Tina Cane

Tina Cane is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI and is an instructor with the writing community, Frequency Providence. Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The Literary Review, Two Serious Ladies, Tupelo Quarterly Jubliat and The Common.

 She is the author of The Fifth Thought (Other Painters Press, 2008), Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, poems with art by Esther Solondz (Skillman Avenue Press, 2016) and Once More With Feeling (Veliz Books, 2017. In 2016, Tina received the Fellowship MeritAward in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, where she lives with her husband and their three children.

Linda Cutting

Author Linda Katherine Cutting has had essays and poetry published in The New York Times, The London Guardian, The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, and Salamander Magazine. Her memoir, Memory Slips, which won Barnes and Nobles’ Discover Great New Writers award, and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers’ Deems-Taylor award, was published in seven different languages, garnered appearances on the Today Show, and NPR’s Performance Today, and was optioned for film by Columbia Tristar. The audio version of Memory Slips, published by Harper Audio, on which Cutting read and performed the music, was nominated by Audiofile as audiobook of the year, and is forthcoming on Audible.com.
Her flash fiction piece “What Matters” was a selection for the 2015 MuseFlash contest from GrubStreet’s Muse and the Marketplace conference and appears in the June 2015 issue of The Drum. Her flash memoir piece, “Learning to Drive” was published by Silver Birch Press in March 2016. She has a children’s book coming out with Familius in 2018.

Julie Carrick Dalton

As a journalist, I have published thousands of articles in The Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. I have a Master’s in Creative Writing from Harvard University Extension School and have published short stories in the Charles River Review and The MacGuffin. I am a current member of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator, a year-long novel-writing intensive. In 2016 I was one of twenty-two emerging literary fiction writers selected by The Work Conference.

Also in 2016, excerpts from my novel-in-progress, The Poachers’ Code, were chosen as winners in the Sun Vs. Snow, Craft on Draft, and Writer’s Digest Dear Lucky Agent (literary/book club category) contests. I also contribute to Dead Darlings and GrubStreet’s writer’s blogs. When I’m not chasing my four children, skiing, or kayaking, I run a family farm.

Desmond Hall

Desmond has written and directed a feature film, A DAY IN BLACK AND WHITE, which was nominated for the Gordon Parks Award and sold to HBO. His screenplay, FRANKIE, a thriller set in Jamaica, was a runner-up at the IFP screenwriting contest. He’s also written and directed a full-length play, STOCKHOLM, BROOKLYN, which won the Audience Award at the Downtown Theater Festival, and afterwards, the Public Theater picked it up for its New Works Series. He has also been named one of Variety Magazine’s Top 50 Creatives to Watch.

He has worked for several Madison Avenue advertising agencies. He also served on the Advertising Council’s Campaign Review Committee and the Partnership for a Drug Free America. During his ten years as Executive Creative Director of Spike Lee’s advertising agency, Desmond led creative teams, pitched clients and created award-winning work, including two Super Bowl commercials.

Julia Rold

Julia Rold is a fiction writer, essayist and playwright whose work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Boston Globe Magazine, the annual Best New Voices collection, among others, and also named for a Pushcart Prize. Her plays have been produced at Boston Center for the Arts, The Electric Theatre, and Boston Playwright’s Theatre. A two-time winner of the Artist Grant in both playwriting and fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Ms. Rold has also received writing awards from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, the Ropewalk Writers Retreat, and the Steelgrass Foundation, and, most recently, was named a Fulbright Scholar to El Salvador in 2015. Her memoir, Foreign Lands, Familiar Places, a series of interlinked novellas based on her decade of living and working in international development, has twice been among the winners of the Faulkner-Wisdom Award. A native of Kentucky, Ms. Rold lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Berklee College of Music.

Mandy Syers

A California native, Mandy Syers attended UC Santa Barbara before moving east for an MFA from Emerson College in Boston, where she went on to complete Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program. She owns Heirloom Books, a company that creates custom family history books to be passed down for generations. She is at work on her first novel as well as an illustrated picture book, and she blogs at deaddarlings.com. She lives in Providence, RI, and enjoys cycling, bookbinding, and competing for blue ribbons at the county fair.