Staff

Teaching Artists

Aracely Gonzalez is a writer and teacher. She was raised in Salinas, California where she drew inspiration from the row fields in her horizon. She earned an MA in English from San Francisco State University and is co-founder of Fish Soup, an all-women cross genre writing workshop. Her writing has appeared in “Suspect Thoughts: A Journal of Subversive Writing.”

Myron Michael Hardy is a poet and recording artist. He is a Cave Canem fellow and earned an MFA in writing from California College of the Arts. His work has been published in several journals and he was a finalist for the Blue Light Poetry Prize Chapbook Competition. He has recorded two albums: “Songs of Experience” and “Masters Thesis.”

Cindy Je was born in Korea and moved to the United States as a child. She earned her BA at UC Riverside and her MFA in writing at the University of Oregon. She has been a mentor and case manager for homeless youth and has taught students from a range of backgrounds and ages, from middle school students to university students. She is the recipient of the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize and the Roy T. Thompson Poetry Award.

Milta Ortiz is a poet, playwright, performer and revolutionary arts educator. She earned her BA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and is the recipient of a 2006 Individual Artist Grant from the City of Oakland. She is a member of Las Manas, an all women spoken word collective. She also performs a one-woman hybrid theater piece “Scatter My Red Underwear.”

Artist in Residence

Katharine Gin has worked in arts and literary education for at-risk youth for over 14 years. She has taught photography and creative writing to youth in a variety of settings. Her artistic work with students has been published in The New York Times and the recent edition of the award-winning college textbook, “Seeing & Writing 3.” Katharine has a BA in architecture from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon.

Staff

Janet Heller, Program Manager, is the founding director of the San Francisco WritersCorps. She has taught English in high school, colleges and community settings in Louisiana and Florida. She is the co-founder of Runaway with Words, a creative writing program for runaway and homeless youth in Florida. Janet graduated with an MA in creative writing from Florida State University and is the recipient of an Arts Administration Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Judith Tannenbaum, Training Coordinator, has served on the training staff of WritersCorps since the program’s inception. A panelist and keynote speaker on prison arts and education, she has taught through California Poets in the Schools, Arts-in-Corrections, and UC Berkeley’s Academic Talent Development Program. She has published two books: “Teeth, Wiggly as Earthquakes: Writing Poetry in the Primary Grades;” and a memoir, “Disguised as A Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin.” Judith has also edited several WritersCorps books. Read Judith’s blog and learn more about her work.

Melissa Hung, Program Associate, is a writer and journalist. A graduate of Northwestern University’s creative writing and journalism programs, Melissa has written for newspapers, magazines and literary journals. She is the founding editor of Hyphen, an Asian American culture magazine, and a frequent speaker on Asian American media and independent media. She also curates Slant, an annual festival of short films at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston.

Advisory Board

Anne Wintroub, Friends of the Library

Chrissy Anderson-Zavala, Streetside Stories

David Blazevich, The Bernard Osher Foundation

Valerie Chow Bush, Communications consultant

Kimberly Harding,Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Andrea Helmboldt, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Leticia Hernandez, GirlSource

Chris Iglesias, Human Rights Commission

Aimee LeDuc, SFAC Gallery

Randall Martinez, Cordoba Corporation

Judy Nemzoff, San Francisco Arts Commission

Sonya Shah, California Institute of Integral Studies