2011 Spring Residents

Session 1

• Audra Ang, CA
• Jon Gollinger, CA
• James Ladd Bauer, CA

Session 2

• Mary Ellen Hannibal, CA
• Nate Johnson, CA
• Tara Austen Weaver, WA

Session 3

• Maria Finn, CA
• Tracie McMillan, NY
• Jaune Evans, CA

Session 4

• Eugene Linden, NY
• Molly Antopol, CA
• Chanan Tigay, CA
• Mira Manickam, CA

Resident Bios

Audra Ang
Audra Ang is a Beijing-based correspondent for The Associated Press. From 2002-2009, she covered disasters, disease and dissent while chronicling breakneck social and economic changes within China. Her assignments have led her to sleep in rat-infested hotel rooms, climb earthquake rubble seven stories high, interview monks in the shadows of Tibetan monasteries and scour chicken farms during outbreaks of bird flu. Ang has also reported from other parts of the region, including North Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines and Afghanistan. Ang is a graduate of the University of Washington, where she received degrees in psychology and creative writing. She started as a reporter with the AP in Seattle and worked on the national editing desk in New York before being posted to China. She was a 2010 fellow at the Salzburg Global Seminar, a 2010 fellow at the Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution and a 2010 Nieman fellow at Harvard University. Ang grew up in Singapore and is obsessed with food.


Molly Antopol
Molly Antopol is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, where she currently teaches as a Jones Lecturer. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as One Story, American Short Fiction, The Mississippi Review Prize Stories of the Year, Nimrod's Prize Stories of the Year, and on New York Public Radio and NPR's This American Life. She's finishing up a collection of stories.


Ladd Bauer
Ladd Bauer is a physician, essayist, radio host, ethicist, associate editor of a medical journal, and promoter of Slow Medicine. His book project exposes and explores a cultural blind spot obscuring the crucial role of our medical choices on our shared environment, economy, and spirit.


Jaune Evans
Jaune Evans is a poet and photographer. She has worked in philanthropy and public service for the past twenty-five years. Currently, she is Associate Director of Tides Foundation in San Francisco. Jaune has extensive experience working with fine arts, human rights, cultural organizations, indigenous and environmental advocacy groups. As a multi-disciplinary artist, Jaune has taught numerous community workshops on the creative process. Her expertise is in collage and the writing of memoir. At the Mesa Refuge, she will be writing a book and planning a visual arts exhibition, Fogseeker, an homage to her father-in-law, a cloud physicist who collected fog for over sixty years in the Bay of Fundy.


Maria Finn
Maria Finn is author of the memoir Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home (Algonquin Books 2010), the book A Little Piece of Earth, How to Grow Your Own Food in Small Spaces (Rizzoli 2010), and she compiled and edited the anthologies, Cuba in Mind (Vintage 2006) and Mexico in Mind (Vintage 2008). Her essays have been anthologized in The Best Food Writing and The Best Women’s Travel Writing. She has written for Audubon Magazine, Sunset Magazine, Saveur, Gastronomica, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wine Spectator, among many others. She teaches in the English Department at Sonoma State and is an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts. While at the Mesa Refuge she will be working on a series of related essays with the working title, Birds, Fish and Other States of Grace.


Jon Golinger
Jon Golinger is an attorney, community organizer, and public interest advocate. Drawing on more than a decade of experience working in San Francisco politics, he is writing a book about San Francisco’s colorful political history and its unique culture of civic participation. He lives on Telegraph Hill, where the wild parrots greet him every day.


Mary Ellen Hannibal
Mary Ellen Hannibal is a Bay Area writer and editor focusing on science and culture. The author of three books, the most recent is Evidence of Evolution (2009, published simultaneously in hardback by Harry N. Abrams and in paperback by the California Academy of Sciences). A former book review and travel editor, Hannibal is Chair of the California Book Awards; her blog, “The Writer’s Life,” posts on behalf of the San Francisco Public Library. Hannibal’s next book, The Spine of the Continent, is about one of the world’s most ambitious conservation initiatives and will be published in Fall 2012. She is currently an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow.

Nathanael Johnson
Nathanael Johnsonis a freelance journalist based in San Francisco. A former newspaper and public radio reporter, Johnson has written for This American Life, along with Harper's, New York, Outside, and San Francisco magazines. While at the Mesa Refuge he will be working on his first book, The Heidi Hypothesis, on the consequences of placing too much faith in either technology or nature, which is forthcoming from Rodale in 2012.


Eugene Linden
Eugene Linden has spent his career writing about humanity’s relationship with nature in books, articles and essays. His most recent book, The Ragged Edge of the World, was published in March. His eight other books include, Winds of Change, which won the 2007 Grantham Prize Special Award of Merit, and The Future in Plain Sight, which The Rocky Mountain News hailed as “the book of the decade.” Apart from his books, Linden has written for a wide range of publications including TIME, Fortune, Foreign Affairs, National Geographic, the New York Times, and Parade. He intends to use his time at the Mesa Refuge to plan his next book.


Tracie McMillan
Tracie McMillan is a freelance journalist and writer whose work centers on the question of access to good food, particularly within lower-income communities. McMillan's work has appeared in a wide range of publications including the New York Times, Harper's, Slate, Saveur, Salon and Gastronomica, and has won numerous awards. She will spend her time at Mesa Refuge working on the manuscript for her first book, to be published by Scribner in 2012, for which she worked as a farmworker in industrial fields in California; produce aisles at a major grocer; and the kitchen of a Brooklyn Applebee's. She lives in Brooklyn, NY but reports regularly in Detroit, MI.

Mira Manickam
Mira Manickam is an environmental educator, urban forester, hip hop artist, documentary filmmaker and writer. After working in Thailand from 2001 to 2003 for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, she spent much of the next 6 years studying and documenting rural Thai people’s environmental resistance movements, including several months between 2006 and 2009 in Pattani province, where Malay nationalists are staging a bloody insurgency against the Thai government along the country’s southern border. She is taking time off from her life as an educator at the Headlands Institute in the Marin Headlands to finish her book, Just Enough, about the people of a small Muslim village in Thailand’s troubled Pattani province.

Chanan Tigay
Chanan Tigay is an award-winning journalist, who has contributed to publications including Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, the Jerusalem Post, McSweeney's and Agence France-Presse. Among other postings, he has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a correspondent in the Jerusalem bureau of Agence France-Presse; 9-11 and the church abuse scandals for AFP's New York bureau; the anthrax attacks and Ground Zero recovery work for United Press International; and the United Nations for The Jerusalem Report magazine. Chanan has interviewed Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Joe Lieberman, in addition to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres. He won a Simon Rockower Award for reporting for a story he wrote on an Israeli team sneaking into New Orleans to take part in rescue and recovery during Hurricane Katrina. Chanan holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and teaches in Stanford's Continuing Studies Program.


Tara Austen Weaver
Tara Austen Weaver writes about food, travel, agriculture, and the environment. She is author of The Butcher & The Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis, and writes the award-winning blog site Tea & Cookies. While at Mesa, she will be working on a book called Orchard House, about urban farming, permaculture and growing community.