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The Writers
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Gary Borders has worked for newspapers for more than forty years, as a paperboy, photographer, writer, editor and publisher. His weekly column is distributed by the New York Times News Service to newspapers across the country. He is the publisher of the Longview News-Journal, where he began as a paperboy in 1968. “A Hanging In Nacogdoches,” his account of a century-old hanging in Nacogdoches, was published by University of Texas Press in March 2006. A collection of his columns, “Behind and Beyond the Pine Curtain,” was published by Eakin Press of Austin in 2005. Borders earned a bachelor’s degrees in in history, English and philosophy from Stephen F. Austin State University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. He currently serves as president of the Texas Daily Newspaper Association.
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Erin Burdette is a Dallas freelance writer who won The Wall Street Journal’s Nonfiction Prize for Literary Excellence at the Mayborn Writers Conference in 2005. She has written articles for The Dallas Morning News and is nearing completion of her first novel. Burdette was selected to attend the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy this past March based upon the first chapters of her novel in progress. Burdette began on the stage as an actress and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theater at Southern Methodist University and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California San Diego in the Professional Actor Training Program. In graduate acting school, she wrote her first play, “Freefall,” which was later produced in Los Angeles. This play earned her entry into the Actor’s Studio Playwright’s Division in Los Angeles, where she wrote several more plays. After returning to Dallas in 2000, Burdette has worked with Kitchen Dog Theater as an actress and playwright mentor to high school students in KDT’s annual Pup Fest. Burdette is married and has a four-year-old son, Jack.
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Spencer Campbell is a graduate student at the University of North Texas and a two-time recipient of the Mayborn Scholarship. His work has been published in the Dallas Morning News, AvidGolfer Magazine, and the North Texas Daily. In 2007, Campbell’s piece, “A Troubled Heart,” took second place at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference. Campbell rents a cheap room in a run-down house in Bedford, Texas, and works as an intern at the Dallas Observer.
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Joan Donaldson and her husband, John, are organic blueberry farmers in southern Michigan. For the past ten years, Donaldson’s personal essays have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor. She has published two picture books: The Real Pretend, illustrated by Tasha Tudor and The Secret of the Red Shoes, illustrated by Doris Ettlinger. In 2000, Holiday House published her first young adult novel, A Pebble and A Pen. It will release her new novel, By My Own Hands, in 2008. Donaldson holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from Spalding University, Photos of her farm can be viewed at www.joandonaldson.com.
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Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe is a journalist, writer, and the winner of the first Mayborn-UNT Press prize in 2005. Her book, See Sam Run (UNT Press, May 2008), is the second to be published in the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Series. An award-winning journalist with the Denton Record-Chronicle, she lives with her three children on an Argyle farm, populated with pecan trees planted by her late husband, Mark, as well as a herd of cashmere goats, a flock of chickens, three dogs, one cat and growing number of bee apiaries. |
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Judith Greene, a student of poetry and creative nonfiction in the Writer’s Garret Mentorship Program, submitted her first piece of literary nonfiction to the Mayborn Conference’s writing contest last year. She was stunned to learn that what started as a poem was selected by jurists as one of the “best of the best” essays. The piece grew out of experiencing stage four breast cancer. Instead of pursing chemotherapy she chose to volunteer with Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity, to work among the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. Greene spent her days helping lepers, abandoned children, the sick, the dying. Greene “loves words, loves images, loves to watch words that might not normally match bang up against each other…to see what they do.” |
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Sam Kusic, author of “Of All the Rotten Luck,” a tale of his woes with cops and courts and decrepit jalopies, is a general assignment reporter for the Indiana Gazette, where he covers other peoples woes with cops and courts. These days, Kusic finds himself tethered to trial proceedings involving a string of grisly homicides in and around Indiana, Pennsylvania. When he isn’t covering murders, Kusic is winning awards. This year, Kusic won a Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors Award for a sports story about a twenty-two-year-old ultra-marathoner. He also won a Pennsylvania Newspaper Association Keystone Press Award for a feature about a small-town restaurant shuttering its doors after thirty years, much to the chagrin of its fraternal patrons. After seeing an ad in Editor and Publisher about the Mayborn Conference, Kusic decided to test his literary skills last summer by submitting “Of All the Rotten Luck” to the Mayborn’s literary nonfiction writing contest. “Stunned” by the jurists’ selection, Kusic is returning to the 2008 Mayborn Conference and submitting another narrative to the writing competition to prove to himself that his winning entry wasn’t “a fluke.” Kusic, a self-described “journalism geek,” holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.
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Julianne McCullagh began a regular writing life with her column on family life spirituality when she was director of Family Life Ministry in her parish. Her work has appeared in Newsday, The Tablet and various publications of Loyola Press. McCullagh, a native New Yorker, has lived in Texas since 1991 with her husband and four children. For the last year she has been a writing instructor, a co-director and director of the Writers Community and Mentorship Program at The Writer’s Garret in Dallas. |
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Jere Pfister pubished essays and poetry in The Women’s Journal, a publication of Bridget’s Place in Houston. Her poem, Burn Unit, appeared in the 2007 anthology of Texas Poetry, The Weight of Addition, published by Mutabilis Press, Houston. Several of her plays have been performed in Houston. She is finishing a memoir about growing up in Southeast Louisiana during the 1940s, and the impact of her family’s move west to Santa Fe and then Phoenix in the early 1950s. She holds memberships in the Texas Storytelling Association and the American Dramatist Guild. Pfister has a Master in Fine Arts in theatre from the University of Houston. She was a teaching artist for the Alley Theatre during their 2004 season. The Louisiana native has lived in Houston since 1978. |
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John E. Petty currently serves as director of Special Projects - Movie Posters for Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas, Texas. A graduate of Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, Petty’s first writing job was as a copywriter for New American Library in New York City. He is a regular contributor to several hobby publications, including Comics Buyer’s Guide, Big Reel, Classic Images, and Films of the Golden Age, and is co-author with Grey Smith, of the soon-to-be published CAPES, CROOKS, AND CLIFFHANGERS: A History of Heroic Serials through Vintage Movie Posters. Petty lives in Lewisville with his wife Judy and their dog, Sadie, and two cats, Scrapper and Meeep. |
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Althea E. Rhodes is an assistant professor of rhetoric at the University of Arkansas—Fort Smith. She completed her master’s and doctoral degrees in Rhetoric and Composition at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her dissertation, Finding the Ties that Bind—Writers in Transition, grew out of her need to help writers become more comfortable with their writing process and with different writing contexts. Rhodes has presented her research at local and regional conferences. She has published a chapter, “When Pain is the Other Dancer: Living with Migraine” in Illness in the Academy, Kimberly R. Myers, editor, and a number of biographies and scholarly articles in the Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography, Afro-American Women Writers, Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, and American National Biography. Rhodes teaches courses in rhetoric and creative nonfiction. |
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