| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
|---|---|---|
A.H. Kim | A.H. Kim (Ann) was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to the U.S. as a young child. Ann was educated at Harvard College and Berkeley Law, practiced corporate law for many years, and served as chief of staff to the CEO and head of investor relations at a Fortune 200 company. Ann is the proud mother of two sons, a long time cancer survivor, and community volunteer. After raising her family in the Bay Area, Ann and her husband now call Ann Arbor home. |  |
Shanelle Boluyt | Shanelle Boluyt grew up in Dexter, MI. After spending her teenage years swearing she would get as far away from home as possible, she landed... one town over, in Chelsea, MI, where she now resides with her husband, child, and cat. Shanelle graduated from the Fiction Writing program at Columbia College Chicago and serves as the IT Director for the Chelsea Writers' Workshop. Her shorter works have been published in the Huron River Review and Hairtrigger. Her debut novel, Intersections, was published in 2019. |  |
Brenda E. Bentley | What started as a hobby during her children’s teen years turned into a passion project for Brenda E. Bentley who wrote River Walks Ann Arbor; Walking Loops Along the Huron River. She spent many days poring over historical maps at the Bentley Library, and many, many days exploring on foot all the streets of Ann Arbor to design pleasing walking loops. Brenda got to know the trees of the city and its wonderful pioneer history. During this time, she fell in love with the ice-age history of the surface geology of Michigan. She decided to make the moraines and river a central theme of the book, interlaced with one-page stories of cultural history. Since the book project, Brenda has continued to explore and learn about the wonderful glacial deposits covering Michigan. She has a rudimentary Youtube channel, Brenda Ellen Bentley, on which (for example) she posts videos focussed on the glacial remains seen from the Kiwanis Rail Trail between Tecumseh and Adrian. She and her husband moved to Ann Arbor in 1992, raised their children there, and now are delighted to be grandparents. They also carry the agony of losing their beautiful 18-year-old son in 2007. They look daily toward spiritual sources of strength along this rugged path. |  |
David Pratt | David Pratt is the author of Bob the Book (Chelsea Station), Wallaconia (Beautiful Dreamer Press), Todd Sweeney, the Fiend of Fleet High (Hosta Press), Looking After Joey (Lethe Press), and a story collection, My Movie (Chelsea Station). His stories have appeared in several periodicals and anthologies. David has performed work for the theater at venues in New York City and Michigan. He recently published Two Plays: The Snow Queen and November Door, and The Book of Humiliation, an "anti-novel" published as a series of zines designed by Ann Arbor, MI artist Nicholas Williams. | |
Kelly Murdoch-Kitt | Kelly Murdoch-Kitt is an Associate Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She is a user experience designer and educator focused on people, systems, and interpersonal interactions. In her work and teaching, human connection drives the creation of effective and socially responsible concepts. She integrates visual communication, user experience, and service design with behavior change and social engagement, drawing on her industry experience as a user experience strategist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to joining U-M, Murdoch-Kitt served as an Assistant Professor in the School of Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She also taught in the Graphic Design Programs at the University of San Francisco and California College of the Arts. Her excellence in teaching and contributions to service within the discipline have been recognized by the Design Incubation Communication Design Educator Awards: Intercultural Design Collaborations in Sustainability; and the Decipher 2018 Design Educators Research Conference. Murdoch-Kitt and her research partner, Dr. Denielle J. Emans of Roger Williams University are co-authors of Intercultural Collaboration by Design: Drawing from Differences, Distances, and Disciplines through Visual Thinking (Routledge 2020). Based on their research, the book offers more than 30 visual thinking activities to support effective collaboration among diverse teams. Their research group, ORBIT Labs (Online Resource for Building Intercultural Teams), was recently recognized as a recipient of the 2022 Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for Excellence in Promoting Equity and Social Change. Murdoch-Kitt and Emans are currently working together on a new book about the intersection of creative practice and psychological resilience, which argues that everyone can learn to become creatively resilient—and put methods of adaptability, flexibility, and optimism into practice. Its 15 case studies include various projects, practices, and activities that show readers how to utilize creative methods to work positively with uncertainty. |  |
Carla Harryman | Carla Harryman is a poet, experimental prose writer, essayist, performance writer, and collaborator in multi-disciplinary performance. The author of twenty-five books, she is known for her boundary breaking investigations of genre, non/narrative poetics, and text-based performances. The influence of improvised music, electronic sampling, and collaborative practices animate her recent works. Recent publications include Cloud Cantata (Pamenar, 2022); the poet's theater play Good Morning (PAJ: Journal of Performance and Art, MIT Press, 2022); and Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (trans. Sabine Huynh), a collection of poetry and performance writings composed between 2001-2015 and released in 2018 by PURH "To Series" in separate English and French volumes. Other key publications in the last two decades include Adorno's Noise (2008), an experiment in prose poetry and "the essay as form," the collaborative ten-volume work, The Grand Piano: Experiments in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975-1980 (completed in 2010); the poet's novel Gardener of Stars (2001); W-/M-(2013), and the essay Artifact of Hope (2017). Her awards include an artist award in poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York; a grant (with Erling Wald) from Opera America: Next Stage, an NEA Consortium Playwright Commission; several awards from The Foundation for Poetry; and the Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Award for Creative Activity at Eastern Michigan University. Her work has been translated into many languages and her poetry, prose and plays have been represented in over thirty national and international anthologies. | |
Keith Taylor | Keith Taylor was born in British Columbia in 1952. He spent his childhood in Alberta and his adolescence in Indiana. After several years of traveling, he moved to Michigan, where he earned his M.A. in English at Central Michigan University. He has worked as a camp-boy for a hunting outfitter in the Yukon, as a dishwasher in southern France, a housepainter in Indiana and Ireland, a freight handler, a teacher, a freelance writer, the co-host of a radio talk show, and as the night attendant at a pinball arcade in California. For more than twenty years he worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then he taught in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Michigan, and directed the Bear River Writers Conference. From 2010–2018 he worked as the Poetry Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. He retired from the University of Michigan in 2018. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor; they have one daughter. | |
Jennifer Traig | Jennifer Traig is the author of Act Natural, Well Enough Alone, and Devil in the Details and the editor of The Autobiographer's Handbook and Don't Forget to Write. She holds a PhD in English from Brandeis, and teaches in the Comprehensive Studies Program at UM. | |
Carey F. Whitepigeon | Carey F. Whitepigeon is a member of a Potawatomi tribe, one of the Three Fires of the Anishinaabe. A lifelong resident of the state of Michigan, she lives in Ann Arbor with her husband, three children, and two cats. She holds a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from the University of Michigan. Carey’s career has included marketing, market research, business consulting, project management, and non-profit management. Her professional travels have given Carey the opportunity to meet and work with amazing people in countries around the world, for which she is grateful. As a reader and writer, Carey's first love has been science fiction and fantasy ever since she read Tolkien’s The Hobbit in second grade. In addition to reading, Carey enjoys travel, hiking, kayaking, and spending time with her family. | |
Ruth Behar | Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba and grew up in New York. She is a cultural anthropologist, poet, and writer of fiction for young people. Behar is known for the compassion she brings to her quest to understand the depth of the human experience. She has lived in Spain and Mexico and returns often to Cuba to build bridges around culture and art. She writes about her journeys in her ethnographies, which include An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba and Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in Between Journeys. The 25th anniversary edition of her classic book, The Vulnerable Observer Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, was published in 2022. Her bilingual poetry appears in Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé. Behar won the Pura Belpré Author Medal for her debut middle grade novel, Lucky Broken Girl, and her second novel, Letters from Cuba, is a Sydney Taylor Notable Book and received an International Latino Book Award. Behar's debut picture book, Tia Fortuna's New Home, and in Spanish, El nuevo hogar de Tía Fortuna, a Cuban Sephardic story about intergenerational memory. A second picture book, Pepita Meets Bebita, is co-authored with her son, Gabriel Frye-Behar. Behar is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a "Great Immigrant" by the Carnegie Corporation. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and is the James W. Fernandez Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. | |
| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
