Nicole Criona,
Co-Founder
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Web Page
Read Nicole's
Blog
Find Nicole's Groups
Nicole, a Los Angeles native,
attended Mount St. Mary's College as a Liberal Arts Major and the UCLA
Writers program. As Director of Operations and Development at
Writers Boot Camp, she worked supporting and guiding emerging screenwriters,
as well as being a writer in her own right. After managing several
medium-sized independent businesses, she decided to learn production, and
produced three short films. THE SHOOTING was her first producing project,
and screened at the Austin Film Festival, IFFM in New York,
Cleremont-Ferrand in France, and the Taos Talking Pictures Festival. She
went on to produce DEATH STORIES #3: THE LAST IMPRESSION, and MONSTERS!
MONSTERS! MONSTERS! She was both Assistant to the Director and Key
Research on MICHAEL & ME, a documentary due out late 2005. She
writes a popular blog called
Verbs Via Ones and Zeros where according to blogpulse.com, for a single
lovely day in December 2005 her blog was 15th most popular blog in the world
for a post
about Craigslist. In
addition to writing poetry and short story fiction, she is also a freelance
writer for IG Living Magazine, and a
Content and SEO Writer. She currently has stories published on
http://www.hissquarterly.com
and Six Sentences.
Sanora Bartels,
Co-Founder
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Web Page
Read Sanora's
Blog
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Sanora received her
Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from North Dakota State University. She has
studied with various mentors, including Cathy Colman ("'Borrowed Dress") in
her Unleash the Writer Within workshops and her Master Poetry Class; and Ron
Koertge ("Making Love to Roget's Wife") in Pasadena. She has been a featured
reader at several venues, including Skylight Books in Hollywood, Midnight
Special Book Store in Santa Monica, The Rose Café in Venice, CA and
Projectile Poetry. Two of her poems, Elegy and Untouchable, appeared in the
20th edition of Wordwrights! magazine. Her poem They Want to Make Buttons
Out of My Bones received Honorable Mention and was published in
Issue 17 of New
Millennium Writings. She is a graduate of the University of Southern
California with a Master of Professional Writing degree. Her chapbook of
poetry is titled The Order of Things.
Clare Elfman,
LA
Moderator: Advanced Workshop for Writers
(West Los Angeles / Brentwood)
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Clare's Workshop
Clare Elfman was born in
New York, relocated to Los Angeles, married Milton Elfman, teacher, and
until she started her writing career, taught English (Dorsey High, Palisades
High the Venice School for Teenage Expectant Mothers).
She wrote four novels (under the name of Blossom Elfman) based on her
experiences with pregnant teens. The first, The Girls of Huntington House,
was made into a movie of the week; the second A House for Jonnie O. was many
times optioned. She was asked by ABC Motion Pictures to write a teen film
(The Making of Emma), which was in pre-production when the company folded.
She was asked to write a film about teen pregnancy, I Think I'm Having a
Baby, which earned her an Emmy.
She left YA for the adult field with The Strawberry Fields of Heaven
(currently written as a screenplay). Her most recent novel explores the
marriage of Oscar and Constance Wild, The Case of the Pederast's Wife, and
is being adapted as a cabaret-opera.
Clare is mother of Richard Elfman, Danny Elfman and Judith Belfer Elfman,
grandmother to Bodhi Elfman, Louis Elfman, Lola Elfman, Mali Elfman, Jenna
Elfman, and Oliver Henry Milton Elfman. Mother-in-law to Larry Belfer and
Bridget Fonda Elfman and shortly to Lauren O'Hynan (to-be Elfman).
Visit Clare's Web site at
www.clareelfman.com
Rosa Lowinger,
LA
Moderator
(Farmers Market / Miracle Mile area)
Find Rosa's Groups
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A native of Havana
Cuba, Rosa Lowinger grew up in Miami Beach, and moved to Los Angeles in
1988. Prior to coming west, Rosa received degrees in fine arts and art
conservation from Brandeis University and. NYU. A practicing art
restorer, Rosa has been writing fiction and non-fiction for decades and
has had essays, articles, and short stories published in Witness,
ArtNews, Preservation, Sculpture, the Michigan Quarterly Review, the
Philadelphia Inquirer, Latina Magazine, and the anthologies Bridges to
Cuba (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), Cuba in Mind (Random House, 2004),
and the upcoming The Portable Island (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). She is
also the author of a play titled the Encanto File, which was produced in
1991 at the Judith Anderson Theater in New York by the Women's Project
and Productions and published by the Women's Project (Smith and Kraus,
2003).
Rosa is the author of
Tropicana Nights: the Life and Times of the Legendary |
Cuban Nightclub
(Harcourt, 2005). A non-fiction account of Havana's 1950s nightclub scene,
Tropicana Nights did well with the critics and public and is now in its
third printing. Rosa is now hard at work on a collection of interrelated
stories about art conservation—a book that was sparked by a sentence she
wrote in Nicole and Sanora's LAwritersgroup.com™ writers group.
Richard Dean Starr,
LA
Moderator: Critique Only Group
(San Fernando Valley - near Sepulveda and Ventura Blvd)
Read more about Richard's Workshop
Richard Dean Starr has
published more than two-hundred articles, columns and short stories in
magazines and newspapers including Starlog, Twilight Zone, Science Fiction
Chronicle, and the Tribune-Georgian, just to name a few.
His fiction has appeared in anthologies including Hellboy: Odder Jobs,
Kolchak: the Night Stalker Chronicles (a Bram Stoker Award nominee for best
anthology of the year), Kolchak: The Night Stalker Case Book, The Avenger
Chronicles, and Tales of Zorro, as well as in the Stephen King Halloween
issue of Cemetery Dance magazine.
He is also the author of
the graphic/illustrated novel, Wyatt Earp: The Justice Riders and editor of
Tales of Zorro, the first anthology of original Zorro fiction in the
eighty-five year history of the character. With Joe Gentile, he is also
editor of Sex, Lies and Private Eyes, a collection of noir mystery fiction
featuring some of the best names in the genre.
Richard is an active member of the HWA (Horror Writers Association; founded
by New York Times best-selling author Dean Koontz), and the International
Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW; founded by Monk and Diagnosis:
Murder writer Lee Goldberg), and a former member of the SFWA and the Georgia
Press Association. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he is a
full-time author and copywriter and works on the occasional feature film.
