2011 Fall Residents
Session 5
Session 6
Session 7
Session 8
Resident Bios
Larry Bogad
Larry Bogad is an author and performer. He writes, performs, and strategizes with mischievous artists such as the Yes Men, Agit-Pop, the School for Creative Activism, and La Pocha Nostra. He is a veteran of the Lincoln Center Theatre Director's Laboratory, a co-founder of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (www.clownarmy.org), founder of the Center for Tactical Performance and theatre professor at the University of California at Davis. www.lmbogad.com
Story Clark
Story Clark is a consultant, lecturer and author specializing in conservation finance. She is the founder and lead organizer of a series of intensive conservation finance training sessions to practitioners and graduate students at Yale and Stanford Universities, a fellow at the Environmental Humanities graduate program at the University of Utah, and a frequent lecturer at conservation conferences. She is a recipient of the National Park Foundation’s Citizen Leadership medal for continued leadership in the preservation and protection of America’s scenic and historic heritage. Currently, Story is writing the second volume of A Field Guide To Conservation Finance (Island Press 2007).
Julie Guthman
Julie Guthman is an Associate Professor of Community Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has written extensively on contemporary efforts to transform the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed to be more sustainable and socially just. Her first book, Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California (University of California, 2004), discussed the dynamics by which organic agriculture came to replicate some of what it set out to oppose. She has just completed Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (University of California, 2011) which challenges many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about America’s so-called obesity epidemic. At the Mesa Refuge, she will be developing ideas only touched on in Weighing In about the social significance of environmentally-induced and non-nutritional food-borne bodily transformations.
Marybeth Holleman
Marybeth Holleman is the author of The Heart of the Sound and co-editor of Crosscurrents North. Her essays, poetry, and articles have appeared in such venues as Orion, Christian Science Monitor, The Future of Nature, and on National Public Radio. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, where she sometimes teaches creative writing and writes for nonprofits on environmental issues, from polar bears to oil spills. While at Mesa Refuge, Marybeth will be working on Among Wolves. www.marybethholleman.com
Jeff Kane
Jeff Kane is a medical doctor who has limited his practice the past thirty-five years to simply listening to patients and their families. He founded the cancer support programs at Sutter Cancer Center in Sacramento and Sierra Nevada Cancer Center in Grass Valley, CA, where he's Director of Psychosocial Education. Fascinated by the venerable "bedside manner," he's taught the skill to medical practitioners around the country and published dozens of articles and two books on it, Be Sick Well and How To Heal: A Guide for Caregivers. At Mesa Refuge he'll be developing his next book, Healthcare As Though People Matter, based on his blog.
Grace LeClair
Grace LeClair is a practitioner and advocate of collaborative entrepreneurship. She has been embroiled in organizational creation and transition since the sixties and was instrumental in the development of the field of socially responsible investing. Her experience and action remain grounded in fifty acres of field and pasture and woods, a small farm in southern New Hampshire that is now a Wal-Mart. She is writing the story of that place, with its rich, alluvial loam ideally suited to the growing of food, close enough to feed a city, and its submersion under asphalt.
Meredith Maran
Meredith Maran is the author of nine nonfiction books, including the San Francisco Chronicle bestsellers Dirty, Class Dismissed, and What It's Like To Live Now. Her first novel, A Theory Of Small Earthquakes, will be published by Counterpoint in 2012. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Meredith has published articles, essays, and reviews in magazines including People, Family Circle, Salon.com, More, Self, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Lisa Morehouse
Lisa Morehouse is a public radio and print journalist, who has filed for National Public Radio, American Public Media, KQED Public Radio, Edutopia, and McSweeney’s. Her reporting has taken her from Samoan traveling circuses to Mississippi Delta classrooms to the homes of Lao refugees in rural Iowa. For the last year she’s reported and produced a public radio series New Harvest: The Future of Small Town California KQED’s The California Report. KALW is currently airing pieces she created while teaching radio production to incarcerated youth.
Samin Nosrat
Samin Nosrat creates community around food with her varied endeavors as a cook, teacher, writer, and accidental activist. A natural storyteller and author of the blog Ciao Samin, she draws her inspiration from culture, tradition and history and seeks in her writing to connect these influences to issues of community and sustainability. She is at work on a series of essays exploring how to harness and mobilize the power of connection we experience around food in order to shift stale, unhealthy social, cultural and environmental paradigms.
Liza J. Rankow
Liza J. Rankow is an interfaith minister, educator, and activist. She is the founding director of OneLife Institute, an Oakland-based nonprofit organization working at the intersection of spirituality and social transformation. This intersection is at the heart of her work and her writing, and is the focus of the book project she will be engaging at Mesa Refuge.
Sylvia Sukop
Sylvia Sukop is a Los Angeles-based independent journalist and recipient of the 2009 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship in support of her creative nonfiction writing. Most recently she has worked as a writer for The California Endowment and other nonprofits, she has reported extensively on grassroots efforts to transform food and physical activity environments to prevent obesity and improve community health. She is currently working on a memoir centered on the death of her 19-year-old brother, who was an organic farmer and environmental activist in Washington.
Elizabeth Ü
Elizabeth Ü has extensive professional experience at the intersection of social finance and sustainable food systems. She has provided strategic guidance to institutional financiers, foundations, individual investors, nonprofits and social entrepreneurs on projects including investment fund creation, investment strategy development, and capital raising. Executive director of the nonprofit Finance for Food, she is currently writing a book to help food system entrepreneurs in their efforts to identify and access mission-aligned financing.