Helene Atwan
Helene was born in Paris, France in 1953, and has been director of Beacon Press since October 1995. She was a summa cum laude graduate of the University of South Carolina and holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Virginia. She began her career in publishing at Alfred A. Knopf in 1976, and has worked at The Viking Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Simon and Schuster. Her acquisitions at Beacon include Gayl Jones’s The Healing, a National Book Award Finalist, Lillian Faderman’s I Begin My Life All Over, Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, Mitchell Zuckoff’s Choosing Naia, Sudha Koul’s memoir The Tiger Ladies, Nancy Mairs’ A Troubled Guest, Danielle Ofri’s Singular Intimacies, Suzanne Stemprek Shea’s memoir Shelf Life, and Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early. She has served as Chair of the board of PEN-New England and on the board of the National Coalition against censorship and has lectured on publishing at New York University, Radcliffe College, and several other colleges as well as at many writers’ conferences.

Rea Killeen
Rea received her B.S. in Psychology from the College of Holy Cross, her M.A. in English from the State University of New York at Albany, and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Rhode Island. She has been teaching literature and writing for 25 years at various universities and schools including the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Rhode Island, Bryant College, and Milton Academy Upper School. A freelance writer, she has published several essays in The Boston Globe and The Providence Journal. Presently, she is in her fifth year of what she calls her “most demanding and rewarding position” as a seventh grade teacher of English at Hingham Middle School.

Joe Mackall
Joe is the co-founder and -editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative—a journal dedicated to publishing the best in creative nonfiction, including essay, memoir and literary journalism.   His articles have been published in a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Washington Post.  His essays have appeared in several anthologies, literary journals, and on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. An excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage, appears in the anthology Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction. Co-director of the Creative Writing program and director of the Journalism program at Ohio’s Ashland University, he is currently working on a book about a year with an Old Order Amish family.

Rebecca McClanahan
Rebecca's most recent book is a collection of memoir-based essays, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings (University of Georgia's Press, 2002). She's also published four  volumes of poetry (most recently Naked as Eve, Copper Beech Press, 2000) and three books about writing, including Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere.  Her awards include a Pushcart Prize in fiction, the Wood Prize from Poetry, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in nonfiction, and (twice) the Carter prize for the essay from Shenandoah.  She earned her undergraduate degree from California State University and a master's and doctorate from University of South Carolina; for fifteen years, she was the writer-in-residence for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools  She now lives in New York City and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Queens University in Charlotte, the Kenyon Review Writing Program, and the Hudson Valley Writers' Center.

Elizabeth Mehren
Elizabeth has been the New England Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times since 1990. Her news stories, features, and articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including Newsweek, Vogue, Elle, Modern Maturity, Redbook, Town & Country, and McCall's. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also went on for a master's degree in journalism. She is the author of a memoir, Born Too Soon: The Story of Emily, Our Premature Baby, a book frequently used as a text in nursing and medical schools and adapted into a film that is aired often on the Lifetime channel. Her other books include After the Darkest Hour: A Parent's Guide to Coping with the Loss of a Child, and Overcoming Infertility (coauthored). She has lectured on journalism, communications, creative writing, politics, and neonatology at Boston University, Dartmouth, Harvard, Occidental College, UCLA, and other universities. She lives outside of Boston with her husband, the former New York Times reporter, Fox Butterfield, and their future major league baseball star, Sam.

Kyoko Mori
Kyoko is the author of two nonfiction books—The Dream of Water: A Memoir and Polite Lies: On Being A Woman Caught Between Cultures-- as well as three novels, the most recent of which is Stone Field, True Arrow.  Born in Kobe, Japan, Mori has lived in the American Midwest most of her adult life.  She has taught creative nonfiction at Harvard University and fiction in Lesley University's low-residency MFA program.  Mori will join the MFA faculty at George Mason University in September to teach creative nonfiction. Her essay “Yarn” was selected for The Best American Essays 2004.

Danielle Ofri, MD, Ph.D.
Danielle is the author of two collections of essays about life in medicine: Incidental Findings and Singular Intimacies. Ofri teaches and practices medicine at Bellevue Hospital/NYU School of Medicine. She is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her writings have appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, Best American Essays, Best American Science Writing, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, and on National Public Radio.  She is an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital and Assistant Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Janna Malamud Smith
Janna is a writer and psychotherapist. She graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in American History and Literature, and received her Master’s degree from Smith School for Social Work. She is the author of three non-fiction books: Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life, A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear (both chosen by the New York Times as “Notable Books”), and My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud (chosen by the Washington Post as one of its “Best books of the year 2006”).  Her essays and articles have been published in The New York Times and Threepenny Review.  She is on the editorial board of The Harvard Mental Health letter.  In 2005 she won the "Les Havens Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching” from the Cambridge Hospital Department of Psychiatry.

Suzette Martinez Standring
Suzette Martinez Standring is the author of The Art of Column Writing:  Insider Secrets from Art Buchwald, Dave Barry, Arianna Huffington, Pete Hamill and Other Great Columnists (Marion Street Press, Inc.).  Since 2000 she has been working as a freelance newspaper writer and her work appears in the Boston Globe, the Patriot Ledger, The Milton Times, and other publications.  She is the immediate past president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.  Her column about spending two days in hospice with Art Buchwald ran nationally and was Featured on Boston’s National Public Radio.  Before relocating to Massachusetts, Ms. Standring worked for two years as a county reporter for the Hunterdon County Democrat (NJ).

Christina Thompson
Christina is the editor of Harvard Review, a literary journal published by Harvard University. She also teaches in the Writing Program at Harvard University Extension and directs the Internship Program for the Certificate in Publishing and Communications. From 1984 to 1998 she lived in Australia, where she edited Meanjin, Australia's oldest literary quarterly. Her essays and criticism have appeared in a number of both scholarly and literary journals, including the American Scholar, the Journal of Pacific History, and the Contemporary Pacific, and have twice been selected for Best Australian Essays. Her historical memoir Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All will be published by Bloomsbury in 2007.

Christina Ward
Christina is President of the Christina Ward Literary Agency. A literary agent in the Boston area since 1992, Christina (“Kit”) was previously an editor with Little, Brown and Company.  As an agent, she represents a diverse list that includes such nonfiction subject areas as biography, narrative history, psychology, travel and nature writing, religion, creative nonfiction and memoir, and a variety of practical nonfiction.  Her fiction list ranges from literary fiction to mystery and suspense.  Kit finds her editorial background to be a particular asset in helping writers shape and develop their work in progress. Some of her recent projects include Gerald Stern's book of personal essays, What I Can't Bear Losing; Catherine Reid's Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Out Midst; Laura Waterman's memoir, Leaving the Garden; and the collected letters of Elizabeth Bishop with the editors of The New Yorker, edited by Joelle Biele; and in fiction, The House on Eccles Road, by Judith Kitchen, and Karen Fisher's forthcoming novel, A Sudden Country.