| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
|---|---|---|
Devika Dibya Choudhuri | Devika Dibya Choudhuri is a Professor of Counseling at Eastern Michigan University. A Professional Counselor (MI/CT), Board-Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselor, Approved Clinical Supervisor, and Certified EMDR Therapist. She has 20 years of clinical experience with refugees, immigrant and multicultural populations, as well as trauma survivors of violence, sexual assault, grief, and loss. Her scholarship focuses on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access issues in counseling, supervision and pedagogy. She served as Director and Chair on the National Board of Certified Counselors from 2009-2015, the Minority Fellowship Advisory Council from 2015-2018, and as President of the Association for Specialists in Group Work in 2020. She is an Editorial Board member of the Journal of LGBT Issues in Counseling, the Journal of Multicultural Counseling & Development, and a Reviewer for Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. She is a recipient of several awards and a 2015 American Counseling Association Fellow. | |
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. |  |
Heather Neff | Born in Akron, Ohio, Heather Neff's family moved to Detroit when she was in her teens. After graduating from Cass Technical High School, Heather earned a Bachelor's Degree in English with High Distinction at the University of Michigan. She went on to study French language and culture at the Sorbonne, University of Paris. Heather earned her Lizentiat and doctoral degree in English Language and Literature, Comparative Literature and French Linguistics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She then spent two years in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, where she taught at the University of the Virgin Islands and St. Joseph High School. She joined the faculty in the Department of English at Eastern Michigan University in 1993, retiring as a Distinguished Professor in 2021. The author of eight novels, Heather's books cover topics such as female friendship, lost heritage, love, troubled cultural relationships between Africans and African Americans, addiction and recovery, modern-day human trafficking, and intimate partner violence and its effect on children. Her book Wisdom received a Fiction Honor Book Award from the American Library Association. Heather's poetry from her time in France is collected in The Paris Hours. | |
Simone Yehuda | Simone Yehuda is a bilingual (French is her first language) screenwriter who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, historian Barry Michael Shapiro. Simone’s father was a German Jewish Holocaust survivor escaping from Hitler who met her mother, a French Catholic whose own mother was a leader of the French Resistance. She began as a poet (2 books published: THAW and LIFTING WATER, and a third poetry collection, PIECES OF THUNDER). She has served as Founding Editor for ECLIPSE MAGAZINE and Poetry Editor at BRIDGES JOURNAL. Her BA is from Bennington College. As a graduate student at Columbia University, she played flute with a NY Symphony Orchestra and was a member of the Mass Transit Dance Company. She’s also a multi-produced playwright (including a mystery, WILLING, Off Broadway). She has served as Playwright in Residence at Detroit’s Attic Theater. She later earned a Master’s in Screenwriting at Screenwriting U and became a Top Tier Screenwriter at Roadmap Writers. Professor Emeritus at Siena Heights University, she’s now a full-time screenwriter. Some of her screenplays – JERUSALEM ROAD, THE NEW EVE, and LOVE AND HOMICIDE – focus on the reconciliation of opposites divided by cultural and identity barriers. | |
Tracy Gallup | Tracy Gallup’s paintings and figures come to life in stories and poetry. Her most recent books are My First Book of Haiku Poems published by Tuttle Press and Paint the Night published by Fifth Avenue Press. In March 2023 Anna's Kokeshi Dolls will be released by Tuttle Publishing. Other picture books include A Roomful of Questions, Stone Crazy, Shell Crazy, Tree Crazy, Snow Crazy and King Cat published by Mackinac Island Press, a division of Charlesbridge, and Beastly Banquet published by Dial Books for Young Readers. | |
Cody Walker | Cody Walker teaches English and directs the Undergraduate Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He’s the author of two full-length poetry collections: The Self-Styled No-Child (Waywiser, 2016) and Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser, 2008). He’s also the author of The Trumpiad, a 2017 chapbook that doubled as an ACLU fundraiser. His awards include the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from Shenandoah, the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize from Hunger Mountain, and residency fellowships from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Amy Clampitt Fund, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A longtime writer-in-residence in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program, he was elected Seattle Poet Populist in 2007. His work appears in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, The Yale Review, and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2007). He’s the director of the Bear River Writers’ Conference and the co-editor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan, 2013). He lives in Ann Arbor with the fiction writer Polly Rosenwaike and their two daughters. | |
Kelly Hoppenjans | Singer-songwriter Kelly Hoppenjans creates empowering rock, combining the spirit of riot grrrl tinged with folky introspection. The follow-up to her energetic 2019 full-length debut, OK, I Feel Better Now, her new EP Can’t Get the Dark Out dives deep into relationships, fate, and breaking free of toxic patterns. The EP is inspired in part by Hoppenjans’ journey of finding love during the pandemic: navigating online dating, confinement, and impending life changes to sustain that love. Kelly authored Kelly Hoppenjans Takes Herself Too Seriously, A Collection of Poems, Music, Lyrics and Some Real Arty Shit. "In contrast to what the title says, Hoppenjans brings a playfulness by including drawings, handwritten notes, and QR codes on the pages of the book. Poems and lyrics are distinct but morph into one form or the other when on the page or sung in a recording." —A2Pulp |  |
Kathrine Edgren | Katherine Edgren's book, Keeping Out the Noise, was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. In addition to her book, The Grain Beneath the Gloss, published by Finishing Line Press, she has two chapbooks: Long Division and Transports. She has appeared in numerous journals including: Coe Review, Moss Piglet, Christian Science Monitor, Birmingham Poetry Review, Peninsula Poets, the Decadent Review, Light, Orchards Poetry Journal, and Barbaric Yawp. She served as a Guest Associate Editor for Third Wednesday, and has a Masters Degree in Social Work from the University of Michigan. Katherine lives in Dexter, Michigan. | |
Bruce Tharp | Believed to be the first industrial designer to receive a PhD in anthropology (University of Chicago), in 1998 Bruce began researching the material culture of Indiana's Old Order Amish, focusing on the production & consumption of value. He first earned a BS in mechanical engineering from Bucknell University and a master’s degree in industrial design from Pratt Institute. In between his schooling, he served as a US Army nuclear weapons officer (Captain) in Germany. After researching the future of work and the workplace for Haworth Inc.'s design research think-tank, the Ideation Group, he began his teaching career. Over the last fifteen years he has been a tenured professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and currently at the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. His and Stephanie's award-winning design studio has exhibited internationally, licensed designs for local and global companies, and self-produced commercial, experimental, and discursive products. |  |
Anne Ruggles Gere | Anne Ruggles Gere is a professor of English and a professor of education at the University of Michigan. A high school English teacher before she took her PhD and became an academic, she has always been interested in writing. Questions that interest her include how people use different processes of writing to reach various goals, the kinds of learning that writing can enable, and how writers develop as they move from high school to college. Her most recent book, Developing Writers in HIgher Education: A Longitudinal Study, was a collaborative project based on surveys, samples of writing, and interviews with 169 undergraduates as they progressed from entering first-years to graduating seniors learning to identify necessary information for specific audiences and synthesizing feedback for stronger writing. |  |
| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
