Guest Speakers

Girls Write Now Guest Speakers
2009-2010 Season

Janus Adams, Guest Speaker at Journalism Workshop
Emmy Award-winner, historian, publisher/ producer and creator of BackPax children’s media, Janus is also the author of books, including her trilogy of African American history and culture: Glory Days: 365 Inspired Moments in African American History; Freedom Days, a chronicle of the civil rights years; and Sister Days, a history of African American women. A frequent lecturer and on-air guest, Adams’ column is now in its fifteenth year and her commentaries are heard on NPR.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Guest Speaker at CHAPTERS
Chimamanda is author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and The Thing Around Your Neck. She has received numerous awards, including the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Tara Betts, Guest Speaker at Poetry Workshop
Tara is the author of Arc and Hue and a graduate of the New England College MFA Program, and a former Girls Write Now mentor. Her work appears in numerous anthologies and journals such as Gathering Ground, Bum Rush the Page, and both Spoken Word Revolution anthologies. She currently teaches at Rutgers University and leads community-based workshops.

Ramola D, Guest Speaker at Fiction Workshop
Ramola’s first short fiction collection, Temporary Lives, was awarded the 2008 AWP Grace Paley Prize, and was published in December 2009 from the University of
Massachusetts Press. She has worked as a teacher, technical writer, and trainer in the U.S. and as a freelance journalist in India. She currently teaches creative writing at George Washington University and at The Writer’s Center, Bethesda.

Kelly McMasters, Guest Speaker at Memoir Workshop
Kelly is author of the narrative nonfiction book Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, which has been featured in The Oprah Magazine, Metropolis, Ms. Magazine, The Onion’s AV Club, and Plenty Magazine, among others. She teaches writing at mediabistro.com and in the creative writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University.  

Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Guest Speaker at CHAPTERS
Marie’s debut novel, Picking Bones from Ash (Graywolf, 2009), explores the struggles women face in accepting their talents, and has been praised as “a book of intelligence and heart” by Amy Tan and “ambitious” by Publishers Weekly.

Nami Mun, Guest Author at CHAPTERS
Nami is author of the debut novel Miles from Nowhere (Riverhead), which was shortlisted for the Orange Award. Named Best New Novelist of 2009 by Chicago magazine, she is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Award.

Catherine Orenstein, Guest Speaker at Journalism Workshop
Catherine is the founder and director of the OpEd Project, an initiative to expand the range of voices we hear from in the world, with an immediate emphasis on enlarging the pool of women experts who are accessing (and accessible to) our nation’s key print and online forums. She has contributed to the op-ed pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Miami Herald.

Petronia Paley, Guest Speaker at Playwriting Workshop
Petronia’s one-person play On the Way to Timbuktu was written and performed as part of the Passage Theatre Company’s SOLOflights Festival and premiered at EST in 2007. It was nominated for two Innovative Theatre Awards—Best Original Music and Solo Performance—and three Audelco Awards—Direction, Original Music, and Solo Performance. It won an Audelco Award for Best Solo Performance. She is the founder of I the Actor Acting Workshops.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Guest Speaker at CHAPTERS
Dolen’s fiction and essays have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2009, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She splits her time between Washington, D.C. and Seattle. Wench (Amistad, 2010) is her first novel.

Liza Jessie Peterson, Guest Speaker at Poetry Workshop
Liza began her poetry career at the famous Nuyorican Poets Café in 1995 and was a vital member of the enclave of notable poets who were part of the “underground slam poetry” movement before it attracted television cameras and became a national obsession. It was this electric group of artists that inspired Russell Simmons to bring “slam poetry” to HBO. Since 1996 she’s taught creative writing, poetry, and theater to urban and incarcerated youth.

Sarah Saffian, Guest Speaker at Memoir Workshop
Editorial director of the online network SHE WRITES (shewrites.com), Sarah is an author, a journalist, and a teacher. Her memoir, Ithaka, about being an adoptee who was found by her birth family, was widely and favorably reviewed, and has been in print for a decade. Sarah has written and/or edited for publications including the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Daily News, Entertainment Weekly, Slate, and Redbook.

Lizzie Skurnick, Guest Author at CHAPTERS
Lizzie’s new book is Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading (Avon, 2009). She is columnist for Jezebel.com’s Fine Lines and has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, the Washington Post, and more.

Susan Stein, Guest Author at Playwriting Workshop
Susan is the author of Etty, an adaptation of Etty Hillesum’s diaries and letters. Susan picked up the diaries in 1994 for fifty cents at a yard sale after her friend Joan recommended it. She is on the faculty of Princeton Day School.

Raina Telgemeier, Guest Speaker at Graphic Novel Workshop
Raina is author of Smile, received her BFA in 2002 and has worked as a freelance artist ever since. Her comics have been nominated for numerous awards, including the Eisner, Ignatz, Cybil, and Web Cartoonists’ Choice awards.

Hannah Tinti, Guest Speaker at Fiction Workshop
Hannah is cofounder and editor-in- chief of One Story magazine, for which she recently won the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for excellence in editing. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her first novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.

Lauren R. Weinstein, Guest Speaker at Graphic Novel Workshop
Lauren, author of Girl Stories, draws comics, makes etchings, and teaches cartooning and drawing in New York City. She is also in an experimental rock band called Flaming Fire, and they are recording their third album.

See list of guest speakers from previous seasons