Authors

Susanna Lancaster

Susanna Lancaster writes for young people of all ages, with work ranging from chapter books to Young Adult books. She completed her M.F.A. in Creative Writing for Young People from Lesley University. Her writing has appeared in Balloons Lit Journal and Hieroglyph Literary Journal. She also writes for the magazines Memphis Health + Fitness and The Perpetual You. The Growing Rock is Susanna’s first published book.

Erik Segall

Erik Segall earned a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Colorado and a Master of Arts in the Eastern Classics from St. John’s College. He taught for several years at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, and volunteered at the Pueblo Suicide Prevention Center until its untimely demise. You can follow his blog at www.eriksegall.com

L.L. Holt

L.L. Holt is a Humanities professor and author of the international prize-winning novel, Invictus (Indie Next Book Award finalist, Goethe Award Shortlist), about Beethoven’s overcoming discrimination to enter the world stage, and The Black Spaniard, a novel about music (Unsolicited Press, 2016). She has a doctorate in Arts and Letters from Drew University and reviews classical music for Fanfare Magazine, Bachtrack, Concertonet, and Broad Street Review, and her articles have appeared in New York Classical Review. Following a successful career in communications, she is devoting herself to writing about the inspiring power of music as well as the common ground shared by eastern and western spiritual traditions. Holt lives in New Jersey.

Lowry Pei

Lowry Pei has taught Creative Writing at Harvard University and has written seven novels, the first of which, Family Resemblances, was published in 1986 by Random House (Vintage Contemporary, 1988). His short story, ‘Is This Love?’ appears in the HSE anthology Above Ground. Best American Short Stories 1984 included his short story “The Cold Room”, and The American Story: The Best of Story Quarterly reprinted his “Naked Women”. His literary criticism has appeared in the New York Times Book Review.

He teaches creative writing at Simmons College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, Vaughn Sills, a photographer who also teaches at Simmons.

Susan Pashman

Susan Pashman is a philosophy professor and former attorney. While in law school, she served a year in the New York City Council President’s office; some of what she learned there has found its way into this story. But most of this book derives from her experience of raising two boys on her own in Brooklyn. Many of her sons’ childhood exploits, and the hopes and fears she had for them, became the heart of this novel. She resides in Sag Harbor, New York, with her husband, Jack Weinstein.

Mona de Vestel

Of mixed Belgian and African descent, Mona grew up in Brussels and later moved to the United States where she taught writing at the State University of New York (Oswego & Utica). Her memoir King Leopold’s Daughter is a finalist for Restless Books’ Immigrant Writing Prize. Her work explores the role of the ‘other’ in the marginalized voices of our world. She is currently at work on Trail of Light, a memoir about her quest for joy, healing, and the magic in her life. Mona now lives in Southern California with her family. For more info about the author, please visit: www.authormona.com

Susan Rubin

Susan Rubin’s writing talents range broad and deep: her Funny or Die sketches have survived to amuse readers for nearly a decade. In contrast, Rubin has written over two dozen documentaries that deal in the unfunny issues facing women worldwide: Domestic Violence, Forced Child Marriage, Untested Rape kits accumulating in police evidence rooms by the tens of thousands. In each documentary, Rubin has used her skill, empathy, and compassion to render these darkest of topics into accessible films distributed to tens of thousands of college classrooms, to educate young people about the gravity of the situation for women in the USA and worldwide.

As a playwright, Rubin has been the recipient of 20 years of Los Angeles County Arts Commission Grants and Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department Grants. She also was honored with a six-year residency at the prestigious Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Her plays have been seen at New York Theatre Workshop, Baltimore Cen-ter Stage, and at every major 99 seat theatre in Los Angeles including co-productions with Bootleg Theatre, Circle X, Skylight Theatre to name a few. She is the recipient of Garland, Ovation and LA Weekly Awards for her plays and the critical response has been exceptional, for example:

“In its mythological themes, modernist irony and imaginative visual styling, ‘Liana and Ben’ is something of a companion piece to Circle X’s memorable 2006 production of Sarah Ruhl’s ‘Eurydice’.”

Alan Howard

Alan Howard has written for The New York Times Magazine, the Nation, Dissent, public television and labor union publications about workers and politics in the US and many other countries around the world. He was a Fulbright Scholar at San Carlos University in Guatemala, an International Fellow at Columbia University, the Latin American correspondent for Liberation News Service, and a national volunteer leader in the 2008 and 2012 campaigns of Barack Obama. His novella Hollywood Furs was short-listed for the 2011 Paris Literary Prize. In the Land of Eternal Spring is his first novel.

Michael Raleigh

Michael Raleigh’s new novel The Conjurer’s Boy was praised for its “beautifully modulated undercurrent of subtle fantasy” by The Midwest Review. He has received the Eugene Izzi award for crime fiction and four Illinois Arts Council awards for fiction. Michael is the author of seven previous novels, including In the Castle of the Flynns. He teaches writing at DePaul University and lives in Chicago with his wife Katherine and his three children.

Margot Singer

Margot Singer teaches creative writing at Denison University and has won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction for her first novel. Her short stories and essays have appeared in HSE’s Above Ground, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Western Humanities Review, Agni, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and many others. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Carter Prize for the Essay, and an honorable mention from the judges of the PEN/Hemingway award.

Margot is a graduate of the University of Utah (Ph.D. 2005), Oxford University (M.Phil.1986) and Harvard University (B.A. 1984). From 1986 until 1997 she worked for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she was a Principal in the New York Office. She holds the Bosler Endowed Faculty Fellowship at Denison University, and also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She lives with her husband and two children in Granville, Ohio.

Tony Rogers

Tony Rogers’ collection of short stories, Bewildered, Harold Faced the Day, won the Writer’s Voice Capricorn Prize.  He was a semi-finalist in the Quarterly West novella contest. An excerpt from his award-winning first novel was first published in HSE’s Above Ground anthology. His fiction has also been published in Pleiades, Worcester Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Painted Hills Review, Thema, Outerbridge, and many others.

His non-fiction has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine. He is a Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude graduate of Yale and has a JD from Harvard Law School.  Tony has been a lawyer and a jazz musician and the head of a veteran’s hospital.

Andrew Binks

Andrew Binks has won honorable mention in the Writer’s Union of Canada’s short prose contest, Glimmertrain’s Family Matters contest, and he was a finalist in the Queen’s University Alumni Review poetry contest, and This Magazine’s “Great Canadian Literary Hunt.” An excerpt of his novel, The Catalytic Seduction of Brian White, was first published in HSE’s Voice from the Planet. His fiction and non-fiction has been published in Joyland, Galleon, Fugue, Prism International, Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly (U.S.), Bent Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and Xtra, among others.

Binks’ first novel, The Summer Between, was published by Nightwood Editions in Spring 2009.  His poetry has also appeared in Quill’s “Lust” issue and Velvet Avalanche Anthology. Andrew’s satirical play, Reconciliation, about Native land claims, Japanese internment, and political corruption, will receive a staged reading in Toronto as part of the Foundry Theatre play-reading series.

He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Andrew spoke at the AWP conference in New York City in 2008 on the merits and challenges of multi-genre writing programs.