Members of The Writers’ Room are poets, novelists, journalists, graphic novelists, translators, librettists, playwrights, memoirists, and historians. We pride ourselves not just on our vibrant creative diversity, but on our cultural and socioeconomic diversity, too.
A partial presentation of our current members includes:
Mary Bonina is the author of My Father’s Eyes: A Memoir ( 2013) and the poetry collections Clear Eye Tea (2010), Living Proof(2007) published by Cervena Barva Press, and Lunch in Chinatown, a poetry chapbook inspired by teaching English to recent immigrants. Winner of the Boston Contemporary Authors UrbanArtsAward, her poem “Drift” is a public art installation in the City, carved in a granite monolith and permanently installed outside Green St. MBTA Station on the Orange Line, Jamaica Plain. Commissioned by composer Paul Sayed, she wrote a set of three poems, Grace in the Wind, which inspired Sayed’s composition for piano, cello, and soprano voice; the piece had its premiere November 2012 at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, Cambridge, MA. Bonina’s poetry and prose has been featured in Salamander, Hanging Loose, English Journal,Gulf Stream, The Worcester Review, in many other journals and anthologies, including Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo. Bonina has had a residency at Vermont Studio Center, and she has been a fellow at VCCA since 2001 when she was named finalist for the VCCA Goldfarb Fellowship in non-fiction. She works as a narrator for Talking Books for the Blind at the Clive V. Lacey Recording Studio at the Perkins School in Watertown, MA. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and she serves on the Board of Directors of the Writers Room of Boston, where she is at work on a novel.
Shaun Bossio is a fiction writer born and bred in Boston. He holds an undergraduate degree in English from Boston University, and is currently an MFA candidate in fiction and fellowship recipient at Emerson College. He is currently serving as the Fiction Editor for Redivider, the student-run journal out of Emerson, and is also a contributor to their website. His short fiction has appeared in Typehouse and Firewords. When he’s not working his day job or studying at Emerson, he’s hard at work on a novel and collection of short fiction when he probably should be sleeping.
Liz Breen is a writer of screenplays, short stories and flash fiction. She has worked for productions including WordGirl, Antiques Roadshow, Phantom Gourmet and CONAN, and her fiction has appeared in Columbia’s Catch & Release and Cleaver Magazine. Liz blogs for Grub Street and teaches writing at Cambridge Center for Adult Education. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Bachelor’s from Boston University. You can find her online at www.lizbreen.com and on Twitter @beinglizbreen.
Debka Colson was the 2013 Ivan Gold Fiction Fellow and is now the Program Director for the Writers’ Room. Debka writes fiction, poetry, essays and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Folio, Slab, North American Review, GAMBAZine, Construction, and Roar, among others, and in two anthologies. Debka coordinates the Flash Fiction Contest for JP Reads, an annual community literary celebration in Boston and has taught creative writing at Emerson College, the Boston Public Library, Brookline Adult & Community Education, and the Urban Scholars Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She can be found at: www.debkacolson.com/
Robert Dall is a fiction writer from Cambridge, Massachusetts. His short stories have been published in Hunger Mountain, the Evansville Review, the Blue Moon Review, Acorn Whistle, and the Beacon Street Review. He received his MFA from Emerson College, has completed two residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, and has been a member of the Writers’ Room of Boston since 2001 (and a board member since 2009). Currently, he is working on new pieces of short fiction while hoping to find a home for his novel In the Box, the dystopian tale of a New England fishing town that decides to mix 17th-century punishments with 21st-century media saturation.
Alexander Danner is co-creator of the serial audio drama Greater Boston (www.greaterbostonshow.com). He also writes comics and prose fiction, with stories appearing in Event: Poetry & Prose, The Saturday Evening Post, and Fantasy Scroll Magazine, as well as the Machine of Death anthology. He is co-author of two textbooks about comics: Comics: A Global History, 1968 — Present with Dan Mazur (Thames & Hudson, 2014) and Character Design for Graphic Novels with Steven Withrow (Rotovision/Focal Press, 2007). His comics and other writing can be found at TwentySevenLetters.com. Alexander joined The Writers’ Room in 2005, and is a past recipient of the Ivan Gold Fellowship.
Camille DeAngelis is the author of the crossover-YA novel Bones & All as well as two novels for adults, Mary Modern and Petty Magic. She wrote and revised her forthcoming novel (tentatively titled Immaculate Heart, coming 2016) at the Writers’ Room. Camille is also a certified vegan lifestyle coach and educator, and veganizing an 18th-century Scottish cookbook is one of her pet side projects. Camille also serves on the Board for the Writers’ Room.
Kate Gilbert is a children’s fiction writer with advanced degrees in medieval and Roman history. She works as a freelance editor specializing in works on premodern history and is the associate author of The Bayeux Tapestry and Its Contexts. Prior publications include a historic preservation activity workbook for children and an English village history. She is currently writing a middle-grade historical novel set in medieval Scandinavia and revising her first novel, a middle-grade fantasy/adventure. She has also worked as an AM-radio DJ, a janitor in an English boarding school, a children’s librarian, and a high school Latin teacher. Kate can be found at www.kategilbertwriter.com and as a blogger at www.readersunbound.com.
Elizabeth Herlihy (Beth) is primarily a fiction writer and is currently working on her first novel. She has a Bachelor’s from the University of Vermont and is an MFA candidate in fiction at Emerson College, expecting to graduate in May of 2018. Beth spent over twenty-five years working in marketing communications for commercial real estate and real estate investment firms. She continues to consult in this capacity, so she can pay her mortgage and put food on the table while focusing on finishing her MFA and her novel.
Eric E. Hyett lives in Medford, MA, and works as a poet, writer and translator. His translation (with Spencer Thurlow) of “Sonic Peace,” the award winning first book by contemporary female Japanese poet Kiriu Minashita, is coming out this year in a bilingual edition from Phoneme Media. Eric studied linguistics at Harvard College, and the History and Social Study of Science and Technology at MIT. He’s also a lifetime member of PoemWorks, the Workshop for Publishing Poets. Eric’s poems, essays and translated poetry have recently appeared in World Literature Today, The Cincinnati Review, The Hudson Review, Barrow Street, Antioch Review, Nimrod, Harvard Review Online. Eric is circulating two poetry collections, “Flight Risk” and “Faith In The Digital Age,” and is using his time in the Writers Room to complete a memoir. Eric serves on the board of the Writers Room.
Geoff Kronik got his BA in 1983 and an MFA in 2012. He spent the twenty-nine years in between in a business career. His fiction and essays have appeared in Salamander, Opium, SmokeLong Quarterly, Litro, The Boston Globe and elsewhere. He is at work on a collection of short stories titled Vendor. Selected recent publications: “Haben Sie Schleim?” The Common, “A Second Bowl of Jook,” Litro (winner of “China” Flash Fiction Contest), “Three Thousand Lunches”, Boston Globe Magazine. All were written partially in the Room. Geoff joined The Writers’ Room in 2012.
Karen Lenar received her MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Grey Sparrow Journal, and JMWW, and others. She is working on her first novel. She is proud to serve as the Co-Chair of the Board of the Writers’ Room.
Rebecca Givens Rolland is a writer, educator, photographer and consultant. She has a doctorate from Harvard in Human Development and Education and is also a speech-language pathologist and learning specialist, with a focus on early childhood. She won the 2011 Dana Award in Short Fiction and has fiction published or forthcoming in The Literary Review, Slice, and Hobart. Her nonfiction has appeared in Brain, Child Magazine, The Harvard Education Letter, and is forthcoming in Education Week. Her first book of poetry won the May Sarton New Hampshire First Book Award and was published by Bauhan Publishing.
Mike Sinert was the Writers’ Room 2016-2017 Fellow in Nonfiction. A graduate of the Memoir Incubator at GrubStreet in Boston, his current project is a memoir on 20 years of life and almost death with binge eating disorder. His most recent essay, The Insanity of Eating, appeared in The Rumpus (therumpus.net). Mike has been a general contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. He became co-chair of the Writers’ Room in November, 2016.
Laura van den Berg is the author of the novel Find Me, longlisted for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize and selected as a best book of 2015 by Time Out New York and NPR, and two story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, both finalists for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her honors include the Bard Fiction Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. She has taught fiction at institutions including Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. At present, Laura is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge with her husband and dog.
Mariya Taher has worked in the gender violence field for over eight years in the areas of teaching, research, policy, program development, and direct service. She is also pursuing her second graduate degree, a MFA in Creative Writing, at Lesley University, where she received the 2014 Graduate School of Arts & Social Sciences Dean’s Merit Scholarship. She writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has contributed articles on domestic violence and female genital cutting to Huffington Post, The Fair Observer, Brown Girl Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, Global Voices, The Express Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, BayWoof, and the Imagining Equality Project – a Global Fund for Women and International Museum of Women joint project. Her fiction has appeared in Prism Review, Pulse Online Literary Journal, The Blue Minaret, Cecile’s Writers Magazine, The Flexible Persona, and her short story “American Daughters” was a finalist for the 2015 Editor’s Reprint Award at Sequestrum Literary Magazine. She received her Master in Social Work from San Francisco State University and a B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara. You can connect with her on Twitter @mariaytaher83.
Brent Whelan retired recently after many years of teaching high school English at Commonwealth School in Boston in order to devote himself to writing fiction. He joined the WROB in the fall of 2015, and has completed a very rough draft of a novel there, along with a number of short stories. He is married with three grown children. He also writes blogs on various political and cultural matters, most recently at whatsleft2016.blogspot.com.