| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
|---|---|---|
Avik Basu | Avik Basu is a researcher and lecturer at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. His research has included understanding the differences between experts and laypeople in environmental decision-making, designing sustainable developments to be more acceptable to rural residents, promoting the adoption of sustainable transportation, and designing environments that simultaneously enhance individual and communal well-being. Along with Rachel Kaplan, he is co-editor of Fostering Reasonableness: Supportive Environments for Bringing out our Best which describes Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE), a human needs framework that is the foundational theory of reDirect. |  |
Patrick Barry | Patrick Barry is a Clinical Assistant Professor and the Director of Digital Academic Initiatives at the University of Michigan Law School, as well as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of several books on advocacy and has recently launched a series of online courses called “Good with Words” on the educational platform Coursera. Among Professor Barry’s teaching awards are the Wayne Booth Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Prize, and the Outstanding Research Mentor Award. He has also served as the law school’s Faculty Ally for Diversity and been selected as a Faculty Fellow by the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’s Center for Educational Outreach. A member of the California bar who regularly partners with law firms, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, he is currently working on a project that uses immersive technology to help lawyers and other professionals give and receive more effective feedback. He has a Ph.D. in English in addition to a law degree, and in college he was an All-American soccer player. https://michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/our-faculty/patrick-barry | |
T. Casey Brennan | T. Casey Brennan is an Ann Arbor comic book writer and author. He wrote for Warren Publishing's horror comic anthologies Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella. He also wrote for DC’s House of Mystery and Archie Comics’ Red Circle Sorcery. His full length novel Lesbo Cult! was published in 1979 and his story Carrier of the Serpent is included in Warren Eerie Archives Volume Eight, available at the Ann Arbor Public Library. | |
Julie Babcock | Julie Babcock is a poet and fiction writer who has lived in Ann Arbor since 2004. Her hybrid poetry collection, Rules for Rearrangement, wrought in response to the sudden death of her husband, won the 2019 Kithara Book Award and was published in December 2020. She is also the author of Autoplay, described as both an ode and an elegy to her Midwestern upbringing. Her poetry and fiction appear in The Rumpus, PANK, december magazine, and has been anthologized in New Poetry from the Midwest. She is the recipient of a Vermont Studio fiction fellowship and several Pushcart nominations. She is faculty in the Minor in Writing Program at University of Michigan and is deeply committed to helping students connect their embodied experiences to research-based academic work to support stories that have been silenced and/or suppressed. | |
Angela K. Berent | Angela K. Berent always wanted to write, but she couldn’t find the time. Life on a lake in Chelsea with her husband and their teenage twin sons offers plenty of pleasant distractions. Finally, she discovered that she could write it all in short lists of three. As a teacher, she finds that creating lists is a great way to help reluctant middle school students write. A Midwesterner at heart, influenced by a few good years in California, her stories and lists are endless. Her goal is to help readers capture their memories quickly and easily. There is never a shortage of writing material, only of precious writing time! Everyone has stories to write, and that is why Berent created List Your Life: A Modern-Day Memoir, Trace Your Travels: An Adventure Journal, and Notes from the Nursery: A Keepsake. |  |
Gregg Barak | Gregg Barak is an Emeritus Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Eastern Michigan University. Barak is an award-winning author and editor of books on crime, justice, media, violence, criminal law, homeless- ness, and human rights. He is also the co-founder and North American Editor of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime. | |
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. |  |
Kimberley Barker | Kimberley Barker holds a Ph.D. in organization development from Benedictine University, Lisle, IL, and an MBA from Hawai’i Pacific University, Honolulu, HI. She has had extensive experience in organization development and change, cultural competence, human resources, global leadership, dilemma reconciliation, influence and negotiation management, teams, business research, and global communication. She teaches as a Full-Time Lecturer at Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her latest book is now available, “YOU Can Create Positive Change at Work,” by Kimberley Barker and Mary Ceccanese. |  |
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. | |
Bernice Baran | Bernice Baran started her website, Bakery Baran, as a place to document all of the adventures in her everyday life. It was a creative outlet on days off of working as a nurse, and a place to come and look back on 10 years from now and see all her photos and thoughts from this time in her life. That quickly and exclusively turned into her baking and sharing her recipes. Over the last five years, Bernice stopped nursing, had two babies, and took Baran Bakery full-time. She wrote a cookbook, Frosted, and hosts cake decorating workshops. She can't wait to see what the next five years bring, but whatever it is, she knows it'll be sweet. |  |
| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
