CREATIVE ADVISORY COUNCIL

We are pleased to announce the formation of Hedgebrook’s first-ever Creative Advisory Council, led by alumna Gloria Steinem. Hedgebrook’s Creative Advisory Council is a group of influential women writers who embody the spirit of Hedgebrook – characterized by a commitment to nurture and amplify women’s voices – who offer advice and guidance as we usher our the retreat into a new era of visibility and sustainability.

Launched in 2006 by Hedgebrook alumna Gloria Steinem, the Council functions as ambassadors and brain trust, working with Hedgebrook Staff and Board to:

• Raise our visibility and presence in the world, and the visibility of Hedgebrook alumna

• Extend our reach globally, to communities and writers we might not reach otherwise

• Connect us to organizations and individuals with like-minded visions

• Guide our vision by challenging us to be expansive and dynamic

• Advise us as we develop innovative programs to connect our writers with audiences

• Open avenues to publishers, producers and agents who support the work of women writers

• Introduce us to funders in order to deepen the impact of women’s voices on our culture

Throughout their careers, these exemplary writers embody our motto of “women authoring change” by penning groundbreaking work, challenging us to think outside of the box and opening our minds and hearts to new ways of being in the world. We are thrilled to engage with our new Council members, who are working with Hedgebrook staff, Board and alumnae to guide and expand our vision - raising Hedgebrook’s visibility and impact in the world.

Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, editor, and feminist activist. Co-founder of the Women’s Media Center Ms. Steinem travels in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice. In 1972, she co-founded Ms. magazine, and remained one of its editors for fifteen years. In 1968, she had helped to found New York magazine, where she was a political columnist and wrote feature articles. As a freelance writer, she was published in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and women’s magazines as well as for publications in other countries. Her books include the bestsellers Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Moving Beyond Words, and Marilyn: Norma Jean, on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Her writing also appears in many anthologies and textbooks, and she was an editor of Houghton Mifflin’s The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History. Ms. Steinem graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956, and then spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship. She wrote for Indian publications, and was influenced by Gandhian activism. She has served on the board of trustees of Smith College, as well as the boards of other non-profit and educational foundations. She was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a three-year effort on the part of activists and experts from South Africa, Brazil and the United States to compare the racial patterns of those three countries and to learn cross-nationally. She now lives in New York City, and is currently at work on Road to the Heart: America As if Everyone Mattered, a book about her more than thirty years on the road as a feminist organizer.

Eve Ensler playwright, performer, and activist, is the author of THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, translated into over 45 languages and running in theaters all over the world. Her experience performing THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES inspired her to create V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a global movement that supports anti-violence organizations throughout the world, helping them to continue and expand their core work on the ground, while drawing public attention to the larger fight to stop worldwide violence (including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM), sexual slavery) against women and girls. V-Day stages large-scale benefits and produces innovative gatherings, films, and programs to educate and change social attitudes regarding violence against women. In 2004, Ms. Ensler’s performed her play THE GOOD BODY on Broadway in NYC. In September 2006 Ms. Ensler’s newest play THE TREATMENT , which examined the relationship between a military therapist and solder who was suffering PTSD opened at the Culture Project. Her play NECESSARY TARGETS, set in a Bosnian refugee camp, opened Off-Broadway in 2002. Other plays include CONVICTION, LEMONADE, THE DEPOT, FLOATING RHODA AND THE GLUE MAN, and EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES. THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, THE GOOD BODY, NECESSARY TARGETS and INSECURE AT LAST have been published by Villard/Random House.

Holly Morris is an author, producer and television correspondent. She is the executive producer/wwriter/director of the award-winning prime-time PBS documentary series, “Adventures Divas.” Featured destinations in this series include Cuba, India, New Zealand and Iran. Her essays are widely anthologized, and she writes regularly for numerous publications including The New York Times, and is columnist for National Geographic Adventure magazine. Her recent book, Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine, based on her experiences as an international correspondent, was named an Editors’ Choice and a Notable Book of the Year about exploration by the New York Times.

Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent 33 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity. The author and/or editor of more than 20 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East A Maze Me: Poems for Girls , Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006). She is also the author of Mint Snowball (paragraphs); Never in a Hurry (essays); Habibi and Going Going (novels for young readers); and Baby Radar and Sitti’s Secrets (picture books). Other works include seven prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including This Same Sky, The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East, and What Have You Lost?. Her new book of essays is entitled I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are you Okay? Tales of Driving and Being Driven (fall 2007). A book of poetry for young adults entitled Honeybee is due to be published in 2008. Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a regular columnist for Organica and poetry editor for The Texas Observer. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials: “The Language of Life with Bill Moyers” and “The United States of Poetry” and also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been visiting writer for full semesters for The Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Hawai’i.

Alice Walker is a poet, essayist, and novelist born February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and last child of sharecroppers Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker. She attended Spelman College and received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Her books of poetry include A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings (Random House, 2003); Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003); Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 Complete (Harcourt, 1991); Horses Make the Landscape More Beautiful (1984); Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (1979); Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973); and Once: Poems (1968). She is also a well-known fiction writer. Among her novels and short story collections are Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Novel (New Press, 2008); The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart (Random House, 2000); By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998); Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992); The Temple of My Familiar (1989); To Hell With Dying (1988); The Color Purple (1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award; and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981). Her collections of essays include Dreads: Sacred Rites of the Natural Hair Revolution (Artisan, 1999. With Francesco Mastalia and Alfonse Pagano); Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism (1997); The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult; Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-87 (1988); and In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). Walker has won numerous awards and honors, including the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, a Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. She lives in Mendocino, California.
Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire in 1966, and went to school locally before going to university in Canterbury for a PhD in English Literature. Her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, won a 1999 Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. She was inspired to write it while working on her PhD thesis on lesbian historical fiction that underlined the inadequacies and potential of the contemporary lesbian historical genre. As part of her research, she read a fair amount of nineteenth-century pornography and dictionaries of slang and vulgar words: ‘tipping the velvet’ is Victorian slang for cunnilingus. Tipping the Velvet was published in February 1998 and was described by Emma Donoghue as ‘A lesbian Rake’s Progress which will transport you to the lush textures and emotional ambiguities of 1890s London … a delightful novel which sets a new standard for lesbian historical fiction’, while the Daily Telegraph declared ‘This could be the most important debut of its kind since that of Jeanette Winterson’. It was adapted by Andrew Davies for BBC drama in 2002. Sarah Waters’ second novel, Affinity, was published in May 1999. which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, as well being runner up for the Welsh Book of the Year Award, all in 2000. Affinity has also been shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Her third novel, Fingersmith, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2002 and for the Man Booker Prize 2002. It won the CWA Historical Dagger prize for historical crime fiction and was picked more than any other novel as a Book of the Year 2002. In January 2003, Sarah Waters was named as one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Writers. She is recipient of the South Bank Award for Literature 2003 and was named Author of the Year at the 2003 British Book Awards. Sarah’s fourth novel, The Night Watch, was published to critical acclaim in February 2006. She lives in South London.