Volunteer

Jill Bergkamp received the Rona Jaffe Poetry Scholarship for Breadloaf Writers' Conference and Relief’s first Editor’s Choice Award. Her poems have most recently appeared in Rattle, and The Southeast Review, and are forthcoming in Third Coast, and Gargoyle. She currently teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida.

Wincy Lui is a fourth-year student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is majoring in Creative Writing. She loves photography, short stories and warm tea on a foggy afternoon.

Alexandra Tanner has been a reader for Memoir Journal since April 2011. She is currently an undergraduate at the University of Florida, where she's studying English, History, Drama, and College Football Culture Avoidance. Her work can be found online at anderbo.com.

Samantha Steven has a B.A. in English with a double-emphasis in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Montana. She currently works as a copywriter at a Montana-based computer, electronics, and appliances company called Vanns and an outdoor equipment and apparel company called BigSkyCountry.com. She has authored a college guidebook for College Prowler on the culture, academics, and atmosphere of the University of Montana, and has been published in Publishers Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, the Montanan, and The Great Falls Tribune.

Greg Schreur ’s earliest aspiration as a writer was to revive the James Bond series to its Ian Fleming glory. Unfortunately, his hometown of Byron Center, Michigan proved an unworthy setting. Instead Schreur has drawn on his surroundings and experiences to write about things like faking diarrhea to avoid manual labor, raising three children, having poop thrown at him, and teaching in juvenile detention; most of this is nonfiction. And for what it’s worth, it’s pronounced sker.  

Celeste Mannis is the award winning author of several children’s books, and is also an online English instructor  for UC Berkeley Extension, a free-lance editor, and professional photographer.  She loves reading for Memoir Journal, which provides a constant source of inspiration for her work. Celeste lives with her family in Southern California.

Melanie Madden is an essayist, Co-op marketer and aspiring tap dancer who lives in Davis, California.

Jennifer Lang is a recent immigrant to Israel and former magazine writer. Her work has appeared in Parenting, American Baby, Real Simple, Yoga Journal, Parents, Woman’s Day and Natural Solutions, among others. Lang’s essays have also appeared in the South Loop Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Mom Writers’ Literary Magazine, and ducts.org, the webzine for personal stories. Most recently, her essay “At Gilda’s” was selected to appear in an anthology of international writers titled Saying Goodbye.

Dr. Hardy Jones is the Director of Creative Writing at Cameron University. He has had over thirty pieces of fiction and nonfiction published in journals, and his story "Snow" has appeared in the 2009 Dogzplot Flash Fiction Anthology. In 2001 and 2006 he won writing and research grants. He is the co-founder and executive editor of the online journal Cybersoleil (www.cybersoleiljournal.com). In 2010, his novel, Every Bitter Thing, was published by Black Lawrence Press.

R Dean Johnson ’s prose have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize Anthology and appeared in, among others, Ascent, Juked, Natural Bridge, New Orleans Review, Slice, Santa Clara Review, and The Southern Review. He lives in Richmond, Kentucky with his wife, the writer Julie Hensley, and is an Assistant Professor in Eastern Kentucky University’s Brief-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program.

Tiffany Jimenez is from the Bay Area, and is currently finishing her last year at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studies Creative Writing and Economics. Other than being an ardent supporter of the imagination and the art of story-telling, she writes a lot, laughs a lot, startles easily, and loves potatoes.  

Anne Hoffmann is a New Yorker living in California.  While living in New York, she obtained her degrees from Union Theological Seminary and Fordham University, as well as a membership in Actor’s Equity.  An avid reader of creative nonfiction and memoir she read her first “grown up” book, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, at age 9. Today, she’s more interested in the details of a narrative than the plot; details reveal everything.  Her life now revolves around the details of her garden, teaching mindfulness based stress reduction, and writing a play about two people living in France between 1940 and 1946.  It was the quality of the work in Memoir(and) that drew her to the reading program, and she is proud to be a part of it.

Julie Foster is a freelance writer living in Sacramento. She specializes in home, history, lifestyle and agricultural writing as well as book reviews. Her most recent projects include a book review of David Rains Wallace’s incredible Chuckwalla Land : The Riddle of the California Desert for the San Francisco journal ZYZZYVA. She followed the review up with a Q & A with the author. The process so intrigued her she is working on a set of interview questions for geographer Paul Starrs and his recent book, Field Guide to California Agriculture. You can reach her at: julieincarmel@hotmail.com or visit her website at www.juliefosterwrites.com/. She tweets occasionally about books she is reading at JFBookSelect.

Riley Dacosta has been a reader with Memoir Journal for almost 4 years. A writer by trade, Riley attended the University of California, Berkeley obtaining her B.A. and Masters of Fine Arts from the University of San Francisco. Riley loves working as reader because the…”personal stories are so moving. The opportunity to examine the life experiences of others makes for very exciting reading.” When she is not reading for Memoir Journal, Riley enjoys cooking, traveling and spending time with friends and family and running. A favorite hobby is running races here in the bay area. Riley is currently training for the Walnut Creek Marathon.

Juli Case ’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Willow Springs, The Pinch, Descant, Quarterly West, Confrontation, Carolina Quarterly, and other journals. Recently, she won the University of New Orleans Writing Contest for Study Abroad in the nonfiction category, and in 2006 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany. She graduated from the master's program in creative writing at University of California, Davis, and currently teaches at Millikin University in Illinois.

Anna Bartley studied English literature and theater arts in her home state of Minnesota before moving to San Francisco in 2004 and has been reading for Memoir Journal for almost a year. Her day job is as a proofreading manger for a marketing agency in Marin, and in her spare time she volunteers in a wildlife rehabilitation clinic, mending broken wings and injured paws. She loves Memoir(and) because she believes everybody has a story, and every story is worth reading.

Margaret Barthel is a current junior at Smith College, where she's majoring in English literature with a concentration in archival studies.  In Spring 2012, she plans to continue her investigation of literature, language, and history as a visiting student at Oxford University. When she's not reading for class or digging through files of old letters, you can find her tutoring fellow students in writing essays, singing in chorus, or scribbling before bed.

Kate Asche is a poet/essayist and creative writing teacher. A graduate of the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, she was a finalist for the 2011 Audio Contest at The Missouri Review and has poetry forthcoming in Confrontation. She received two Elliot Gilbert Prizes in Poetry and an Academy of American Poets Award, and she was a finalist for University of California Poet Laureate. A trained facilitator in the Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) Method, she is associate director of Arts, Humanities and Writing at UC Davis Extension, where she coordinates The Tomales Bay Workshops. She volunteers regularly for the Sacramento Public Library, the Sacramento Poetry Center and 916 INK, a local youth literacy organization inspired by 826 Valencia. www.katesmiscellany.blogspot.com.

Kris Anderson was born and raised in Seattle, but now lives with her husband in (equally rainy) North Yorkshire, England. Completing her B.A. in English at Western Washington University, she went on to study for her M.A. in Creative Writing at Newcastle University and has recently been accepted to their Ph.D Creative Writing program. Short-listed for the Cadaverine Award for Young Writers and the Ravenglass Poetry Press Competition, her work also received commendation in the Havant Literary Festival 2009 Poetry Competition and is featured in The Strand Book of International Poets. 

Nicole Alexander received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University–Los Angeles. Because she struggled with self-expression when she was young, she often felt misunderstood; her love for memoir was born of the desire to relieve that struggle and be understood. Her writings have been featured on Open Salon’s Editor’s Choice and she is currently working toward her M.A. in Psychology in New York. Relationships and attachment dynamics are among the subjects she has been exploring both in school and in her writing. You can read her most recent work published in FringeLit  at www.fringelit.com/submissions/fiction/home.html and her on-going blog can be found at  http://open.salon.com/blog/nicoleathena.