2010 Spring Residents

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Session 4

 

 

Resident Bios

Chris Colin
Chris Colin is the author of the award-winning What Really Happened to the Class of '93 and a former writer/editor at Salon.com. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, Smithsonian, the San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney's Quarterly and several anthologies. He's a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, where he's working on his second book. This will be his second Mesa residency.

 

Kate Levinson
Kate Levinson is a psychotherapist and owner of Point Reyes Books. In addition to her private psychotherapy practice, she leads Emotional Currency Workshops where women explore their relationship to money from emotional, psychological, spiritual, and political perspectives. While at the Mesa Refuge she will be completing a book on the topic of women’s relationship to money, tentatively titled Emotional Currency, to be published by 10 Speed Press in early 2011.

 

Scott Wallace
For more than 25 years, Scott has worked as a writer, photographer and television journalist on the frontlines and “edge of contact” between competing worlds and coexisting cultures. He started his career in the 1980s covering the civil war in El Salvador, the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, and the other “low-intensity conflicts” in Central America. Since the end of the Cold War, he has focused his work on the struggles along the world’s final wilderness frontiers, where indigenous peoples find themselves and their homelands under mounting assault by a globalized economy hungry for resources and markets. He is currently writing The People of the Arrow, to be published by Harmony Books (Crown/Random House), about a journey through the land of an uncontacted tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. Scott was recently a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

 

Shalini Kantayya
Shalini Kantayya is a filmmaker, educator, and activist uses film/video as a tool to educate, inspire, and empower audiences.   The mission of her production company, 7th Empire Media is to create a culture of human rights and a sustainable planet through an imaginative media that makes a real impact. Shalini finished in the top 10 out of 12,000 filmmakers on FOX’s ON THE LOT, a show by Steven Spielberg in search of Hollywood’s next great director.    A William D. Fulbright Scholar in documentary film, her work received the first prize award for best documentary at the Asian American Film Festival, Best Short at Palm Beach International and Audience Choice at IUOWF.  She is currently a Food and Policy Fellow at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

 

Dave Henson
Dave Henson is a founder and the Executive Director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, an 80-acre organic farm, training and organizing center, and intentional community in Northern California (www.oaec.org). With the experience of 30 years of work with social justice and environmental organizations, Dave comes to the Mesa Refuge to reflect and write about what social change frames, issues, strategies and methods might work best in this time of such great ecological, economic and social crises.

 

Bonnie Tsui
Bonnie Tsui is the author of American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods (Free Press), winner of the2009 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009: 50 Notable Bay Area Books selection. A frequent contributor to The New York Times, she has also written for The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure, and Mother Jones. She is the editor of A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise (Sierra Club Books), a collection of essays on the natural World.  While at the Mesa Refuge she will work on a story about Alabama's Rural Studio.

 

Spring Warren
Spring Warren is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, artist, and farmer.  She is currently writing a nonfiction book to be published by Seal Press about living off of her Quarter Acre Farm, otherwise known as her yard.  Recognizing that most people who have any land at all in the US have only the small lot their home sits on, she is challenged to see and share how productive a small patch of dirt can be and how much healthier the food coming out of it is for people and their environments.

 

Elizabeth Galicia Gettelman
Elizabeth Gettelman is a writer and editor at Mother Jones magazine. Formerly a policy analyst working on health reform issues, Gettelman will be using her time at the Mesa Refuge to work on a book about her grandfather, a pioneering pediatrician whose 70 years of practice tracked the evolution of modern medicine.

 

Jacob Needleman
Jacob Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. He is the author of numerous books exploring the help that great spiritual and philosophical ideas can bring to the urgent problems of our present world. His works include: Money and the Meaning of Life, The American Soul, Why Can’t We Be Good? and, most recently, What Is God?  At the Mesa Refuge he will be working on his next book, a study of humanity’s spiritual obligation to the Earth, seen from the perspective of the ancient idea of the universe itself as a living being.

 

Gail Needleman
Gail Needleman teaches music at Holy Names University in Oakland, California.  Her work as a writer and teacher addresses the essential role of music in the moral and spiritual development of children.  She is the recipient of the Parsons Fellowship from the Library of Congress for research in American folk music, and is the co-creator of the American Folk Song Collection website, a pioneering online resource of American folk songs for teaching music to children.  At the Mesa Refuge she will be working on a book exploring music, nature and the human spirit.

 

David Sassoon
David Sassoon is a writer and founder of SolveClimate.com, a web site that provides daily climate news and analysis. He also runs the Lost Light Preservation Project, a non-profit that preserves visual records of disappearing culture. At Mesa, he will be working on a book about the relationship between global and cultural extinctions -- past, present and future.

 

Heather Smith
Heather Smith is a science and environmental journalist working in San Francisco. She is currently at work on a book about humans, insects, and the various misunderstandings that arise between them.

 

Eugene Linden
Eugene Linden writes about animals and humanity's relationship with nature in books, articles and essays. His most recent book is Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations. Next spring, Viking will publish The Ragged Edge of the World, a book about his travels over 30 years to that moveable frontier where wildlands, indigenous peoples, and modernity collide. While at Mesa he will be working on a new project on animal intelligence as well as some final revisions of Zoo Stories, a book for young adults that follows the theme of his books The Parrot's Lament and The Octopus and the Orangutan.