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Posted by: powderkegprep | November 14, 2011

PowderKeg writers

Holly Morris, co-founder of PowderKeg, is a writer and editor, and a television documentary producer and correspondent. The former Editorial Director of the book publishing company Seal Press, Morris edited an eclectic list of titles on topics ranging from domestic violence and geo-politics, to award-winning poetry and international fiction and nonfiction. She also edited the Adventura imprint, which features outdoor, travel, and environmental literature. She is a longtime board member of Hedgebrook, a writer’s residency in Washington State.

Her essays are widely anthologized, and she writes for numerous publications including The New York Times. Her book, Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine, based on her experiences as an international correspondent, was named an “Editors’ Choice” and a ‘Notable Book of the Year’ about exploration by the New York Times. Morris is the executive producer/writer/director of the award-winning prime-time PBS documentary series, “Adventure Divas.” Featured destinations in this series include Cuba, India, New Zealand and Iran. She also hosts the documentary series’ “Lonely Planet Treks in America,” “Treks in a Wild World,” and “Globe Trekkers.” Destinations in these programs include Borneo, Lapland, the Swiss Alps, Zambia, Niger, Syria, and Ukraine, among others. Morris also hosted the series “Outdoor Investigations,” in which she investigated the scientific side of today’s environmental and natural world mysteries.

Sharon Lerner, co-founder of PowderKeg, is a journalist and author who has covered a wide range of issues of concern to women for more than a decade. Sharon is a Senior Fellow at Demos, where she is working on a book about cities that are solving America’s biggest problems. Lerner’s 2010 book, The War on Moms: On Life in a Family-Unfriendly Nation, puts a human face on American family policy. The LA Times called the book “a page-turner for working moms,” and NPR called it “A stinging account of how public policy and private businesses have failed to adapt to working mothers.” Lerner has worked as a writer, reporter, public radio producer and Village Voice columnist. Her written work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The American Prospect, The Nation, Salon.com, DoubleX/Slate.com, and Ms. among other publications. www.sharonlerner.com

Jessica Maria Tuccelli is a writer, filmmaker, and women’s welfare advocate. Her debut novel, Glow (Viking 2012), was named a Southern Independent Booksellers’ Alliance Okra Pick, their highest honor. In film, Tuccelli’s lighting finesse can be seen in over 100 commercials, film shorts, and documentaries, most notably the Emmy Award-winning How Do You Spell God? (HBO), Sesame Street (PBS), The American Experience (PBS), and Zoom (WBGH). Tuccelli’s commitment to women’s empowerment began as leader of the Association of Women Students at the MIT and continues today with her involvement with Women for Women International, a philanthropic organization dedicated to helping women in war torn regions rebuild their lives. jessicamariatuccelli.com

Kio Stark writes fiction, talks to strangers, and writes about the way humans relate to technology—and to each other, mediated by technology. She teaches at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Her first novel, Follow Me Down, was published by Red Lemonade in 2011. Long obsessed with photography, she wrote the introduction to Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots, a collection of vernacular police photography. Stark is currently working on Don’t Go Back to School: a handbook for learning almost anything and her second novel. She once spent a racetrack season in Miami interviewing old thugs, and they all told her they knew where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. www.kiostark.com

Sheri Holman has written four award-winning and bestselling novels published by Grove/Atlantic, including The Dress Lodger, a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award; The Mammoth Cheese, named a Publisher’s Weekly and San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year and shortlisted for the UK’s Orange Prize, and most recently, Witches on the Road Tonight (Grove/Atlantic, 2011), lauded by Cathleen Schine in the New York Review of Books, Jane Smiley in the Los Angeles Review of Books, named a NYTBR Editor’s Choice, and Independent Publisher’s Gold Medalist for Literary Fiction.

Sheri has written a novel for middle grade readers, Sondok: Princess of the Moon and Stars which won an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Medal, and with Jungsoo Kim, was awarded the Daesan Foundation Translation Prize for “The Sobbing Drum of Nakrang: Plays of Inhoon Choi.” She is currently at work on another novel for young readers and her first graphic novel about human experimentation on the World War II American homefront. Sheri is a founding member of The Moth (www.themoth.org) and currently serves on its curatorial committee. www.sheriholman.com

Monique Truong’s first novel, The Book of Salt (2003), was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, and the recipient of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and an Association for Asian American Studies Poetry/Prose Award. Her second novel, BITTER IN THE MOUTH (2010), received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a 25 Best Fiction Books of 2010 by Barnes & Noble booksellers. Truong was a PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow, a Princeton University’s Hodder Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and most recently a Visiting Writer at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. A graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law, Truong is also an intellectual property attorney. She serves on the board of the Authors Guild, the Advisory Council for PEN American Center, and the Creative Advisory Council for Hedgebrook. www.monique-truong.com

Susan Choi was born in South Bend, Indiana, and raised there and in Houston, Texas. She studied literature at Yale and writing at Cornell, and worked for several years as a fact-checker for The New Yorker. Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. With David Remnick she co-edited the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, and her non-fiction has appeared in publications including Vogue, Tin House, Allure, O and The New York Times and in anthologies including Money Changes Everything and Brooklyn Was Mine. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Pete Wells, and their sons Dexter and Elliot. www.susanchoi.com

Elizabeth Gaffney is a native and current Brooklynite. She studied at Vassar College and Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich and holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College. Her first novel, Metropolis, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, was published by Random House in 2005. She is now completing work on her second novel, The End of Wonder, and a story collection. Her stories have appeared in many little magazines, and she has translated three books from German.Gaffney has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. She also teaches fiction and literature at the New School and, after working for 16 years as an editor at The Paris Review, now serves as the editor at large of the literary magazine A Public Space.

Joan Hilty is an editor, cartoonist, and book packager specializing in comics and graphic novels. Her clients include Viacom, Farrar Straus & Giroux, A&E Networks, and a roster of award-winning writers and graphic novelists, including New York Times bestsellers. She was an editor at DC Comics for 15 years, where her projects included Eisner- and Harvey-Award-winning books such as Cairo and Cuba: My Revolution. Her comic strip Bitter Girl has been nationally syndicated since 2001, and her illustrations have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Women’s Review of Books and the Village Voice. She teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is a founding member of the independent editorial group 5E. www.joanhilty.net