Elaine Greensmith Jordan
After a career in teaching and ministry Jordan now lives in Arizona writing personal essays to sort out the chaos. Her awards include the Nonfiction Prize from the Preservation Foundation and the Florida State Writing Competition. Her essays have appeared in South Loop Review, Alligator Juniper, Passages, The Georgetown Review, and other journals and anthologies. One has been nominated for a Pushcart by Arizona Authors. Excerpts from her unpublished memoir, Mrs. Ogg Played the Harp, have won awards from the San Francisco branch of American PEN Women, Bayou Magazine, and the California Writers Club.
VP Programs
Arlene Eisenbise
At age twenty-eight, Arlene asked for a challenge. She signed up for her first writing class at a vocational school in northern Wisconsin and has felt challenged since. Her feature articles covering theatre, musicians and travel were published in Wisconsin’s leading newspapers. In 1965 she helped get the Rhinelander School of the Arts off the ground. It is still going strong. As a student at the RSA, Arlene studied with such notables as Teri Rios, author of the book on which the Flying Nun TV series was based, and two of Wisconsin’s most prolific authors, August Derleth and Norbert Blei, among others. While there she was exposed to the stories of Studs Terkel, Chicago’s man-on-the-street, and Marc Connelly, a member of the Dorothy Parker Algonquin Circle.
In 1970, Arlene placed first in the Wisconsin Regional Writers Jade Ring Contest. Her poetry appeared in Wisconsin History in Poetry and in several UW-SP literary publications. She quit her federal job for a year and attended the UW, taking all creative writing and literature courses—a gift to herself after raising five children. She participated in script-writing workshops with Linda Seger, Hollywood’s “script doctor.” Arlene wrote and directed children’s drama and has been an active member of SCBWI since 1994. She also co-facilitated a workshop in Anaheim, in Minneapolis and in Toronto titled, “Let Your Characters Do the Walking.”
But Arlene dreams of seeing her fiction published. Since relocating to Prescott Valley in 1997, she’s completed a series of chapter books for early readers, a young adult historical novel and recently completed book two in a trilogy for YA/adults. She's working on the third volume and submitting her work to agents and publishers. See Missippi Myth, Arlene's brand new short story at WritingRaw.com.
VP Membership
Marian Powell
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. Began scribbling bad poetry and stories at an early age. I'm happy to say I published my first story at age 14 and paid $5.00 by American Girl Magazine. A few decades passed before I published again. In the meantime, I went to college and then in the early 70s did some Sixties things like hitchhiking across Europe, working as a volunteer on a kibbutz in Israel, and then upon returning to the USA, working as a waitress at the Grand Canyon and picking crops in Oregon. Then settled down a bit. Eventually earned two Masters degrees and in recent years have focused on writing.
I now have a number of online book reviews, Days Past features about Prescott, AZ history with the Prescott Daily Courier, and a story, Neither Cain Nor Abel, in an anthology edited by Ahmed A. Khan (Whortleberry Press, March 2007), and another, Categorical Imperative, in the anthology, Sci-Fi Waxes Philosophical (Edited by Ahmed Khan, ZC Books, 2008). Recently I published another sci-fi story in the anthology It Was a Dark and Stormy Halloween (Whortleberry Press, 2009). Keep your eye out for the clever sequel to the story in a holiday anthology, Christmas in Outer Space.
Next goal, the novel!
Secretary
Jeannie Leighton
Jeannie has a Bachelor's degree in English from Rutgers University and wrote a weekly sports column for the Courier News and the Trenton Times newspapers from 1986 through 1994. Some of her poetry has been published in obscure and long disappeared literary magazines. Since moving from New Jersey to the Prescott area in 1999, her writer's voice reawakened. While a writing student at Yavapai College under Laraine Herring, Jeannie was the first (2009) winner of PWP's $500 Agnes Franz Award for outstanding creative writing. She's also studied with novelist and nonfiction author Mary Sojourner.
Jeannie is currently working on two novels, both set in the Southwest where an everyday life isn't all it appears to be.
Treasurer
Leota Hoover
Leota is a native of Arizona who lived in Alaska for over twenty-four years, raising her children and earning a living as a single mother. Alaska is a character in much of her writing, as are moose, salmon and freezing weather. She is a trained grief therapist and addiction counselor, and works in the field today. Her most transforming experiences came during her work with the renowned innovative thinker, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who inspired her writing and shook her world. Ross is the subject of Hoover's memoir in progress.
Leota's essay Hunter appears in the poetry & non-fiction contest issue (Winter/Spring 2009) of So To Speak, A Feminist Journal of Language & Art published by George Mason University. She didn't win but felt honored to be one of the finalists. She's also featured in the 2009 Byline Calendar, and she has published a piece about her charming parrots in Companion Parrot Quarterly.
2010 Committee Appointees
Librarian
Chris Hoy
Chris has always enjoyed creative writing. He has a Master's degree in English and taught composition, literature and the history of cinema at a community college in upstate New York. He taught those subjects at nearby Attica State Prison, too, as a voluntary participant in the college's state-directed prison program. During his teaching days, his short story Cache la Poudre was included in a social science textbook published by Little, Brown alongside work by Erica Jong and Phillip Roth.
In recent years he's completed one novel, four short stories, and published one children's book, THE ELK IN THE ATTIC (Primrose Press, 2007). Hoy, City of Prescott Event Coordinator Dawn Castaneda and Prescott College drama professor Charissa Menefee are working on the adaptation of Elk in the Attic as a play and plan the play's premier for Fall 2010 in the newly renovated Elks Opera House.
Hoy is currently at work on his second novel. When he isn't writing, he's busy being President of the Citizens Water Advocacy Group.
Networking
Karen Despain
Karen Despain, an Arizona native and graduate of the University of Arizona (many eons ago), retired in 2005 from a long career in journalism, most recently as managing editor of the Prescott Daily Courier. After her retirement, she wrote many articles for Yavapai Magazine, which ceased publication in September 2007, and she is now fishing for freelancing opportunities as are many PWP members. Karen says, "Let's hope our PWP networking sessions help us hone our talents and open doors to publishing our gifts." Recently she founded the Prescott Daily Courier "On The Bookshelf" feature that highlights Yavapai County writers and their publications.
Karen is also on the Prescott Area Habitat for Humanity Board of Directors and the Arizona's Children Association regional board, where she 's editor of PAHH's quarterly newsletter and helps ACA with publicity to promote its mission of helping children and families. Recently, she became a member of the newly formed nine-member Yavapai County Arizona Centennial Committee. Karen has a daughter and a granddaughter, who is the joy of her life, especially when she drives her mother nuts - a payback she especially enjoys.
Newsletter
Susan Lanning
Susan, an Ohio native, is a retired English teacher who enjoyed instructing her students in her greatest love – writing. She's written novels off and on since 1970, preferring suspense and mystery, though she's also tried her hand at writing romances.
Since moving to Arizona in 2000, she joined PWP and has found much support in her work. She's served on the PWP board for seven years, six of those as newsletter editor. Susan is the author of the novel trilogy - a mystery thriller, HARPER'S BLUFF (2006), a romantic suspense, THE DANESBORO LINE (2007), and a supernatural thriller, THE DAY OF THE BEAST (2008), all published with iUniverse.
Susan won First Prize in the Fiction category in the Inland Empire California Writers Club Contest for 2009. "The Sight" appeared in the December issue of Fresh Ink, IECWC's monthly publication for members.
Publicity & PR
Leslie Hoy
A fortune-teller read Leslie Hoy’s tea leaves when she was 19 years old and told her that writing would play an important part in her life. What a surprise! The fortune-teller was right. Though Leslie is neither novelist nor poet (except for a few very bad poems), she has used her writing and editing talents in all her careers. In her twenties she edited scientific papers for the Water Resources Research Institute at the University of Wyoming and designed the cover for the department’s publications. Her write-up of an environmental conference appeared in the Congressional Register.
Leslie is also a retired small business owner and personal coach. She enjoys writing press releases for PWP and the Citizens Water Advocacy Group, as well as other issue-oriented projects. Leslie balances her role as citizen activist with a love of nature. "My office window is on the edge of a tiny patch of forest," she says. "When I peek out at the deer, they peek back."
Webmaster
Kate Robinson
Kate began her literary career writing bad poetry in Des Moines, Iowa at age ten. After working as a grocery clerk, nursing assistant and home health aide, a variety of clerical and secretarial positions, city bus driver, museum aide, and substitute teacher, all while attending college and raising a family, fiddling with the fine art of writing looked like a suitable diversion.
She earned a BA from Prescott College in 1999 and is working on an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Kate formerly lived in a juniper forest on a star-studded ridge in Chino Valley, Arizona with her two teenagers and a fat Buddha cat, a loyal dog, and two wily ferrets. She's now sadly petless, but living with her teens on a magical forested ridge full of songbirds and foxes above Cardigan Bay in beautiful County Ceredigion. She amuses herself when not writing with freelance editing, studying Tibetan Buddhism, bicycling, hiking, exploring Aberystwyth and the surrounding area, and of course, volunteering for PWP via the internet and butting heads with computers.
Kate is the author of two middle-grade reference texts, THE NATIONAL MALL and LEWIS AND CLARK (Enslow Publishing, 2005 & 2010), and short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry featured in a variety of venues: Literary Mama, Absolute Write, Kaleidoscope, Sandcutters, and June Cotner's acclaimed prayer and poetry anthologies, among others. A recent story, The Upstairs Room, appears in a slipstream sci-fi anthology, Subtle Edens (Elastic Press, 2008) and another, Off-key, won Kate's second New Short Fiction award in November 2008 on the Jerry Jazz Musician website.