Planning Committee

Thank you to everyone who has worked so hard behind the scenes to bring WriteAngles together.

Celia Jeffries

Celia Jeffries is the author of the award-winning novel Blue Desert. She lives, teaches, and writes in Northampton, and was in the room when the idea for Straw Dog Writers Guild became a reality.

Cheryl C. Malandrinos

Cheryl C. Malandrinos is a children’s author and freelance editor. A member of SCBWI, Ms. Malandrinos is a blogger and book reviewer.

Ellen Meeropol

Ellen Meeropol is the author of five novels, most recently The Lost Women of Azalea Court. She is a founding mother of Straw Dog Writers Guild and a long-time member of the WriteAngles planning committee.

Fungai Tichawangana

Fungai is a web developer and writer with a passion for helping creatives use digital tools to launch and market their work. He is the founder of Artist Dynamix, a digital marketing agency based in Amherst MA.

J. A. McIntosh

J. A. McIntosh, a recovering attorney, writes the Meredith, Massachusetts series about imperfect people seeking justice. She is working on a historical novel about the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir.

Jacqueline Sheehan

Jacqueline Sheehan is a New York Times Bestselling author of six novels. She is one of the founders of Straw Dog Writers Guild.

Jan Whitaker

Jan Whitaker is a non-fiction writer whose subjects include the social histories of department stores and restaurants. She has had three books published, is a veteran blogger, and has been interviewed for All Things Considered, NPR’s Marketplace, BBC World Service, and CBS Sunday Morning.

Joan Axelrod-Contrada

Joan Axelrod is a longtime member of the WriteAngles organizing committee. She writes books for young people as well as a monthly column for The Daily Hampshire Gazette, which she is hoping to include in a collection of essays.

Julie Wittes Schlack

Julie Wittes Schlack is the author of the essay collection, This All-at-Onceness (named by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best Indie Nonfiction books of 2019) and the novel, Burning and Dodging. She lives with her husband in a co-housing community in Northampton.

Laura Stone

Laura Stone is a graphic designer, & lover of words. Happy to be a part of Straw Dog Writers Guild on the planning committee for WriteAngles.

Liz Bedell

Liz Bedell (she/her) writes and teaches in western Massachusetts, where she is currently trying to make sense of the early fragments of a new novel project. She holds an MFA in Fiction and Literary Translation from VCFA.

Lynn Bechtel

Lynn Bechtel has published articles, essays, and poetry in professional magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. She worked for many years as an editor and writer for Center for Responsive Schools.

Millicent Jackson

Millicent Jackson

Millicent Jackson is a fiction writer currently based in Western Massachusetts. Her fiction has been featured in Today’s Black Woman magazine and The Power to Write by Caroline Joy Adams. For ten of those years as a professional writer, she facilitated writing workshops for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women at a Western Massachusetts correctional facility.

Nicole M. Young- Martin

Nicole M. Young is a performance poet, playwright, theater instructor and pop culture critic originally from Detroit, MI. Nicole is the Founder, Producer & Host of BLACK WRITERS READ, and initiated The Emerging Writer Fellowship under the auspices of Straw Dog Writers Guild to support women of color and gender-expansive writers of color based in Western Massachusetts at the early stages of their career.

Chelsea Catherine

Chelsea Catherine is an award-winning fiction and nonfiction writer. You can find their work in journals like The Sun, Passengers Journal, The Florida Review, and others.

Patricia Lee Lewis

Patricia Lee Lewis was the founding president of Straw Dog Writers Guild, and has continued most recently to serve on the Advisory Council and on the Straw Dog-Mount Residency Project. An award-winning poet, since 1992, she led hundreds of creative writing workshops and over 70 writing & yoga retreats internationally, and is now endeavoring to complete a novel set on a ranch in West Texas in 1938.

Patricia Pin

Patricia Pin

Patricia Pin is an alumna of Vermont College with an MFA in poetry and works as the Public Programs Director at The Mount: Edith Wharton's Home in Lenox, MA.

Stephanie Shafran

Stephanie Shafran’s chapbook Awakening was released in 2020. She resides in Northampton, Massachusetts; more at stephanieshafran.com

Ginny Sullivan

Ginny Sullivan is an early childhood educator and landscape designer whose writing explores these worlds. Lens on Outdoor Learning (2011) is an ethnography of children's learning in nature. Her poems have been published in The Arkansas Review, Beyond Words, Valley Voices, and the Naugatuck River Review, among others. She is (naturally) working on a manuscript for a book.

Join Our Team

If you are interested in being part of the WriteAngles team, we’d love to hear from you.
Reach out via our contact page. Link below.