2003-2004 WritersCorps Staff Biographies
Janet Heller, Project Manager
Janet.Heller@sfgov.org
Janet Heller is the founding director of the San Francisco WritersCorps. She has taught English in high schools, 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 a master's degree in creative writing from Florida State University in 1990. She is a co-author of a chapbook of poetry, Back to Front, published in 1993 by Red Window Press. Her poems and essays have been published in Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination, Apalachee Quarterly, and the Southeast Review. In 1994, she received an Arts Administration Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Avesa Rockwell, Project Assistant and Youth Intern Coordinator
Avesa.Rockwell@sfgov.org
Avesa Rockwell provides administrative, evaluative and logistical support to the teachers, staff and interns of WritersCorps. She also leads experiential education workshops for the SFUSD. She has managed publications for several non-profits; organized literacy programs at 14 public schools; taught environmental education to urban sixth graders in Sonoma County; and led extended wilderness trips for youth-in-recovery in the northern Rocky Mountains. She earned her B.A. in feminist literature at the Evergreen State College.
Judith Tannenbaum, Training Coordinator
Judith Tannenbaum has served as a mentor, teacher, and member of the training faculty for San Francisco WritersCorps since its inception in 1994. Judith has taught in the California Poets in the Schools program for 19 years. She received two California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence grants, which allowed her to teach poetry at San Quentin prison, as well as develop a multi-age community poetry project. Judith also created a poetry intensive for gifted teen-agers that she taught for nine summers at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2000, Judith published two books: Teeth, Wiggly as Earthquakes: Writing Poetry in the Primary Grades (Stenhouse Publishers); and a memoir, Disguised As a Poem: My YearsTeaching Poetry at San Quentin, published by Northeastern University Press. For more information on Judith Tannenbaum, see her website.
2003-2004 Teacher Biographies
Cathy Arellano is a San Francisco-born, Mission
District-raised writer. She published a poetry chapbook, I Love
My Women, Sometimes They Love Me, in September 2002. Her poetry,
fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in books, literary journals,
magazines, and grassroots publications, including Tongues
Magazine, shellac magazine, Fourteen Hills,
Cipactli, ALLGO Pasa, Curve Magazine, and
Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. From
interviews she conducted, she edited and wrote portraits of women
for the publication I Will Survive: Women Living with HIV. This is her sixth year with
WritersCorps.
Toussaint Haki is a community cultural worker born and raised in Oakland, CA. He is a self-published poet and journalist, theater and spoken word performer, workshop facilitator and educator. Haki founded SEEDS, an eight page bi-monthly newsletter documenting the spoken-word movement of the East Bay, and founded "10 Poets Plus a Mic," a collective that fuses spoken word, poetry, live music and theater. In 1998, he published his first book, Stretch Marks, a collection of autobiographical poems and prose. Haki has facilitated spoken word and manhood workshops with young men in two groups homes and through Project Reconnect's Future Father's Program. He's taught hip-hop performance workshops in an elementary after-school program in Alameda, and toured with The Recovery Theater Troup. This is his second year with WritersCorps.
Mahru Elahi recently moved back to the West Coast, after teaching writing for five years in New York City public schools. She believes strongly in the writing process and in the ability of youth to use the written word as a vehicle for empowerment. Mahru earned her bachelor's degree in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her Masters of Science in Teaching from New School University in New York City. Mahru participated in the Voices of Our Nations Writing Workshop, housed at the University of San Francisco, studying poetry with Ruth Forman. Her poetry has appeared in Fireweed, a Canadian feminist journal, and she is the author of a graphic novel published by Fantagraphics Books. This is her first year with WritersCorps.
Michelle Matz has taught creative writing at Upward Bound in Oakland, directed an after-school program for homeless youth, and taught GED classes to homeless adults. Michelle has read her poetry at venues all over the Bay Area, including St. Mary's College, Writer's Harvest, and Intersection for the Arts. Michelle was awarded the Mary Merritt Henry Prize for poetry at Mills College, where she received an M.F.A. degree. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Wesleyan University and a master’s in education from Stanford. She has been published in numerous journals, including The Berkeley Poetry Review, The New Delta Review, and The River King Poetry Supplement. This is her fifth year with WritersCorps.
Kim Nelson teaches writing at the Log Cabin Ranch for boys in La Honda. She also teaches with California Poets in the Schools, and has received grants through the California Arts Council. Kim co-hosts The Poetry Show on public radio KUSP (Santa Cruz). She earned a bachelor’s degree in literature and writing from Columbia University, and studied acting with Anna Deavere Smith, performing in her series "On the Road." She traveled to Japan to participate in a theater exchange, and studied drumming with master drummer Abdulai in Senegal, Africa. Her poetry is published in CPITS Statewide Anthologies, In Celebration of the Muse, Poetic Medicines, Intuitive Remedies, Porter Gulch Review, Verve. Pinto, and Coldsweat. This is her sixth year with
WritersCorps.
Beto Palomar is a xicano poet and artist born and raised in Los Angeles and Watts, California. He learned and taught poetry for the first time in June Jordan's Poetry for the People at UC Berkeley, where he graduated with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with a self-designed major, "Political Poetry of the World." He has also taught poetry, computers, Spanish, and art at Berkeley High School, UCLA, Napa Valley Upward Bound, and D.U.S.T.Y (Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth). He is working this year on his first manuscript of poetry for publication. For more information on Beto, go to his website. This is his first year with WritersCorps.
Jime Salcedo-Malo is a Chicano writer, performance poet, teacher and cultural worker born in Los Angeles and currently living in San Francisco. For the past eight years, he has worked with many civic, youth, and non-profit community organizations, and has a strong commitment to the arts, education and self-empowerment. Jime combines hip-hop and spoken word to teach writing, expression and self-determination with youth. This is his third year with WritersCorps.
Chad Sweeney has taught with WritersCorps at Everett Middle School, Mercy Housing and Mission High. Previously, Chad taught creative writing, drama, and Spanish at the Discovery Center School in San Francisco. He has explored languages and cultures throughout China, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and Bolivia. His poetry has won awards Oklahoma, where he won several awards for his poetry, fiction, and essays while earning a appeared in several journals and he's performed his work throughout the Bay Area, including KPOO Radio and the television program, Poetry In Motion. Chad has published three chapbooks, most recently Nail by Nail the Sunlight (Brooklyn, Urban Iris Press). He earned his bachelor's degree in English at the University of Oklahoma and is currently in the MFA program in poetry at SFSU. This is his fourth year with WritersCorps.
Gloria Yamato has worked with various social change agencies and community organizations in the Pacific Northwest, including The Women's Funding Alliance, American Friends Service Committee, Central Area Motivation Program, and Seattle Rape Relief. Yamato has helped youth and marginalized communities through such community resources and educational institutions as Brother to Brother, Seattle’s Middle College, University of Washington's women's studies department, and Echo Glenn Youth Detention Facility. Her work has been published in Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives, Sinister Wisdom, New Voices 1, and Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras. Yamato earned a master's degree in interdisciplinary arts at San Francisco State University, with a concentration in creativity and arts education, in 2001. This is her fourth year with WritersCorps.
Former Teacher Biographies
Russell Reza-Khaliq Gonzaga taught during
the 1999-2000 WritersCorps program year at Ida B. Wells High School,
Phoenix Middle School, and the Columbia Park Boys and Girls Club,
Excelsior Unit. He is a poet, writer, performance artist and
community activist. Russell was an Artist-in-Residence with the
2001-02 WritersCorps program. He taught spoken word classes and
coached youth involved with the Youth Poetry Slam League. Russell
also performed in WritersCorps workshops and at events throughout
2002.
Uchechi Kalu is a Nigerian-born poet, performer, activist, teacher and survivor of life who grew up in Missouri, Texas and Massachusetts. She spent four years with the late June Jordan's Poetry for the People program, teaching poetry at Berkeley High School, the Federal Corrections Institute at Dublin, and at UC Berkeley where she received her B.A. in African-American Studies. She has performed at many venues and events throughout the Bay Area and the west coast, including the Afro Solo Festival, the Radical Performance Fest, In the Street Theatre Festival, Intersection for the Arts, Rhodessa Jones' Medea Project and on KPFA Radio. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals and anthologies, and most recently in Revolutionary Voices (Alyson Books, 2000). She has published a book of poetry, Flowers Blooming Against a Bruised Gray Sky.
Danielle (Dani) Montgomery is a queer youth activist and poet who grew up in Tucson and San Diego. She has taught poetry with Poetry for the People at Berkeley High School, University of California at Berkeley, Federal Corrections Institute in Dublin, Calif., and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. At Mills College, where she received an M.F.A., she founded the Community Workshops Project. Through the Project, she taught poetry at Oakland High and the Pacific Center, and helped coordinate other high school and community workshops. Her poems have appeared in the Santa Clara Review, Anything That Moves, Icarus, and other magazines, as well as in the anthology, Revolutionary Voices (Alyson Books, 2000).
Ishle Yi Park is a Korean American woman
born and raised in Queens. She has taught poetry in prisons, high
schools, junior high schools, conferences, and community centers
throughout New York. Her work has been published or forthcoming in
more than 20 journals and anthologies, including Beacon Best
2001, The Cream City Review, Slam, Manoa, The NuyorAsian
Anthology, and New American Writing. She has performed at
colleges and venues in the East Coast, Midwest, Cuba and Korea as a
solo artist, and as part of a pan-Asian spoken word collective
called Feedback. Park is currently a member of Team Union Square
'01, which competed in the National Poetry Slam. She has a Feedback
CD available and her first book of poems will be published with Kaya
in Fall 2002. For more information on Ishle Yi Park, see her website.
