The 28th Kentucky Women Writers Conference, 2007
Click here to view the itinerary from the 2007 conference!
The 28th Kentucky Women Writers Conference featured ten presenters. Click on a name below to read more about each presenter.
nickole brown
lee byrd
nathalie handal
sally jenkins
sedika mojadidi
jessica care moore
naomi shihab nye
helen oyeyemi
ann pancake
michelle slatalla
![brown]](Images/headshots/nickole_brown.jpg)
Nickole Brown is a poet and fiction writer. She graduated from the M.F.A. Program for Creative Writing at Vermont College. She has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Arts Council. She graduated summa cum laude from University of Louisville, studied English Literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson.
Her work has been featured in The Writer's Chronicle, Poets & Writers, 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Diagram Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, Mammoth Books' Sudden Stories anthology, and Starcherone Press anthology PP / FF. She also co-edited the anthology, Air Fare: Stories, Poems, & Essays on Flight. She has served as the National Publicity Consultant for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and as the Program Coordinator for the Union Institute & University writing residency in Slovenia. Nickole has worked at a nonprofit, independent, literary press, Sarabande Books for seven years as Director of Marketing and Development. She currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Lee Byrd, novelist and publisher, was born and raised in New Jersey but has spent most of her life in the Southwest. In 1985, with her husband, poet Bobby Byrd, she founded Cinco Puntos Press, a publisher of nonfiction, fiction, poetry and children's literature, recognized for bringing the multicultural literatures of the American Southwest and Mexico to a national audience.
In 2003, Cinco Puntos published Lee's first picture book for children, The Treasure on Gold Street: A Neighborhood Story in Spanish and English. It received a Skipping Stones Honor Book Award, a Southewest Book Award, a Paterson Poetry Center Prize, and a Teddy Award from the Texas Writers League. Her second children's book, Lover Boy: A Bilingual Counting Book, was published by Cinco Puntos in 2005.
Lee's collection of short stories, My Sister Disappears, was published by Southern Methodist University Press in 1993 and received a Southwest Book Award and the Stephen F. Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters for the best first work of fiction that year. In 2006 Algonquin Books published Lee's first novel, Riley's Fire, voted one of the top ten books of 2006 by People Magazine.
In 2005, Lee and her husband received Cultural Freedom Fellowships from the Lannan Foundation. Lee and Bobby have three children and five grandchildren.
Nathalie Handal is a poet, writer, playwright, director, and producer. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her poetry has been set to music and has been featured in numerous galleries and traveling exhibits. Most recently, her piece "Secrets" was part of the 6+ women's art collective show (exhibitions in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Colorado and Chicago). Handal has been involved as a writer, director or producer in over twenty productions worldwide. She is currently working on a new play, Deir Yassin, The Stonecutters, which will have a staged reading at the Loews Theatre (coproduced by New York Theatre Workshop and Nibras).
Two of her plays, La Cosa Dei Sogni and Between Our Lips, were recently showcased at the Public Theatre's "New Works Now." She is the author of two poetry CDs, Traveling Rooms, and two poetry books, The NeverField and The Lives of Rain (shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series) and is the recipient of the Menada Literary Award. She is the editor of The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (an Academy of American Poets Bestseller and Winner of the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Award), Arab American and Arab Anglophone Literature (forthcoming), and co-editor of Contemporary Poetry from Asia and the Middle East (forthcoming, Norton). She is Poetry Books Review Editor for Sable (British magazine, www.sablelitmag.org), an Advisory Board Member for the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia, a member of Nibras Theatre Collective, and Associate Artist and Development Executive for the production company, The Kazbah Project (currently working on the feature film, Gibran).
Sally Jenkins is an award-winning journalist for the Washington Post and the author of eight books, three of which were New York Times best-sellers, most notably It's Not About the Bike with Lance Armstrong. Her new book, The Real All Americans, tells the story of the American Indian football team in 1903 who faced thousands of hostile fans but became heroes. Her work has been featured in GQ and Sports Illustrated, and she has acted as a correspondent on CNBC as well as on NPR's All Things Considered. She lives in New York City.
Sedika Mojadidi has produced two experimental documentaries on Afghanistan, Kabul, Kabul (2000) and Zulaikha (2002), both distributed byThird World Newsreel. She recently completed a documentary feature, Motherland Afghanistan (distributed by First Run Features) about her father's work as an ob-gyn in Afghanistan that aired on PBS in February 2007. Her work as a producer has aired on The Learning Channel, The Discovery Channel, A&E, and PBS. Sedika holds Master's Degrees in Film Theory from the University of Florida and in Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her appearance at the conference is due, in part, to support from UK's Gender and Women Studies Program.
Jessica Care Moore Poole is CEO of the publishing house, Moore Black Press, and the writer, producer, and star of SPOKEN!, a poetry- and music-driven show on the Black Family ChannelShe is the author of two acclaimed books of poetry, The Words Don't Fit in My Mouth and The Alphabet Verses The Ghetto; two plays, There Are No Asylums for the Real Crazy Women (based on the life of Vivienne Eliot, wife of T. S. Eliot), and AlphaPhobioa; and is featured in two independent films, Hughes Dream Harlem and His/Herstory. She has read from her work in South Africa, Germany, Scotland, France, and The Netherlands, and she is a leading voice in AIDS activism, having performed at the United Nations World AIDS Day; in the AIDS Walk opening ceremonies in NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Atlanta; and in the Hip-Hop-A-Thon Concert for the San Francisco Bay Area. Her forthcoming book, God Is Not an American, will be published in the November 2007. She was recently asked to perform a poem alongside Barack Obama and other activists and celebrity guests to bring attention to Hurricane Katrina survivors in New Orleans on August 29th. She lives in Georgia with her husband, Kenyatta Poole, and their son King Thomas James Poole.
Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, Nye grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on this heritage and her experiences traveling the world, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity. Nye is the author or editor of more than 20 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, and You & Yours, (a best-selling poetry book of 2006).
Other works include seven prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including This Same Sky and The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East. Her new book of essays is entitled I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay? Tales of Driving and Being Driven (fall 2007).
Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, A Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and numerous honors for her children's literature, including two Jane Addams Children's Book Awards. Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer's Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials: "The Language of Life with Bill Moyers" and "The United States of Poetry," and has also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been visiting writer for The Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Hawai'i.
Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and has lived in London since the age of four. She completed her first novel The Icarus Girl before her nineteenth birthday. She graduated from Cambridge University in June 2006 and lives in London. The Opposite House is her second novel.
Ann Pancake grew up in Summersville and Romney, West Virginia. Her collection of short stories, Given Ground, won the 2000 Bakeless Prize. She has received a Whiting Award, an NEA Grant, a Pushcart Prize, and creative writing fellowships from the states of Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and New Stories from the South. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, where her research included Appalachian and working-class studies. After teaching at institutions around the world, including Japan, American Samoa, and Thailand, she is now on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Her first novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (Shoemaker & Hoard, fall 2007), is based on interviews and real events concerning mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky. As the mine turns the mountains to dust and wastewater, workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters. Down below, the hollow's inhabitants live with the constant threat of a black flood that could wash out their world without notice.
Michelle Slatalla, who has written extensively about the big questions people ask in small towns, writes a weekly column for the The New York Times Thursday Styles section. Formerly a reporter at Newsday, where she was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize along with a team of reporters, she also has written regular columns about family life for Time, Rosie and Lifetime. She is the co-author with her husband, Josh Quittner, of three mystery novels and the nonfiction works Masters of Deception and Speeding the Net. She lives in Mill Valley, California, with her husband and three daughters.
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Come to a place where the skylines move like creek-beds, where people understand craft as a way of life. One weekend the best women artists from around the world venture to this place to exchange ideas, process, performance—calling us to newly imagine what it means to be a writer.
