekly, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, and in the anthology Brooklyn Noir 3 (Akashic Books).  A member of the editorial collective 5E (www.5Eeditors.com), she now lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York.

Cathy Deutsch

Cathy is a freelance writer, essayist, former restaurant columnist, and word game enthusiast. She recently published an essay for The Inside Press, where she is a regular contributor, on her beloved Rolling Stones, In Honoring Charlie Watts, which got national attention and filled her cup. She has also been featured in the online blog Storytelling at Work. She resides in Westchester County NY, with her partner John, their feisty Shih Tzu Ollie and is always looking forward to visits from her playwright daughter Avery who shares her love of language and storytelling.

Sarah Gundle

Sarah is a psychologist living in Brooklyn with her two daughters.
She has a doctorate in Clinical Psychology and a master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University. In addition to her private practice, she teaches courses on trauma and international mental health at Mount Sinai Hospital system.

Lesley Alderman

Lesley is a psychotherapist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She has been a staff editor at Money and Real Simplemagazines (where she learned about frugality and the quickest way to clean a kitchen), and was a co-author of a New York Times column on the personal costs of healthcare, Patient Money. As the author of The Book of Times, published by HarperCollins in 2013, she revealed such scientific facts as how long it takes to get over a broken heart and how many hours of sleep your dog actually needs. Currently, Lesley writes about mental health for the Times and other national publications.

Martha Wiseman

Martha grew up in both New York and North Carolina. She has been an acting student, a dancer and choreographer, and an editor. She retired in 2020 from her position teaching literature and writing in the English Department and running the writing center at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. 

The Georgia Review has published four essays of hers, the latest in Fall 2019. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and White Eagle Coffee Store Press brought out a long story, Double Vision (2004), as a chapbook. Her “Dreams of Foreign Cities,” a prize-winner in Fish Publishing’s Short Memoir Contest, was published in Fish Anthology 2021, and essays are out or forthcoming from Ponder Review, Under the Sun, and The Bookends Review. She has also published an essay on Proust, book reviews, and translations from French, and she has collaborated on dance-theater pieces at the University of Michigan. 

Deanne Stillman

Deanne is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer. Her books include Twentynine Palms, an LA Times "best book of the year" which Hunter Thompson called "A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer" and Mustang, an LA Times "best book of the year."

Her essays have appeared in the LA Review of Books, Rolling Stone, Tin House, the Independent, NY Times, lithub, and elsewhere. Her plays have been produced and won prizes around the country and her latest is "Reflections in a D'Back's Eye," directed by Darrell Larson at Highways Performance Space in LA shortly before the pandemic. She's currently writing American Confidential about Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother for Melville House Press.

Virginia Foley

Virginia writes overlooking Lake St Clair in Ontario, Canada.  Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in Canada and USA, most notably, Read650, Southshore Review, Canada’s History Magazine, Talking Writing, and Dreamers Creative Writing. You can visit her at www.virginiafoley.com

Nina Gaby

Nina is a writer, visual artist and psychiatric nurse practitioner who spent the pandemic hunkered down across from the longest floating bridge east of the Mississippi with her dog, two cats, husband. Please visit www.ninagaby.comfor a complete list of publications and images of Gaby’s mixed-media artwork.

Marguerite Bunce

Marguerite grew up in Sydney, Australia, where she published poetry in some anthologies and won a couple of prizes. When her poems became too long for traditional publication, she  wrote a libretto for an opera based on a Bocaccio story from the Decameron. “The Remedy” was performed by the Sydney Metropolitan Opera company. Short films she wrote were shown at the National Film Institute in London and elsewhere.  She currently lives in the south of France where she is experimenting in new forms of writing, such as the essay published here.

Sheila Weller

Sheila is the author of eight well-received books, several of them NYT bestsellers, the best known of which is Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- And The Journey Of A Generation. She has written for (what the hell, let's use the vernacular) a ton of magazines, including Vanity Fair, New York, Glamour, the New Times Book Review, Styles and Opinion pages. She lives in Greenwich Village.

Vivian Gornick

Vivian was born in New York City in 1936. She is the author of fifteen books and the recipient of numerous awards. Her most recent, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader was published in 2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The Odd Woman and the City, from which her piece is excerpted, was published in May, 2015.

Mary Morris

Mary is the author of sixteen books - eight novels, including most recently Gateway to the Moon (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2018), three collections of short stories, and four travel memoirs, including the travel classic, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone (Houghton Mifflin, 1988), and an anthology of travel literature.  All the Way to the Tigers, from which “Visa Trouble” was excerpted was published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday to rave reviews.

Tess Kelly

Tess Kelly's work has appeared in Ruminate and The RavensPerch, and will soon appear in FiveMinuteLit. She is the first prize recipient in the 2020 Women's National Book Association awards, in the category of Flash Prose. She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

Nina Lichtenstein

Nina holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program, and is working on a memoir in parts titled "My Body Remembers." She and her partner divide their time between midcoast Maine, Israel and Norway.

Maggie Levine

Maggie has an MFA in fiction and remembers every book she read in Vivian Gornick's memoir class at the University of Arizona. Her newsletter, ArtWrite, explores the common ground between writers and artists through a blend of personal narrative and interviews.

Mara Kurtz

Mara is a graphic designer, photographer and illustrator and founder of Mara Kurtz Studio.
Her work has been published in numerous publications including Metropolis, New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Travel and Leisure, and The Wall Street Journal.
She has been a Professor at Parsons School of Design,The New School, NYU and School of Visual Arts since 1990. She is a graduate of New York University and Parsons School of Design. She received an MA from The New School in 1995.
The Rock Hill Pictures, a book of Mara's documentary photographs, was published in 2012.

Helen Klein Ross

Helen is a writer whose work has appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her novels include What Was Mine and The Latecomers. She is creator and editor of The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an anthology of new poems titled by telegrams sourced from an 1853 compendium she discovered on Twitter. She lives in Lakeville, CT where she writes about local history for The Lakeville Journal, an 125-year old weekly. She's on Twitter, IG and TikTok as @helenkleinross.

Mimi Zieman

Mimi is an OB/GYN, author of 16 editions of a medical guide, Managing Contraception, and an advocate for women’s reproductive rights. She is working on a memoir about her journey from N.Y.C. to becoming the doctor and only woman on an Everest expedition in Tibet, while she was a medical student in the Bronx (in 1988). You can subscribe to her women’s health newsletter at wwwmimiziemanmd.com, or follow her on twitter and instagram

Ona Gritz

Ona is a poet, memoirist, essayist, and children’s author. A longtime columnist for Literary Mama, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Brevity, Salon, and River Teeth, and been twice listed as Notable in The Best American Essays. Her most recent book, Present Imperfect, is a collection of essays.

Lea Page

Lea’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Pinch, Stonecoast Journal, Sycamore Review, Pithead Chapel (nominated for Best of Net), High Desert Journal, riverSedge and Slipstream. She is also the author of Parenting in the Here and Now (Floris Books, 2015). She lives in rural Montana with her husband and a small circus of semi-domesticated animals.

Deborah Williams

Deborah is a writer and literature professor based in Abu Dhabi. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The Common, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, and The Rumpus. She is finishing a novel based on the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, who defied convention (and Napoleon) to wander the Mediterranean and the Levant with her much-younger lover. Follow Deb on IG and Twitter: @mannahattamamma

Carol Ardman

Carol Ardman is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times and many other publications. She is the co-author of five books about medical conditions for a lay audience. She is also the author off an e-memoir, Tangier Love Story: Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles and Me.

Alexandra Styron

Alexandra is the author of a novel and two non-fiction books, including the bestselling memoir Reading My Father. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair among other publications. 

Sarah Montgomery

Sarah is a writer and lawyer who has been published in McSweeney's and Motherly. She lives in the Washington DC area. When not otherwise occupied by work, family, and dog, she is a competitive rower and coach.

Vivian Conan

Vivian is a writer, librarian, and IT business analyst who lives in Manhattan. A native New Yorker, she grew up in a large Greek-Jewish clan in Brooklyn, graduated from Brooklyn College, and holds master’s degrees from Pratt Institute and Baruch College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Lilith, Narratively, Next Avenue, and Ducts. Her memoir is Losing the Atmosphere. More info at VivianConan.com.

Amy Ferris

Amy Ferris is an author, editor, screenwriter & playwright. Her memoir, Marrying George Clooney, Confessions from a Midlife Crisis (Seal Press) was adapted into an Off-Broadway play in 2012. She recently co-authored the book, Old School Love (HarperCollins, 2020) with Rev Run of RUN DMC fame. Amy serves on a variety of advisory boards supporting women and the arts. She co-founded the Milford Readers and Writers Festival which celebrates the written word. In 2019 she was named one of Women’s eNews 21 LEADERS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, and she is Co-Director of The Story Summit Writer's School.

Nancy Davidoff Kelton

Nancy Davidoff Kelton teaches writing at the New School, privately, and at the Strand Bookstore. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, AARP, McSweeney's, and Next Avenue, among numerous other publications. Her 7 books include: Writing From Personal Experience and her memoir Finding Mr. Rightstein which she is adapting for the stage. Link to her Next Avenue essay about the play: https://www.nextavenue.org/playwriting-lifes-second-half/

Elvina Scott

Elvina is a mother, writer, and athlete. She has two children, one of whom is disabled and has intractable epilepsy. This parenting experience informs her writing and advocacy work. Elvina is in the Memoir Incubator at Grubstreet. She is a certified Wild Writing teacher and offers classes in Brave Writing, a generative free write practice. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a graduate of Smith College.

Ann Kathryn Kelly

Ann Kathryn writes from New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine, a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing, and she works in the technology sector. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her essays have appeared in a number of literary journals. https://annkkelly.com/

Sally Edelstein

Sally is an award-winning collage artist and writer who considers herself a visual archeologist digging deep into American mythology. An incurable collector of vintage ephemera, that serves as a source for both her hand-cut collages and her writing, she draws heavily on popular culture and how it both informs our identities and fragments it.  

Along with feminist icons such as Judy Chicago, her work is currently on view in “Agency: Feminist Art and Power” at The Museum of Sonoma County, CA until June 2022. 

As a writer, her essays have appeared in Ms Magazine, Independent, Next Avenue, N.Y. Daily News Next Tribe, Tablet and is she is the author-illustrator of This Year's Girl ( Doubleday)

Told through both text and illustration her blog Envisioning the American Dream probes the ways that advertising and media steer out perceptions of race, class, and gender. Sally currently resides in Huntington, N.Y. with her yellow lab Stanley.

Gloria Zimmerman

Gloria lives in New York City with her husband in their empty nest. She teaches English as a Second Language at Lehman College. Her essays have appeared in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, Borderline Stories and Beach Reads. Her piece, “Multitudes” was set to music for a concert series in New Ulm, Minnesota and she directed her stage play, “The Negative Space,” at Town and Village Synagogue on the Lower East Side.

Beth Kephart

Beth is the award-winning author of three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a widely published essayist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

Daphne Young

Daphne’s short story “Screw Worm: Larva of the American Blowfly” was published in the Wisconsin Review and her prize-winning play “Bleaching Liver With the Company Man” was produced by E.A.T (the English Alternative Theater at the University of Kansas). She has been an investigative journalist, college instructor, academic department head, and is currently on the senior leadership team of a national nonprofit for abused and neglected children, but she has consistently maintained the wardrobe of an intergalactic cocktail waitress throughout her professional career.

Corinne O'Shaughnessy

Corinne is a retired New York City public school literacy teacher. Her essays have appeared here and in HerStry.com, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and reideasjournal.com. She also recently participated in Read650.org's presentation of Haunted, true tales of the macabre.

Her short fiction has been published in SurvivorLit.org and BookofMatchesLit.org.

She currently lives in Mexico where she finds people so much more gracious.