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Co-Directors
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Kathie Isaac-Luke |
Kathie Isaac-Luke was editor of caesura, the journal of Poetry Center San Jose, for five years. Her poetry collection, Chrysalides, recently published by Dragonfly Press, was selected as runner-up at the 2014 Los Angeles Book Festival. Kathie's short story, "The Collection," was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart prize. She is a freelance writer for The Union Democrat newspaper in Sonora. She has poems forthcoming in two new anthologies to be published in 2014. |
Ginger Bennett Griffin |
Ginger Bennett Griffin, helped coordinate
this conference for many years. She was part of our lives and is
greatly missed.
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Pam Mundale |
Pam Mundale writes short stories and novels.
She has completed one novel and is finishing up the second.
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Faculty | |
Christian Kiefer
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Christian KieferChristian Kiefer earned his Ph.D. in American literature from the University of California, Davis, and is on the English faculty of American River College in Sacramento. He is an active poet, songwriter, and recording artist, and lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Northern California with his wife and six sons. The Infinite Tides is his first published novel.
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Lucy Sanna
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Lucy Sanna
Lucy Sanna's, debut novel, AFTER HE’S GONE, is scheduled for publication by William Morrow in May 2015. In the meantime, while planning her book launch, Lucy is at work on her next novel.
Regarding former publications, Lucy has been featured on national television and radio, including CBS, NBC, NPR and FOX, and recognized in such press as Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, Playboy Magazine and Men's World Magazine, to name a few. Her two self-help books (Random House) have been published in six languages.
For the past ten years, Lucy has served on the Strategic Planning Committee for the National Kidney Foundation's annual San Francisco Authors Luncheon, founded by Amy Tan and Ann Getty. Lucy has also served on the Board of the California Writers Club, San Francisco Peninsula Branch.
In 2010 Lucy received a month-long residency fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, where she finished the final draft of an upcoming novel.
Visit Lucy at www.lucysanna.com.
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Helen Bonner
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Helen BonnerHelen Bonner, PhD, is
founder of Starthistle Press. Her novel, Cry
Dance, is the winner of a 2012 Sharp Writ Book Award in the coveted general fiction category. In 2013, her sci-fi novel Dolphin Papers was a finalist for the prestigious Eric Hoffer award. Her two
memoirs, Laid Daughter and First Love
Last, are becoming classics. MsDemeanors, a novel of the seventies, came out in 2013 to great reviews and her current project, non fiction, will be called Send Me Your Poor.
Dr. Bonner taught creative writing at Ohio University and
Minnesota State U. Her short story, Roadside
Trinity, won several Best Short Story awards, and her
screenplay on Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin has been
optioned.
Her website is: http://www.hbonnerbooks.com/
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Kevin Arnold
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Kevin Arnold
Kevin Arnold is a poet, prizewinning short story writer, teacher and novelist. He’s published two books of poetry, forty short stories and poems. A story extracted from one of his novels won the 2009 San Francisco Book Festival for short fiction; his poems have been featured three times on national website www.YourDailyPoem.com He was invited to read at the Yale Writing Workshops in 2012 and 2013.
He holds an MFA in Creative Writing, fiction, from San Jose State University, 2007; was Co-founder and teacher, Gold Rush Writers, 2005-present. He served as President, Poetry Center San Jose, for thirteen years, 2000-2012. See
http://redroom.com/member/kevin-arnold.
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Sally Ashton
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Sally AshtonSally Ashton is the author of Some Odd Afternoon, Her Name is Juanita, and These Metallic Days. She is Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. Honors include a fellowship from Arts Council Silicon Valley and a residency at Montalvo Arts Center. She was Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley), 2011-2013. Ashton earned her MFA at Bennington Writing Seminars. She teaches at San José State University and will be teaching a two-week workshop again in Lisbon this summer, 2014, through Disquiet: International Literary Program.
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Erika Mailman
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Erika MailmanErika Mailman is the author of The
Witch’s Trinity, a Bram Stoker finalist and a San
Francisco Chronicle Notable Book, and Woman of Ill
Fame, a Pushcart Press Editor’s Book Award nominee.
While writing The Witch’s Trinity, she learned she
was the descendant of a woman accused twice of witchcraft in
the decades predating Salem’s furor and, surprisingly,
acquitted. Her first in a series of young adult novels
tentatively titled The Arnaud Legacy will be forthcoming
from Kensington in 2015. Erika has been a Yaddo fellow and a
juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards. She is a freelance
writer and teaches novel writing through www.mediabistro.com and www.erikamailman.com
Visit Erika's website, www.erikamailman.com,
for further information about her books and upcoming events, and
classes.
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Sal Manna
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Sal MannaSal Manna’s writing life has been all about writing life stories, most recently co-authoring DYN-O-MITE! Good Times, Bad Times…Our Times: A Memoir with comedian Jimmie Walker and The King of Sting: The Amazing True Story of an All-American Outlaw (#1 among Crime Biographies on Amazon.com). Manna’s work has also appeared in Time, Playboy, People, and the Los Angeles Times, among other magazines and newspapers. His interviews have been featured in Conversations with Maya Angelou and Titanic: 100 Years Later, and been referenced in several books, including His Song: The Musical Journey of Elton John and To The Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles. Also a historian, Manna co-authored the Northern Calaveras County and Angels Camp and Copperopolis Images of America volumes and continues to pen the Something From Nothing magazine series.
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Pam Mundale
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Pam MundalePam Mundale (Pamela Dunn) has a B.A. in Creative Writing and a Masters in Library Science. A novelist and short story writer, she is an active member of several Mother Lode area writing groups. Her short story "Who Reads Anymore" won the second place prize for short fiction and will be published in Wine, Cheese, and Chocolate in early 2014. Pam just completed her debut novel, Trash Can Notes, set Cincinnati's nightclub scene. Her second novel Once Upon a Blue Moon, merging ancient myth and the modern occult in Santa Cruz, is nearing completion.
Visit Pam's website, www.psdunn.com/ or her blog psdunn.wordpress.com/,
for further information about her books and upcoming events.
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Amy Smith
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Amy SmithAmy Elizabeth Smith, originally from
Pennsylvania, teaches creative and professional writing at the
University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. Her recent memoir,
All Roads Lead to Austen: A Yearlong Journey
with Jane, recounts a year traveling in six Latin American
countries learning Spanish and holding reading groups on Jane
Austen; it was praised by Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus.
You can visit her website at allroadsleadtoausten.com.
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Kathy Boyd-Fellure
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Kathy Boyd-FellureKathy Boyd Fellure is the
author of the four Blake Sisters Lake Tahoe Adventure Illustrated
Children's books. Kathy is currently represented by Books & Such
literary agent, Wendy Lawton, and is busy writing her third novel in a
trilogy, Lake Cottage Book Haven. Kathy, a Sacramento native, currently
resides in the gold country of California where she founded the Amador
Fiction Writers Critique Group.
One of Kathy's poems, "The Bloom", was published in the book -
Immortal Verses, by Poetry.Com, The International Library of
Poetry. Her poem, "Mad Dash to the Tea House", and three of her
photographs were published in Vol 6, Wild Edges book by
Manzanita Writers Press.
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Kathie Isaac-Luke
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Kathie Isaac-LukeKathie Isaac-Luke was editor of caesura, the journal of Poetry Center San Jose, for five years. Her poetry collection, Chrysalides, recently published by Dragonfly Press, was selected as runner-up at the 2014 Los Angeles Book Festival. Kathie's short story, "The Collection," was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart prize. She is a freelance writer for The Union Democrat newspaper in Sonora. She has poems forthcoming in two new anthologies to be published in 2014.
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Monika Rose
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Monika RoseMonika Rose, writing in the Mother Lode foothill region of Calaveras County, California, edits the Manzanita: Poetry and Prose of the Mother Lode and Sierra series of anthologies with a new anthology due out in Spring 2014 called Wine, Cheese and Chocolate: A Taste of Literary Elegance from Manzanita Writers Press, a nonprofit literary publisher, which she founded, serving as director and editor. She teaches high school and college English in the Central Valley, with a Masters Degree in English, and lives in the foothills of Calaveras County on a small cattle ranch. She has been published in Tule Review, Rattlesnake Review, Poetry Now, Mindprint Review, Squaw Valley Review, The Journal, Refrigerate After Opening, Mokehillion Review, Your Daily Poem, and Yosemite Poets, among other publications. Her collection of poems, River by the Glass, by GlenHill Publications, is available from her web site and from Small Press Distribution, and from Amazon as a print book and an eBook, as well as from the publisher. Currently, she is writing a humorous thriller—a novel about surveillance and voyeurism—and working on a historical novel based on her parents’ WWII stories in Europe.
Contact her at www.manzapress.com or at her web site www.monikarosewriter.com.
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Tom Johnson
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Tom JohnsonTom Johnson's 35-year
career in journalism has taken him from the classroom to the newsroom and
back. He began using computers to tease meaning out of data while a Ph.D.
candidate in the early '70s and studying the impact of technology on urban
spaces.
By the early '80s he was writing about dedicated word
processing systems (think $13,000 in 1978 dollars) and covering the early
stages of personal computing in Silicon Valley for TIME and Popular
Science. He worked for Time Magazine in El Salvador in the
mid-'80s, was the start-up editor of MacWeek, and a deputy editor
of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
His areas of interest are analytic journalism, dynamic
simulation models of publishing systems, complexity theory, the
application of Geographic Information Systems in journalism, and the impact
of the digital revolution on journalism and journalism education. He
often teaches and lectures in Latin America and is the founder and
co-director of the Institute for Analytic Journalism, Santa Fe, New
Mexico. Websites: www.indiepubwest.com and
www.jtjohnson.com
E-mail: tom@jtjohnson.com
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Lou Gonzalez
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Lou GonzalezLou Gonzalez writes technical books and novels. To publish his technical book, Creating Your eBook, he combined his engineering & programming degrees, and his experience in computer design, with his work in converting manuscripts into Kindle & Nook eBooks. In addition, Lou teaches creative writing, lectures about novel structure and eBooks, and for the last nine years has been the moderator for a Barnes & Noble writing workshop. For his Eric Sandoval mystery novels, he draws on his ethnic background in the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles to present the challenges and opportunities that America offers to all its citizens. His novels center on accomplishment, danger, drug lords, and political corruption in Los Angeles.
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Jennifer Tristano
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Jennifer TristanoJennifer Tristano's many years in software programming have given her a powerful insight into the technology behind eBooks. That combined with her love of writing, and her teaching the art and craft of writing allow her to translate the technical eBook information into terms that any writer can understand and utilize. Jennifer, along with Lou Gonzalez, is a co-facilitator of writing workshops at her local Barnes & Noble bookstore. There she presents specific writing techniques and offers advice on how to improve story presentation and characters. In addition, she presents writing & eBook mechanization techniques at conferences and writing events. Jennifer is in the final rewrite of her first Fantasy novel.
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| CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Friday, May 2nd
- 6:00 p.m. Registration and poolside picnic
at Charles and
Antoinette (May) Herndon's home, 8437 Center St., Mokelumne Hill, CA.
- 7:30 p.m. Poetry Reading at Mokelumne Hill Library. Work by
Monika Rose, Kathy Isaac Luke, and Helen Bonner will be featured. This
is an open mic reading. Bring your own work to share.
Saturday, May 3rd
- 8:30 to 9:00 a.m. Registration (for those not registered
Friday) at Hotel Leger, 8304 Main St.
- 9:00 a.m. Introduction: Meet the Gold Rush Writers and learn
their secrets.
- 10:15 a.m. to 11:45 a.m Workshops.
- 11:45 to 1:15 p.m. Lunch on your own, explore Mokelumne Hill.
- 1:15 pm to 1:30 p.m. Talk Accessing Creativity 101.
- 1:30 to 5:00 p.m. Workshops.
- 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. Networking, Book signing/sales, No-host bar.
- 6 p.m. Dinner at the Hotel Leger. Featured Speaker: Christian Kiefer. An acclaimed writer shares his journey.
- 8:15 p.m. Open Mic. This is a casual, laid-back event with
no critiquing, just fun. Each reader is limited to 500 words-about 2
double-spaced pages. Everyone is invited to share.
Sunday, May 4th
- 9:30 a.m. Critique Groups. How will you shape your writing life?
Join Kevin Arnold and others to learn how writing critique groups can enrich your lives.
- 10:20 to noon. Workshops.
- Noon Brunch. Lucy Sanna on Crawling into Your Story
- 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. Workshops.
- 4:30 p.m. Ballroom - Wrap-Up.
Workshop Schedule
Saturday 10:15 to 11:45 a.m.
Saturday, 1:30 to 3:00 p.m.
Saturday, 3:15 to 5:00 p.m.
Sunday, 10:20 to 12 noon
Sunday, 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.
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Copyright © 2014 Gold Rush Writers | | | |
