Keynote Speaker

Mark Bowden

Mark Bowden is an author, screenwriter, and journalist. His book “Black Hawk Down” was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the Overseas Press Club’s 1997 Hal Boyle Award, and was the basis of the two-time Academy Award winning film of the same name. His book “Killing Pablo” won the Overseas Press Club’s 2001 Cornelius Ryan Award, and has been optioned for motion picture. His most recent books are “Guests of the Ayatollah,” an account of the 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis, and “The Best Game Ever,” the story of the 1958 NFL championship game. He is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a national correspondent for The Atlantic. Mark teaches journalism and creative writing at his alma mater, Loyola College of Maryland. He lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania, is married and has five children and a grandchild.

Michael Downs’ book of memoir and literary journalism, House of Good Hope, won the 2007 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. He is the recipient of a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His short stories have appeared in many literary reviews and have been anthologized in the Best American Mystery Stories series. A former newspaper reporter, he teaches creative writing at Towson University.
 

Maureen Green is an editor for Final Draft's Script magazine, the premier trade publication for working screenwriters. She has worked closely with award-winning Web innovators Alec McNayr and Robert Gustafson to develop a new media mission for the publication. A native of Central Pennsylvania, Maureen studied dramatic literature at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and DeSales University, and with the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. Maureen is co-founder, with musician Melissa Phillips, of Plunger & Flashlight, an organization to help independent artists find grants and resources. In 2007, she completed her M. S. Social Science at Towson University.

Susan Muaddi Darraj is Senior Editor of The Baltimore Review. She teaches fiction writing in the graduate writing program at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and English literature at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland. Susan's work has appeared in a wide range of forums, including The Christian Science Monitor, The Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Stories, Mizna, and Orchid. Her critical work and essays have been published in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature as well as anthologies such as Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism and Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism in the 21st Century. Her collection of short fiction, The Inheritance of Exile, was a finalist in the 2003 AWP Book Awards and published by the University of Notre Dame Press. It won ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year award (Short Fiction) in 2007.

David Everett, an essayist, journalist, and fiction writer, now directs the Master of Arts in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins. As a journalist, his writing and reporting won awards from the National Press Club, Society of Professional Journalists, Overseas Press Club, and many other organizations. He has been teaching writers how to read their work in public for 15 years, during which he has organized and led scores of public readings involving students, faculty members, authors, and other writers.

David Dudley has been the editor-in-chief of Urbanite, a free monthly city magazine distributed in the Baltimore area, since August 2007. A native of Buffalo, New York, Dudley is a former staff writer and music editor at the Baltimore City Paper, a former senior editor at Baltimore Magazine, and a former associate editor at Cornell Alumni Magazine. Since 2003, he has been a contributing editor at AARP The Magazine. Among his writing honors are a National Headliner Award for feature writing and a Nixon Newspapers National Writing Award. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two young daughters.

Jane Satterfield

Jane Satterfield is the author of Daughters of Empire:  A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter Press, 2009) and two books of poetry: Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir, 2003) and Shepherdess with an Automatic (WWPH, 2000). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, three Maryland State Arts Council grants in poetry, and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s Gold Medal for the Essay.  She lives in Baltimore with her husband, poet Ned Balbo, and her daughter Catherine, and teaches at Loyola University.

Website: www.ohmidog.com

John Woestendiek, after 34 years with newspapers, departed from the Baltimore Sun last year to write his first book -- about the quest to clone dogs and the marketing of them as pets. It is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2010. He also produces the website, ohmidog!, and looks for jobs in his spare time. Woestendiek graduated from the University of North Carolina and worked as a reporter, columnist, national correspondent and editor at five different newspapers -- the Arizona Daily Star, Lexington Herald Leader, Charlotte Observer, the Baltimore Sun and the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for his coverage of prisons and mental institutions.

Jeff Kleinman is a literary agent, intellectual property attorney, and founding partner of Folio Literary Management, LLC, a New York literary agency which works with all of the major U.S. publishers (and, through subagents, with most international publishers).  He’s a graduate of Case Western Reserve University (J.D.), the University of Chicago (M.A., Italian), and the University of Virginia (B.A. with High Distinction in English).  As an agent, Jeff feels privileged to have the chance to learn an incredibly variety of new subjects, meet an extraordinary range of people, and feel, at the end of the day, that he’s helped to build something – a wonderful book, perhaps, or an author’s career.  His authors include Garth Stein, Robert Hicks, Charles Shields, Bruce Watson, Neil White, and Philip Gerard.

Khris Baxter

Website: www.baxterbaker.com

Khris Baxter is a screenwriter, producer, and story consultant. His body of work includes eight optioned screenplays and one produced film. His current projects include writing and producing the feature film “Homestretch” based on the documentary of the same name. Khris teaches screenwriting at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the low residency MFA in Creative Writing at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. He is an affiliate of the Virginia Film Office as a judge for the annual Virginia Screenwriting Competition. Khris is the founder of Baxter Baker & Associates, a story and media consulting firm. He lives in Reston, VA.

Website: www.CityLitProject.org

Gregg Wilhelm is Executive Director of CityLit Project, which he founded in 2004. CityLit nurtures the culture of literature by presenting literary festivals, conducting writers’ workshops, creating dynamic literary arts programs, and inspiring youth to enjoy reading and writing. He has been in the book publishing business since 1992, working as an editor, designer, production manager, and marketer. Gregg also serves as director and editor-in-chief at Apprentice House--the country's only campus-based, student-staffed book publisher--based at Loyola University.

Michael Salcman is a physician, brain scientist and art critic. Former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum, and presently Special Lecturer at the Osher Institute of Towson University, he lectures widely on art and the brain. His poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hopkins Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, Harvard Review, and New York Quarterly. His work has been heard on NPR's All Things Considered and in Euphoria, a documentary on the brain and creativity (2008). Author of four chapbooks, most recently, Stones In Our Pockets (Parallel Press), his collection The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises Press), was nominated for The Poet’s Prize in 2009 and was a Finalist for The Towson University Prize in Literature.

Jack Carneal is a Lecturer in English at Towson University. He is working on his first novel. Fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Chattahoochee Review, the Blue Moon Review, Vice Magazine, Chesapeake Reader and Exterminating Angel. He was a Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia's MFA program and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writer's conference.

Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson

Website: litdeadline.wordpress.com

Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson is a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and the Homewood Advisor at Hopkins’ M.A. in Writing Program. Author of Literature on Deadline (Celumbra/Pacific Isle 2007), she is a former staff writer for The Miami Herald and Johns Hopkins Magazine, among other publications. Her literary essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Baltimore Review, Utne Reader, Urbanite, and Style, as well as and Signs of Life in the USA (Bedford/St. Martin’s 2009) and Letters to J.D. Salinger (University of Wisconsin Press). A foreign correspondent for various publications, including the Baltimore Sun, Palm Beach Post, and American Journalism Review, she has reported from Argentina, Nepal, Cuba, and China. Cavanaugh Simpson earned her M.A. from Hopkins' Writing Seminars, where she won the Harvard University’s Goldsmith Research Award. She is a contributing editor at The Baltimore Review.

Andrew Reiner is currently a contributing writer for Urbanite magazine and teaches composition, memoir and the literary essay at Towson University where he is a lecturer. His essays have also appeared on TheAtlantic.com, in the Baltimore Sun and the City Paper. He was a frequent contributor to both of these publications. Reiner is at work on a memoir about masculinity and junior high.

Website: www.ebweissman.com

Elissa Brent Weissman is the author of two novels for 8-12-year olds, both released in 2009: Standing for Socks (Simon & Schuster) and The Trouble with Mark Hopper (Penguin). A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and the Roehampton University, London, MA in Children's Literature, Elissa teaches Writing for Children at the University of Baltimore and the JHU Odyssey Program.

Clarinda Harriss is the author of 6 published poetry collections, most recently DIRTY BLUE VOICE and MORTMAIN. Several of poems and a long short story by Harriss appear as a special section in a 2008-9 anthology entitled CAREGIVES AND CARETAKERS. Recently, several of her short stories have been re-printed online in exterminationgangel.com; they are “Bone to Bone: and “Hot Water Piggie Blues.” Having worked for decades with prison writers locally and nationally, she is the executive producer of a forthcoming videodocumentary centered on a play by “lifers” at the Maryland women’s prison. Harriss is the editor/director of BrickHouse Books, Inc., Maryland’s oldest literary press. A professor of English at Towson U,, she is the longtime faculty adviser to GRUB STREET, TU’s literary and arts magazine.

Author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedications, Elise Levine was named by Margaret Atwood as one of Canada’s most important emerging women writers. Reviewers have called her “a cutting-edge literary sensation” and “a sensitive, cagey dominatrix of literary form and human psychology.” She is the author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedications. Her poems, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous periodicals including Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Prairie Schooner, Best Canadian Stories, the Journey Prize Anthology, and Canada’s The National Post. She is the recipient of a Canadian National Magazine Award for Fiction, and many awards including ones from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council, as well as residency fellowships from, among others, the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, where she was an Eli Cantor Fellow.

Originally from Westchester County, New York, Alison Masciovecchio graduated from Towson University in 2006 with a degree in English. Immediately upon graduating, she began working as the assistant to the CEO of Trident Media Group, a literary agency in New York City. She is currently an Associate Publicist at Random House, Inc. where she has been since October 2007

Website: www.ComicMix.com

Mark Wheatley holds the Eisner, Inkpot, Mucker, Gem and Speakeasy awards and nominations for the Harvey award and the Ignatz award. His work has been repeatedly included in the annual Spectrum selection of fantastic art and has appeared in private gallery shows, The Norman Rockwell Museum, The Toledo Museum of Art and the Library of Congress where several of his originals are in the LoC permanent collection. His comic book creations include Ez Street, Lone Justice, Mars, Breathtaker, Black Hood, Prince Nightmare, Hammer of the Gods, Blood of the Innocent, Frankenstein Mobster, Miles the Monster and Titanic Tales. His interpretations of established characters such as Tarzan the Warrior, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Jonny Quest, Dr. Strange, The Flash, Argus and The Spider have brought them to life for a new generation of readers. He has written for TV, illustrated books, designed cutting-edge role-playing games and was an early innovator of the on-line daily comic strip form.

James Magruder’s stage adaptations of works by Marivaux, Labiche, Lesage, Gozzi, Dickens, and Molière have been produced on and off-Broadway, across the country, and in Germany and Japan. His plays Penelope & the Sterile Field, Too Much of Me, Nine Rooms Worth, and Dead Parents have been staged in Baltimore, Atlanta, and New York and published in The Art of the One-Act and Third Coast. His writing has been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, the New Harmony Project, the MacDowell Colony, and the Ucross Foundation. The University of Wisconsin Press published his début novel, Sugarless, last month.

Roger Lathbury has run a publishing company, Orchises Press, out of the Washington, D. C., area since 1983. One of the longest running small presses in the country, it specializes in poetry and reprints of classic texts. Lathbury teaches English at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, collects books, and does some mean card tricks.

David Bergman's latest book is Gay American Autobiography:  Writings from Whitman to Sedaris.  With Katia Sainson, he has translated The Selected Poems of Jean Senac, which will appear next year.

Lynda Robinson is an editor at The Washington Post, where she spent seven years assigning and editing narratives for the Post's Sunday magazine. In July, she began overseeing the newspaper's coverage of social issues, including immigration, religion, poverty, child welfare, family life, philanthropy, demographics, AIDS, and homelessness. Prior to her arrival at the Post in 2000, she worked for three years as managing editor of Capital Style, a political lifestyle magazine, and 10 years as a reporter and editor for The Baltimore Sun. She lives in Columbia with her husband and two sons.
 

Andrew Auseon is a video game designer and a writer of books for young people. A graduate of the prestigious Vermont College Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults program, he is the author of Funny Little Monkey, Jo-Jo and the Fiendish Lot, Alienated, which he co-wrote with filmmaker David O. Russell, and the forthcoming Freak Magnet. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife and their two daughters.
 

Robert Travieso's short stories have recently been published in Tin House, One Story, Fugue, and the Bat City Review. He has another short story forthcoming in Redivider, and a personal essay forthcoming in O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Baltimore Writers' Conference is sponsored by

The Graduate Program in Professional Writing at Towson University
Towson University's College of Liberal Arts
Johns Hopkins Master of Arts in Writing Program | City Lit Project

Painting by Nora Sturges, published courtesy of the artist