October, 2019
Emily and Matt Clifton are the bloggers behind Nerds with Knives. Their new cookbook is Cork and Knife.
September, 2019
Lyn Miller-Lachmann is the author of Rogue (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2013), the story of a eighth grader with undiagnosed Asperger’s and an X-Men obsession, in search of a friend and her own special power. Lyn has also written the historical YA novel Gringolandia (Curbstone, 2009) and its companion, Surviving Santiago (Running Press, 2015) and translated the picture book The World in a Second (Enchanted Lion, 2015) by Isabel Minhós Martins and Bernardo Carvalho from Portuguese to English.
August, 2019
Catherine Arra is a former high school English and writing teacher. Since leaving the classroom in 2012, her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary journals online and in print, and in several anthologies. She is the author of Writing in the Ether (Dos Madres Press, 2018) and three chapbooks, Tales of Intrigue & Plumage (FutureCycle Press, 2017), Loving from the Backbone (Flutter Press, 2015), and Slamming & Splitting (Red Ochre Press, 2014). She is a native of the Hudson Valley, where she teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups.
July, 2019
Donna Minkowitz is the author of the memoir Growing up Golem, which Lilith called “fascinating, compulsively readable… with fierce imagination,” and Kirkus praised for bringing “a defiant, playful energy to writing about her difficult and dark past.” She won a Lambda Literary Award for her first memoir, Ferocious Romance, about covering the Christian right as an openly lesbian journalist. Minkowitz has also written for The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Salon, The Nation, New York magazine, and Ms., and she was a longtime columnist for the Village Voice.
June, 2019
Karen Malpede is an American playwright and director whose work reflects an ongoing interest in social justice issues. She is a co-founder of the Theater Three Collaborative in New York City, and teaches theater at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. George Bartenieff is her collaborator.
May, 2019
Edwin Torres is a renowned poet and the editor of The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press). The book collects an extraordinary range of voices including writers, artists, performers, and healing practitioners to present new perspectives on the body in art by exploring the body in language. http://counterpathpress.org/the-body-in-language-an-anthology-edited-by-edwin-torres
April, 2019
William Lessard has written for such venues as McSweeney’s, Hobart, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic. He is the President of PR with Brains.
Mike Faloon is the author of The Other Night at Quinn’s.
March, 2019
Lesa Cline-Ransome and James Ransome are award-winning children’s book authors whose work focuses on telling the powerful and heroic stories of African Americans throughout history. Some of their most recent books are Finding Langston, Before She Was Harriet, and Game Changers. They have four children, and live in Rhinebeck, NY.
February, 2019
Belinda McKeon’s debut novel Solace won the 2011 Faber Prize and was voted Irish Book of the Year, as well as being shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her second novel is Tender. Her essays and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, the Guardian, A Public Space and elsewhere. As a playwright, she has had work produced in Dublin and New York.
January, 2019
Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy, was published by The Unnamed Press in 2017, and translated into five languages. She was awarded a Fulbright Grant in Creative Writing to Italy to complete the novel, during which time she was the Writer-in-Residence at Florence University of the Arts. Her writing has been published in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Florentine, and Global City Review, among others.
Brendan Kiely is The New York Times bestselling author of All American Boys (with Jason Reynolds), Tradition, The Last True Love Story, and The Gospel of Winter. His work has been published in more than ten languages, received a Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award, the Walter Dean Myers Award, and the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award. His work has been selected twice as one of the American Library Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults and was a Chicago Public Library Best of the Best. Originally from the Boston area, he now lives with Jessie in New York City.
December, 2018
Sam Anderson is currently a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. Formerly a book critic for New York Magazine and regular contributor to Slate, Anderson’s journalism and essays have won numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism. He lives in New York with his family.
November, 2018
Leland Cheuk is the author of the story collection LETTERS FROM DINOSAURS (2016) and the novel THE MISADVENTURES OF SULLIVER PONG (2015). His newest novel NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN is forthcoming from C&R Press in 2019. He is the publisher of 7.13 Books.
Jenn Stroud Rossmann writes the essay series “An Engineer Reads a Novel” for Public Books. Her stories have appeared in Hobart, Literary Orphans, Jellyfish Review, Tahoma Literary Review, failbetter, and other magazines. Her work has been a finalist for honors including the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize, the Disquiet Literary Prize, and Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize. She earned her BS and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a professor of mechanical engineering at Lafayette College.
October, 2018
Brian PJ Cronin lives in Beacon with his son, three cats, and the occasional wayward bat. He regularly contributes to such fine Hudson Valley publications as Chronogram, Upstate House, The Times Herald-Record, Ulster Magazine, Organic Hudson Valley, Visit Vortex, and The Highlands Current.
Katie Hellmuth Martin is a writer, blogger, designer, business owner, wife and mama. She is the co-founder of Tin Shingle, the web-based community and resource making buzz-building affordable and accessible to all small business owners. Katie runs the blog A Little Beacon Blog (www.alittlebeaconblog.com), a blog spotlighting her hometown of Beacon, NY and the local businesses that help it thrive.
Lorraine Hartin is the author of Wisdom in the Telling: Finding Inspiration and Grace in Traditional Folktales and Myths Retold, the winner of the 2008 Storytelling World Resource Award for Special Storytelling Resources.
September, 2018
Danielle Trussoni is an award-winning memoirist and novelist. She is the author of the New York Times and International bestsellers Angelology and Angelopolis, as well as the memoir Falling Through The Earth. Her second memoir, The Fortress, was published in 2016. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages.
She is also known as Danielle Postel-Vinay, author of Home Sweet Maison, a guide to home decor and etiquette, and an exploration of the deep cultural assumptions that inform everything that happens in a French home.
August, 2018
Julie Chibbaro is an award-winning author and teacher and is the Founder of Get Lit Beacon. She has published 3 novels: Into the Dangerous World (Viking, 2015), about a girl artist on the NY streets in 1984, Deadly (Simon & Schuster 2011, Scholastic 2012), a medical mystery about the hunt for Typhoid Mary in 1906, and Redemption (Simon & Schuster 2004) a historical novel about a girl’s unintended trip to the New World in 1524.
July, 2018
Helen Zuman is a tree-hugging dirt worshipper devoted to turning waste into food and the stinky guck of experience into fertile, fragrant prose. She holds a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and a Half-FA in memoir from Hunter College. Raised in Brooklyn, she lives with her husband in Beacon, NY and Black Mountain, NC.
June, 2018
Ruth Danon is a recent arrival to Beacon and we are glad to have her presence. Ruth has taught at NYU, and her work has appeared in such varied places as The Paris Review and BOMB magazine and in many other publications in the US and abroad. We like this fact about her: She grew up in upstate New York on the grounds of the Binghamton State Hospital, where her mother, a Hungarian refugee, worked as a psychiatrist. She is completing a memoir about this experience.
Mike Jurkovic is a poet and the co-director of Calling All Poets, an open mic series that is a poetry hub and an expansive network connecting poets from New York, Long Island, Woodstock, Albany, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. His poetry and musical criticism have appeared in hundreds of magazines and periodicals.
May, 2018
Diane Lapis has collected postcards for the past thirty years and revels in unveiling the hidden stories behind each image. She loves to travel and visit historic places, especially old bars and cocktail lounges. Diane is an independent researcher and a trustee at the Beacon Historical Society where she researches, writes, and presents topics on local history. Diane and her husband live in Beacon, NY.
April, 2018
Lauree Ostrofsky
Lauree Ostrofsky has a similar idea to Get Lit Beacon – she is a coach who wants to join forces with her community to build something bigger than herself. Her Women in Business fulfills this great need. Lauree overcame tremendous physical challenges to form her own career coaching business, which is called Simply Leap.
March, 2018
Jennifer Castle
Jennifer Castle is a YA writer who lives in New Paltz, NY. She’s really prolific and writes all kinds of books – fiction for young kids, middle grade, and young adult. She writes about love, identity, and unusual human connections, and likes to write different types of stories told different ways. Most recently, she published Together at Midnight.
Deb Lucke
Deb Lucke is a Beaconite and a cartoonist – you might have seen her drawings in her latest comic in the New Yorker or her cartoons in the Highlands Current where she even illustrated an article about Get Lit Beacon. If you have kids, maybe you’ve seen Sneezenesia, or The Lunch Witch? Deb is hard at work on the third book of the Lunch Witch series, which has been optioned by Amblin Pictures and is in development with Michael De Luca Productions with Clay Kaytis to direct and Kate McKinnon to star.
February, 2018
Sam Anderson
Sam Anderson is a critic for the NY Times. His writing is so highly polished, so beautifully stylized yet, it gets right into your veins, whatever the subject. His book about Oklahoma and basketball is forthcoming.
Jason Craig
Jason Craig is one half of the duo that makes up the theater team Banana Bag & Bodice. What does that name mean? It comes from a deep place – just like his work – which often has delightful double triple plays on words and hidden meanings. His performances are a delight. He is often accompanied by his partner in crime, Jessica Jelliffe.
January, 2018
John Horgan
John Horgan is a prolific science writer with an amazing list of articles to his name about a huge range of subjects. He is the author of 4 books about the brain, mind, and war. He has written for Scientific American, Time, Newsweek, and Slate, among others, and has just finished a draft of his new book, tentatively titled Mind-Body Problems: The Science of Who We Really Are.
December, 2017
Edwin Torres
Great writers leave us speechless, and Edwin Torres is one of them. He’s an award-winning poet who has received lots of fellowships and who has has performed his poems worldwide. He has published over ten books of poetry, including YesThing, NoThing.
Lily Burana
Lily Burana is fearless in her essays and her exploration of her own life. She is a hero for finding a way to live out loud and do it with great wisdom and humor. Lily has written for the New York Times, NY Magazine, Washington Post, GQ, Slate, Salon, and many others. She is the author of four books, including her newest, Grace for Amateurs.
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