July 2007
Laura Lee Carter
Laura Lee Carter thought she'd seen it all by the time she hit 40, and then the real changes began. After 25 years as an academic librarian and one additional M.A. in psychology, she experienced a divorce at age 46, and then a job lay off at 49. So she started her own dating service, where she met her new husband by age 50. This was enough to convince Laura Lee to try her hand at freelance writing, and to crown herself the "Midlife Crisis Queen." Please see her bio, resume and clips at: http://www.lauraleecarter.com/ and her BLOG: http://www.midlifecrisisqueen.com/
Jason Bane
Jason Bane is a journalist and writer who has worked in television, radio, newspapers and magazines. He has worked as a sportswriter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and covered politics for 5280 magazine and Campaigns & Elections magazine. Jason also worked for five years as a stringer for PEOPLE magazine, where he broke national news in the Kobe Bryant trial and accumulated dozens of bylines and several cover stories. Bane is also a co-founder of ColoradoPols.com, the most widely read and discussed political blog in Colorado.
Aside from journalism, Bane has long been active in Democratic politics, having run local campaigns for several candidates (most recently serving as the Deputy Campaign Manager for Mitch Morrissey's successful campaign for Denver District Attorney). Bane is a 2008 candidate for Jefferson County Commissioner (http://www.jasonbane.org/).
Vonalda Utterback
Vonalda M. Utterback, CN, is a certified nutritionist and freelance writer, editor and copywriter specializing in health/wellness and travel. The former senior editor of Alternative Medicine magazine Natural Solutions and Deepak Chopra's newsletter, Perfect Health, her feature articles have appeared in such national publications as Fit Yoga, Healing Lifestyles and Spas, Revolutionhealth.com, Delicious Living, Integrative Medicine: A Clinician's Journal, Alternative Medicine magazine, and more. Vonalda has written ads, labels, booklets, brochures and other marketing materials for such clients as Celestial Seasonings, Whole Foods Markets, Arrowhead Mills, and American BioSciences.
November 2007
Kimberly Field
Long-time Coloradoan Kimberly Field holds a bachelor's degree in archaeology and a master's in journalism. After a long career as a marketing executive in the television and telecommunications industries, Kim returned to her first love - writing. She writes nationally on topics ranging from politics to the influence of volcanoes in impressionist art. Kim, along with her friend Lisa Ray Turner, authored The Denver Mint: 100 Years of Gangsters, Gold, Ghosts, and a biography of presidential candidate Mitt Romney creatively titled Mitt Romney: The Man, His Values and His Vision. Not one to toil alone in her garret, Kim most enjoys collaborating with other writers and discovering the fascinating stories lurking everywhere.
Sharon Cairns Mann
Sharon Cairns Mann's writing career started with a lucky break when she landed an internship at a publishing company while a senior in college. The editor for whom she worked "kindly shredded my submissions and I learned more from her in one semester than what I had learned in four years in college."
Over the years, Sharon has written literally hundreds of pieces of advertising, press releases, marketing material, product literature, newsletters, curriculum, and policy papers. Additionally, she had several books published and won several awards. Women in India use one of my books and another was translated into Spanish and Korean. In 1987, she founded Savant Publishing, Inc., a business that she still oversees.
Her novel, Mother of Exiles, released in January 2008, has garnered strong positive response.
Sharon has an M.A. in Communication from the University of Colorado-Boulder and a B.A. in English from Trinity College (now Trinity International University, Deerfield, IL).
February 2008
Victoria Hanley
Award-winning author of young adult fantasies, Victoria Hanley was raised in Massachusetts and Wisconsin and attended college in Santa Fe. She then lived in Oregon before moving to Colorado. Her books have sold throughout the world and her first novel, The Seer and the Sword, received several awards, among them a 2001 Colorado Book Award. Her second and third novels, The Healer's Keep and The Light of the Oracle, also were multi-award-winning books and finalists for Colorado Book Awards.
Wendell Logan
A high school counselor for 38 years - 20 years in Oklahoma and the last 18 in Colorado - Wendell Logan retired in 2005 and finished his book, Hard Rain Falling, published in July 2007. As a counselor, he worked for the Littleton School District, serving as Department Chair of the Guidance division at Heritage High School and later at Arapahoe High School. When he was in Oklahoma, Wendell worked as a freelance sports writer/reporter covering high school sports for small newspapers. He is currently writing non-fiction book about counseling and the students that he worked with during my career. Wendell is married and lives in Denver.
Sandra Schwayder Sanchez
Writing stories since high school, Sandy started publishing short stories in The Long Story journal in 1986 and has subsequently written several novellas and short novels. Her stories also have appeared in The Healing Muse, Zone 3 and the online literary publications: The Dublin Quarterly (http://www.thedublinquarterly.com/) and Storyglossia (http://www.storyglossia.com/). Sandy's first novel, The Nun, was published by Plain View Press, Austin, Texas in 1992 and her second novel, Stillbird, was published by The Wessex Collective in 2005. A third, about the Crypto Jews of the southwest, is currently under consideration at a University Press. Wessex just published a collection of her work titled Three Novellas and Cantarabooks (http://www.cantarabooks.com/ ) is planning a fall 2008 ebook collection of five short stories.
Sandy lives in Nederland with my husband Ed. She has two grown daughters, Rachel, who does animal rescue work, and Sara, a documentary filmmaker (http://www.crosseyedfilms.com/) based in Brooklyn. After practicing law for nearly 20 years, she is now on "inactive" status, devoting her time to writing and hiking in Indian Peaks.
Sue Viders
Author of more than twenty books on marketing for artists and several books for writers, Viders has just come out with a card game for writers. Deal a Story has 101 color coded cards, with 16 interesting characters, plots and genres in each section. Besides teaching on-line she is currently working on a plotting book which introduces the Plotting Wheel.
Among her books are The Complete Writer's Guide to HEROES AND HEROINES -
Sixteen Master Archetypes (co-authored) and Ten Steps to CREATING MEMORABLE CHARACTERS
Sue created and developed The Artist's Organizer, authored several audio tapes and charts for artists, wrote ‘Strictly Business', a column on marketing for artists for The Artist's Magazine, and is currently working on a romantic-suspense novel and a book on plotting.
