2010 Fall Residents

Session 5

Session 6

Session 7

Session 8

 

Resident Bios

Christina Ammon
Christina Ammon is a freelance writer perpetually on-the-road. Her stories have appeared in publications such as Orion, The Oregonian, High Country News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. At The Mesa Refuge she'll work on her book about the adventure of auctioning off a diamond ring online to assist the work of eight "Vagabond Philanthropists"-- her term for low-budget travelers who make a big difference in the places they visit. The sale of her diamond sent 20 Nepalese kids to school, helped establish a breeding sanctuary for the diminishing Himalayan Vulture, sent a villager from Mali to nursing school, spayed and neutered dozens of dogs in Mexico, financed an anti-shark finning campaign in Costa Rica, and hired a school teacher in Canoa, Ecuador. The book and the "Committed to the World" project is her effort to get engaged with the world, while examining tradition, values, and diamonds.

 

Katie Kane
Katie Kane is a writer, activist, and professor of Cultural Studies, English Literature, and Colonial Studies at the University of Montana.  She is currently at work on an essay about the historical and legal connection between Native American reservations and Guantanamo Bay as they are linked in the 2003 John Yoo “Torture Memo.”  Additionally, she is completing a short story collection entitled North Dakota, which explores the realities of people in the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain West who live on the economic and cultural margins of the larger national community.  One short story from this collection, “Payday Loan,” is forthcoming in the 2010 Fall/Winter issue of Black Warrior Review.  Kane just finished work on an essay about the 1847 Choctaw and Cherokee donation to hunger relief during the Irish Famine.  She has published other scholarly work on the relationship between the Irish and Native Americans under colonialism in journals such as Cultural Studies and Cultural Critique.  Kane’s article on her experience in Haiti living in a displaced persons tent camp, “Haiti: A Forgotten Country,” was published in June in The Missoulian and then widely reprinted in newspapers such as The Tehran Times, International Edition and in online forums such as Truthout.org.

 

Karoline Kemp
Karoline Kemp is a development worker and journalist and has worked in Asia and Africa with grassroots women's organizations, international NGOs and most recently, the UN. She will be using her time at the Mesa Refuge to write on her work with Outer Voices, a multi-media project devoted to sharing the untold stories, strategies, and tools of women peace activists from the traditional cultures of the Pacific Islands and Asian Pacific Rim, who pioneer new and effective models for non-violent social change across the region. She will be reflecting and writing on the ways in which women can contribute to peace-building efforts in their own communities as a tool for both policy makers and activists.

 

Brian Kevin
Brian Kevin is a periodic contributor to publications that include Outside, Sierra, and High Country News. He has written or contributed to several travel guidebooks on the American West, and he'll be working at Mesa Refuge on an essay exploring the risks and contradictions implicit in travel writing. He is a graduate of the University of Montana's MFA program in Creative Nonfiction, and he currently lives in the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon.

 

Jee Kim
Jee Kim has been active in racial justice, immigrant rights, and progressive media efforts in NYC since the mid 90s. While at the Active Element Foundation, he edited the 9/11 anthology, “Another World is Possible” and “The Future 500,” a youth organizing directory. He is currently a program director at the Surdna Foundation. During his time at the Mesa Refuge, he plans to work on a piece looking at the configuration of the state, social movements, and philanthropy in times of social unrest.

 

Tom Kizzia
Tom Kizzia was a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News and a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. His first book, The Wake of the Unseen Object, was named one of the "Alaska 67 - Best Books about Alaska" by the Alaska Historical Society. He is writing a non-fiction book about the closing of the frontier: an account of a long-running war between an eccentric homesteading family and the National Park Service in a remote mining ghost town in Alaska. The book is to be published by Broadway Books/Random House.

 

Jason Dove Mark
Jason Dove Mark is a writer-farmer active in the movement for ecological sustainability. His writings have appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, Utne Reader, Orion, Gastronomica, and Earth Island Journal, where he is the editor. He is also a co-manager of Alemany Farm in San Francisco. While at the Mesa Refuge he will be working on a book about the urban farming movement.

 

Karen O'Reilly
Karen O'Reilly is a writer and human rights and humanitarian worker. She has worked as a human rights educator for Amnesty International, and in refugee protection for the UN refugee agency in Uganda, the Central African Republic, and Jordan. Her writing examines in particular the human cost of war, and is based on her experiences working with refugees from Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries, as well as travel in the Middle East and Africa. This year, she has published stories in the Dublin Review that look at conflict and remembrance in Beirut and lack of access to water in Uganda. She has also written human rights Education materials including a textbook and drama and film resources for Amnesty International. During her residency at Mesa Refuge, she will be working primarily on a story about a community of Darfuri refugees who live in a remote corner of the Central African Republic.

 

Mary Beth Pudup
Mary Beth Pudup is a geographer teaching urban and regional political economy in the Community Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. At Mesa Refuge she is working on a book about the spectacular rise and demise of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG). During its heyday SLUG was the national non-profit exemplar in the field of community gardening and urban greening initiatives.

 

Linda Sheehan
Linda Sheehan is the Executive Director of the non-profit California Coastkeeper Alliance (www.cacoastkeeper.org), which advocates statewide for clean water and coastal protection. Drawing on her almost 20 years of environmental advocacy experience, she comes to the Mesa Refuge to write about methods to evolve our legal, economic and governance systems to reflect our integrated and reciprocal relationship with the natural world.

 

Tom Walker
Tom Walker has been a peace and social justice activist since the 1960s. He works a three-day week as a clerk/cashier at the East End Food Co-op in Vancouver, B.C. On the other four days, he conducts research on shorter working time. He has published two scholarly articles on the economists' chimerical lump-of-labour fallacy, a conference paper on Sydney J. Chapman's theory of the "Hours of Labour", a review of Robert LaJeunesse's /Work Time Regulation as Sustainable Full Employment Strategy: the social effort bargain/ (forthcoming). He has also lectured and been interviewed on television, radio and film on the topic of working time. He is currently writing The Gift of Prosperity, a historical survey of controversy, insights and misconceptions surrounding the economics of working time, leisure, productivity, wages and employment.

 

Tom Wolf
Tom Wolf is working on an environmental history of the Mancos Watershed (including Mesa Verde National Park) in southwestern Colorado, focusing on the community's long record of resilience and tolerance. He is the author of "Arthur Carhart: Wilderness Prophet" and "Ice Crusaders: a Memoir of Cold War and Cold Sport." He is currently a Park Ranger at Mesa Verde.