Staff

Teaching Artists

Aracely Gonzalez is a fiction 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 various journals, including Suspect Thoughts: A Journal of Subversive Writing.

Rick D’Elia is a poet and teacher. He was raised in Massachusetts and now lives in San Francisco. He received an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and was the co-founder and co-curator of the Living Room Reading Series. His work has most recently appeared in We Still Like, The Chiron Review, and Switchback.

Carrie Leilam Love is a writer and teacher from Oakland. She has an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University and has been published by Drunk N Sailor Press and Intersection for the Arts. She writes about fashion and society at the Ironing Board Collective. Carrie rides a magenta bike most places she goes, and plays roller derby with the B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls when she is not too busy curating her soon-to-be-renowned ’80s boot collection.

Meg Day is a nationally-known spoken word artist, poet and arts educator who hails from San Diego. Named by OUT-ART Magazine as one of the nation’s “Top 30 Under 30″ up-and-coming artists in 2009, Meg is also a 2010 Lambda Fellow and a finalist for the Best New Poets of 2010 anthology. Meg’s poetry has been published in The Greenbelt Review, The Walrus, and ZYZZYVA. She has an MFA in poetry from Mills College and has taught young poets at Youth Speaks.

Anhvu Buchanan is the recipient of the 2010 James Duval Phelan Award for his poetry manuscript “The Disorder Index.” His poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in 580 Split, Cream City Review, La Fovea, The Minnesota Review, Parthenon West Review, The Sand Canyon Review, and word for/ word. He received an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and blogs for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network.

Minna Dubin is a writer, performer and teacher. She has written and starred in a one-woman show, produced plays written by pregnant and parenting teens, and is the recipient of an artist enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She is working on her first book-length manuscript, a series of essays on the theme of coming of age. In her free time, she enjoys mastering the art of matzah balls, watching movies, and attempting soul-crushingly difficult crossword puzzles.

Staff

Melissa Hung, acting program manager, is a writer, editor and native Texan. A graduate of Northwestern University’s creative writing and journalism programs, Melissa has written for newspapers, magazines and literary journals. As a journalist, she wrote stories about people, social issues and culture. She is the founding editor of Hyphen, an Asian American culture magazine, and a frequent speaker on independent media. She also founded Slant, a festival of short films at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston.

Judith Tannenbaum, training coordinator, has served on the training staff of WritersCorps since the program’s inception. A keynote speaker on prison arts and education, she has taught in public schools and prisons for 35 years. Her books include “Teeth, Wiggly as Earthquakes: Writing Poetry in the Primary Grades;” “Disguised as A Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin;” and “By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives” (New Village Press, April 2010). Read Judith’s blog and learn more about her work and about teaching arts and prison arts at her website or Redroom.

Nirmala Nataraj, program associate, is a San Francisco-based critic and playwright. She has written for  ColorLines magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Weekly, Theatre Bay Area magazine, and American Theatre magazine. Nirmala is an original member of grassroots theatre company No Nude Men Productions. Her work has been featured at the Climate Theatre, EXIT Stage Left, Femina Potens, the San Francisco Theater Festival, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

Emeritus Staff

Janet Heller is the founding director of San Francisco WritersCorps and led it for more than 15 years. 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.

Advisory Board

Anne Wintroub, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library

Chrissy Anderson-Zavala, Streetside Stories

Valerie Chow Bush, Communications consultant

Kimberly Harding,Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Andrea Helmboldt, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Aimee LeDuc, SFAC Gallery

Randall Martinez, Cordoba Corporation

Judy Nemzoff, San Francisco Arts Commission

Tomás Riley, ArtsChange

Alison Seevak, Writer