Mennonites(s) Writing Speaker Biographies
Cameron Altaras
Cameron Altaras retired from a career in business ethics, is the co-editor of the new volume Resistance: Confronting Violence, Power and Abuse within Peace Churches, and with her husband, Jeff, produces audio recordings based on her poetry, which can be found on their website Vocem-Redisuum.com One of those recordings formed the basis for her chapter in Anabaptist Remix titled, “Voice of the Residue: The Reckoning of Intergenerational Female Wounding.” Her presentation will include reference both to this chapter and to the book Resistance. Cameron holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.
Julia Baker-Swann
Julia Baker-Swann (she/her) lives surrounded by meadow and birch woods in Maine with her husband Thomas and dog Rumi. Julia has many places she calls home and is delighted to be putting down roots in a place that makes her soul sing. Julia explores the poetic through words on the page, creating ephemeral earth art, painting with natural pigments and foraging materials for whimsical wreaths. A 2011 Goshen College alum, Julia graduated with an MA in Theopoetics and Writing from Bethany Theological Seminary in 2021. She will be teaching a Theopoetic Poetry class there this spring; Composing a Life: Embodied Poetry. Her first poetry collection, published with Cascadia, is “The Moon is Always Whole.” She writes weekly on Substack at Poet Healer, hosts a monthly poetry circle and would love to be invited to lead a Theopoetic retreat, workshop or sermon. Her website is www.baker-swann.com.
Kirsten Beachy
Kirsten Beachy (she/her) serves as director of Eastern Mennonite University’s Core Curriculum and co-director of the Language and Literature programs. She edited the anthology Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror and co-chaired Mennonites Writing VI: Solos and Harmonies at EMU. Kirsten earned her MFA in creative writing at West Virginia University. She lives in Briery Branch, Virginia, with her husband, daughters, and Sophie the cat. Kirsten likes to write and think about motherhood, disability, martyrs, heartwarming moments in dystopian societies, and bad fairies.
Ervin Beck
Ervin Beck is Professor Emeritus of English at Goshen College, where he taught from 1967 to 2003. He also taught at Lithuania Christian College (2006-08) and was Fulbright Professor at University College Belize (1991). He was a visiting fellow at the Universities of Sheffield and Warwick in England. Although his specialties were English Literature and Language, he created courses in International Literature, Folklore, and Mennonite Literature. He was the copy-editor for the Mennonite Quarterly Review (1968-2003) and was a founding co-editor of the online Center for Mennonite Writing. He was a planner for the two previous Mennonite/s Writing conferences at Goshen College. He has published widely on Mennonite literature, especially on the fiction of Rudy Wiebe and David Bergen. He has also published extensively on Mennonite and Amish folklore, folk arts and folk culture, including the books MennoFolk, MennoFolk2 and MennoFolk3. He is curator of the artifacts collection and exhibits for the Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College. He maintains the memorial garden at the southwest corner of Newcomer Center on campus, if you want a quiet place to meet or meditate.
Daniel Born
Daniel Born (he/him), Visiting Assistant Professor in the Core Curriculum at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, is co-author with Dale Suderman of Unpardonable Sins (2021), a hardboiled crime novel published under the pen name David Saul Bergman. He previously authored The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to H. G. Wells (1995), and his essays and short fiction have been published in the New York Times, Mennonite Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fiction, Literature & Theology, and elsewhere. He has edited more than a dozen books, including The Great Books Foundation Short Story Omnibus and The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler. Born has lived in Chicago since 2001. He taught previously at the University of Kansas, Queens College of the City University of New York, Marietta College, and Northwestern University. Between 2001 and 2010 he served as editor of The Common Review magazine and vice president for college programs and book groups at the Great Books Foundation. He holds a PhD in English from the City University of New York and is currently at work on a sequel to Unpardonable Sins, titled Prodigal Sons, set in the fictional central Kansas community of Marion Hills.
Connie T. Braun
Connie T. Braun is an instructor of creative writing, and literary nonfiction, and a mentor to undergraduate writers and editors. She has published two books of nonfiction and two poetry chapbooks along with journal articles and essays. In her scholarly and creative writing, her work is often grounded in the war-refugee and immigrant experience of World War II, resonant today in her explorations of memory and witness, the silences and language of trauma, the sites of geographical and spiritual displacement and belonging, and the pervasive paradoxes inherent in being human. Along the writing journey she has drawn her literary inspirations from, among others, Polish Nobel Laureates Czeław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, the Polish poet Anna Kamieńska, along with Canadian poet Anne Michaels, and American poet and human rights activist Carolyn Forché who mentored her throughout her latest project. Her academic and personal essays, poetry, and reviews, appear in various journals and anthologies, the latest an international anthology for Ukraine, and her poetry has been set to musical compositions. She is a full member of the League of Canadian Poets, among other writing associations, and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Abigail Carl-Klassen
Abigail Carl-Klassen (she/her) is a writer, researcher, poet, educator, translator, and activist living in El Paso, Texas. She grew up in the oil fields of the Permian Basin alongside Old Colony Mennonite immigrants from Mexico and has worked in education, language services, community development, social science research, and agriculture in a variety of contexts across the U.S. and Latin America. She earned an MFA in Bilingual Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and her work has been published widely in English and Spanish, appearing in ZYZZYVA, Catapult, Cimarron Review, Guernica, Aster(ix) Huizache, and others. She has published two poetry chapbooks, A’int Country Like You (Digging Press) and Shelter Management (dancing girl press), and her full-length poetry collection, Village Mechanics, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press in 2023. Recordings of her oral history project, “Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua,” can be found on the Darp Stories YouTube channel.
Daniel Shank Cruz
Daniel Shank Cruz (he/they) is a queer disabled Boricua who grew up in New York City and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He received his BA from Goshen College and his MA and PhD from Northern Illinois University. He currently studies Creative Nonfiction in Hunter College’s MFA program. Cruz is the author of Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community (Penn State University Press, 2019). Their writing has also appeared in venues such as Crítica Hispánica, the Journal of Mennonite Studies, Mennonite Quarterly Review, Modern Haiku, the New York Times, Your Impossible Voice, and numerous essay collections. They are the current editor of the Mennonite/s Writing Bibliographies at www.mennonitebibs.wordpress.com. Follow them on Twitter: @shankcruz.
Todd Davis
Todd Davis (he/him) is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry—Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited the anthology Making Poems. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Western Humanities Review, Southern Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
Christopher Dick
Christopher Dick is a professor at Tabor College, where he has been teaching in the English Department for the past 22 years. He holds a BA from Tabor College in history and English and an MA and PhD from the University of Kansas. His dissertation combined interests in American modernism, stylistics, and translation theory as he explored German translations of Hemingway’s early fiction. In addition to publishing and presenting on Hemingway and linguistic topics, other areas of research have included technology in the classroom and the intersection of religion and popular culture. At the 2015 Mennonite/s Writing Conference in Fresno, California, he presented over the familial structure in the Mennonite Bildungsroman. He lives in Newton, Kansas, with his wife, Christine (a professor of communication studies at Bethel College) and their eight-year-old son, Johann.
Lauren Friesen
Lauren Friesen is the David M French Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. His recent publications include co-editing Anabaptist ReMix: Varieties of Cultural Engagement in North America; editing Mennonite Ethics: from Isolation to Engagement by J. Lawrence Burkholder. Journal of Dramatic Criticism published his review of Graham Ley’s Ancient Greek and Contemporary Performance and Jonathan Larson’s Ensemble: the Rise of Chicago Theater for the American Theatre Annual. Lauren was chair of the Theatre and Dance Department at the University of Michigan-Flint and Director of the MA program in Arts Administration for the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Prior to that he was Professor of Drama at Goshen College. Friesen received his PhD from the Graduate Theological Union/University of California Berkeley. In 1998, the Kennedy Center honored him with the Gold Medallion Award for Excellence in University/College theatre.
Patrick Friesen
Patrick Friesen (he/him), born in Manitoba, now lives in Victoria, British Columbia. He has taught at various colleges and universities, has worked as a radio and film writer/director/producer for Manitoba Education, worked in a factory and as a cabby. Friesen has collaborated with pianist Marilyn Lerner and dancer/choreographer Margie Gillis. Among the films he has worked on are documentaries on Esther Warkov, Don Proch and Patrick Lane. Friesen has published more than a dozen books of poetry, a book of essays, stage and radio plays, three CDs of text and music, and has co-translated five books of Danish poetry with Per Brask. One of these translations, Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments by Ulrikka Gernes, was short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. His play, a short history of crazy bone, won the Winnipeg Theatre Award for Outstanding New Work in 2018. With Niko Friesen he co-created Buson’s Bell, a spoken word/music CD, available on iTunes, Bandcamp, etc. One of the tracks, Emissary, was produced as a video by Ryan Flowers. Outlasting the Weather: Selected & New Poems, 1994-2020 was published by Anvil Press in 2020.
Joseph Gascho
Joseph Gascho (he/him) is a retired cardiologist who writes poems and makes photographs. He is interested in the interplay between word and image, and several of his poetry books contain poems with accompanying images (Lent Then and Now and Advent Then and Now). His most recent book of poetry is Heart & Soul. A Cardiologist’s Life in Verse. HIs first book of poetry, in the Cascadia Dreamseekers series, was Cornfields, Cottonwoods, Seagulls and Sermons. Growing Up in Nebraska. His photographs of patients and medical personnel are on display at Penn State University College of Medicine, and he recently had photographs (The Operating Theater) featured at Positiveexposure 109 on museum mile in New York City. Many of his patient portraits have been published in Annals of Internal Medicine. He is an emeritus professor of Medicine and Humanities at Penn State University, and his creative efforts in medicine have focused on humanizing the patient. He has had numerous humanity-related essays published in a variety of medical journals, including JAMA.
Kyle Gerber
Kyle Gerber (he/him) is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Waterloo. Supervised by Dr. Randy Harris, Kyle studies rhetorical figures and patterns in Mennonite/s writing and is working on a dissertation titled “Figures of Forgiveness: Rhetorical Foundations of the Mennonite Ethos of Forgiveness.” The question at the nexus of Kyle’s interest in Burkean criticism and Mennonite/s writing on forgiveness is “what action do we symbolize when we say ‘I forgive’?” His interest has broadened to include figuration, so additional research questions include “what rhetorical figures cluster around statements of forgiveness?” Kyle lives in St. Agatha, Ontario with his wife Tracy and their three daughters (Gretchen, Felicity, and Eloise), serves as an associate pastor at Faith Mennonite Church near Wellesley, and moonlights as a mandolin player in what’s left of his free time.
Charity Gingerich
Charity Gingerich is from Uniontown, Ohio. Her first collection of poems, After June, won The Hopper poetry prize (Green Writers Press, 2019). Gingerich has received a poetry scholarship from the Sewanee Writers Conference (where she was in the workshop of A.E. Stallings and Robert Hass), and a residency from the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in journals such as North American Review, Quiddity, the Kenyon Review, Arts & Letters, Ruminate, and Indiana Review, among others. A spiritual home and place of great inspiration is the Loretto Community and working farm in Nerinx, Kentucky (Merton country) where she has often been a retreatant. Gingerich has an MFA from West Virginia University, where she was awarded the Russell MacDonald Creative Writing Award. She has taught a variety of creative writing, composition and literature classes at WVU, Fairmont State University, and the University of Mount Union. Currently, she teaches ESL to international business persons and their families, and also works as a writing coach. When not writing and teaching, she enjoys singing with various choral groups, and is a regular choir member at Christ Presbyterian Church in historic Canton, Ohio.
Jeff Gundy
Jeff Gundy (he/him) is Distinguished Poet in Residence at Bluffton University. He studied with Nick Lindsay, Ervin Beck, and others at Goshen College, and taught at Hesston College while completing a doctorate from Indiana University. His Wind Farm: Landscape with Stories and Towers, an exploration of the Illinois landscape, history, and memoir in lyric essays and photographs, is just out from Dos Madres Press. Other recent books include Without a Plea and Abandoned Homeland (both poems, from Bottom Dog Press) and Songs from an Empty Cage: Poetry, Mystery, Anabaptism, and Peace (criticism, Cascadia). His poems and essays appear in Georgia Review, The Sun, Kenyon Review, Forklift, Ohio, Christian Century, Image, Cincinnati Review, Terrain, and many other journals. He held a Fulbright lectureship at the University of Salzburg in 2008 and was named Ohio Poet of the Year in 2015 for Somewhere Near Defiance.
Benjamin Harder
Benjamin Harder was a student of Raylene Hinz-Penner at Bethel College from 1985 through 1990. Subsequently, he received his Doctorate from the University of California, Riverside in 2004, taking six years to write his dissertation, which surprised no one. He has been a full-time, non-tenure-track instructor ever since 1998, both at Bethel College, for one year, and UC Riverside, for 23. His most-read publication is the collective bargaining agreement between the University Council of the American Federation of Teachers and the University of California, but he is finally beginning to write other things again, mostly connected to composition theory and fantastic literature. This is his first essay in ages.
Raylene Hinz-Penner
Raylene Hinz-Penner (she/her) writes poetry and essays about place, especially investigations into deep time, geography, migrations, and the land. She attended Bethel College and took advanced degrees from Kansas University and Wichita State University and taught English at Bethel College and Washburn University in Topeka, especially courses in contemporary American literature and creative writing. Hinz-Penner published the story of Cheyenne Peace Chief and Mennonite minister Lawrence Hart, Searching for Sacred Ground, in 2007. In recent years she has become interested in settler history. An upcoming book, East of Liberal: Notes on the Land, investigates deep time and the migration stories of many peoples/cultures over thousands of years on the land where she grew up. Her unpublished poetry manuscript, Field Notes on the Levee, is a book of poems and field sketches based on a green space near her Topeka home and the Potawatomie burial grounds which elicit the story of Potawotomie relocation from Indiana to Kansas. Recently retired to North Newton, Kansas, Hinz-Penner and her husband Doug Penner have spent their married lives in higher education in teaching and administration.
Ann Hostetler
Ann Hostetler (she/her), director of the Mennonite/s Writing IX conference at Goshen College, is a scholar of contemporary literature and a poet. The editor of A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry (University of Iowa Press 2003) and numerous articles and reviews in the field of Mennonite literature, she is also the author of two collections of poems, Safehold (Cascadia Poetry Series, Dreamseeker Books 2017) and Empty Room with Light (Dreamseeker Books 2002). Professor Emerita of English at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, Hostetler is the website editor of the Center for Mennonite Writing and co-editor of its Journal.
Laura Hostetler
Laura Hostetler (she/they) is Professor of History and Global Asian Studies, and Director of the Engaged Humanities Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her historical work is focused on early modern cartography and ethnography in the context of Qing China (1636-1911). Her books Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago 2001) and Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples (Leiden, 2022 with Wu Xuemei) explore intersections at the margins between cultural systems. Her current project, Bridging Worlds: Reflections on a Journey, has taken her into the realm of creative nonfiction. This memoir-in-progress, set largely during on a sabbatical year spent in India, chronicles a quest for personal integration in a world where obtaining an education has too often become predicated on the ability to cut oneself off from aspects of one’s own inner knowing and lived experience. She writes: In responding to the varieties of human need that quite literally came knocking at my door, I found myself drawing both on the tools of the scholar—reading, reflection, and writing—and opening myself to the impulses of the inner life—recording my dreams, taking long walks in the woods, and finding myself in prayer.
Sheri Hostetler
Sheri Hostetler (she/her) was born in an Amish-Mennonite community in Holmes County, Ohio, where her family has lived since the 1820s. She has been the pastor at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco for 22 years and is the co-founder of the Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery Coalition, which seeks to animate a movement for Indigenous justice within the church. As part of that, she and Sarah Augustine have a podcast called “Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery.” She is also the proud mother of a budding 17-year-old rock star and an occasional poet.
Jean Wiebe Janzen
Jean Wiebe Janzen (she/her) was born in Saskatchewan in 1933, was raised in the Midwestern United States, and has lived in Fresno, California since 1961. She completed her undergraduate studies at Fresno Pacific University and received a Master of Arts at California State University of Fresno where she studied poetry writing with Philip Levine and Peter Everwine. Five of her poetry collections and a book of essays were published by Good Books, and her most recent poetry collection was published by Cascadia Publishing House. Jean is the mother of four children, five grandchildren, and one great grandchild.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Julia Spicher Kasdorf (she/her) is the author of four books of poetry: Sleeping Preacher; Eve’s Striptease; Poetry in America; and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary project created in collaboration with Steven Rubin. Shale Play was selected to represent Pennsylvania in the 2021 Route 1 Reads initiative. She has also published a collection of her own essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and the biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American. With Joshua R. Brown she edited new editions of Yoder’s regional classic Rosanna of the Amish, and Fred Lewis Pattee’s local color romance The House of the Black Ring. With Michael Tyrell, she co-edited Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. Her poetry awards include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. A Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State, she also teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University. She is currently working with Steven Rubin on Homeplace, a book about the resiliency of farmers who live near her home in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.
Grace Kehler
Grace Kehler is an Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. A specialist in the Victorian era, she has published numerous articles on the mutually engendering interchange between literature and opera and on the vexed relationships of Victorians with the physical, the sensate, and the evolutionary. Her ongoing research on affect theory and trauma has led her back to her Mennonite origins and to the recent Mennonite literature that witnesses to hurt and pain. Such literature not only attests to various forms of brokenness but actively works to recreate the possibility of communal connections through a process of address and response.
Dennis Koehn
Dennis R. Koehn exemplifies a life of activism, scholarship, and professional impact. He did time in a federal prison for draft resistance, completed undergraduate work with honors, and went to Harvard on a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship. Koehn, as a management consultant, was known for being “particularly suited to joining business and management skills with theology and the needs of church organizations.” Koehn received a PhD from Chicago Theological Seminary with a dissertation on religion and war. In 2022, he co-edited Anabaptist ReMix: Varieties of Cultural Engagement in North America.
Maxwell Kennel
Maxwell Kennel (he/him) is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, a Research Associate in the Centre for Social Accountability at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and the Director of Pandora Press. His work is divided into four interrelated projects: a book on political theology called Postsecular History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), a revised dissertation titled Ontologies of Violence, a postdoctoral project on critiques of conspiratorial reason, and a series of articles and essays on Mennonites, philosophy, and social critique. Most recently, he has edited and published Hadje Sadje’s Theology at the Border (Pandora Press, 2022), Ronald Tiessen’s novel Menno in Athens (Pandora Press, 2022), and Carla Klassen’s book of reflections These Songs We Sing (Pandora Press, 2022).
Travis Kroeker
Travis Kroeker (he/him) is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and member of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), where he teaches and publishes in the areas of political theology, ethics, literature, philosophy and religious thought. He is the author of Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America (McGill-Queen’s) and (with Bruce Ward) Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (Routledge). He has recently published the first of two book projects on political theology: Messianic Political Theology and Diaspora Ethics (Cascade) and Literary Apocalypse as Political Theology (in preparation).
Kathleen Weaver Kurtz
Kathleen Weaver Kurtz (she/her) grew up in Harrisonburg, Virginia and spent her adulthood in various communities. She graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1990 with a MDiv, and from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1998 with an DMin in Pastoral Counseling and has been active in leadership in both Mennonite and Church of the Brethren congregations. Along with raising two sons, she practiced as a pastoral psychotherapist for more than twenty years. Her life-long interest in social history has led her into the role of family archivist, organizing thousands of family letters spanning a century and collecting other unpublished writings of her mother and grandmother. In addition to her memoir, The Blistering Morning Mist, she has had works published in a number of places including The Conrad Grebel Review, Center for Mennonite Writing Journal, Sacred Spaces, and The Mennonite. She lives with Wayne Kurtz, her husband of more than fifty years, surrounded by stacks of books waiting to be read, miniatures of many kinds, and family heirlooms, all the while trying to catch up on all the interests she couldn’t pursue while working. She is a gardener and potter—two ways of creating beauty from the clay of her life.
Becca Lachman
Becca Lachman (she/her) works in the magical land of public libraries and lives in Athens, Ohio. Her third collection What I say to this house (2022) is a book-length poem and part of a collaborative art book project with German visual artist Astrid Kaemmerling on home-building and (re)building the physical body for parenthood. In 2013, she edited the anthology A Ritual to Read Together to mark the centennial of poet and conscientious objector, William Stafford. Her work’s been recognized by two Ohio Arts Council awards and a Pushcart Prize nomination and can most recently be found in Rattle, Connotation Press, Sweet: Lit, Consequence Magazine, the Voices Together hymnal, and Image Journal. Her website is www.becca-jr-lachman.com.
Angela Lehman
Angela Lehman (she/her) is a writer and editor who has also been a teacher, a journalist, a census enumerator, a toy seller, a cheese buyer and produce slinger, a secretary, a waitress, and a groundskeeper. She has an MFA in poetry and certification in teaching English to speakers of other languages. After working as an editor and journalist, she taught writing and reading to international students at the university level. During this time, she was also a visiting scholar at Al Quds University, and taught literature and academic writing as a Fulbright Scholar at An-Najah University in the West Bank. In the United States, she has taught informal courses and given lectures on Palestinian writing. Angela returned to school in 2021 to earn an MA in History. Her work has centered around various expressions of nonconformity in 20th-century America, such as anti-war Vietnam veterans and Black Muslims. A dedicated amateur cellist who performs regularly in Richmond, Virginia, and beyond, Angela is also the “curator of words” for the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia, working with musicians to create and deliver concerts that combine music, literature, and history. Her website is www.AngelaWrites.net.
Cheryl Denise Miller
Cheryl Denise Miller (she/her) grew up in Elmira, Ontario. She went to the red brick Mennonite church next to the white clapboard Old Order Meetinghouse. After nursing school, she went into VS and worked as a public health nurse in La Jara, Colorado. She fell for her future husband while helping to make suppers at the Homeless Shelter where he was volunteering. They moved to Philippi, West Virginia and became leaders for the Mennonite Service Adventure program for three years. Now they live in the intentional community of Shepherds Field in a timber framed home they built themselves. Cheryl is the author of the poetry books, Fences, forthcoming Dec. 1st 2022, What’s in the Blood (2012) and I Saw God Dancing (2005), published by Cascadia Publishing House, Telford, PA. She has a spoken word poetry CD, Leaving Eden (2012) with music from Ben Regier, available at cdbaby.com. Visit her on Facebook at Cheryl Denise, poet.
Evie Miller
Evie Miller (she/her) grew up in the Kalona, Iowa area and earned her BA in English in 1966 from Goshen College and her graduate degrees (MA and PhD in English, Creative Writing – Fiction) from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. This led to ten years of teaching literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Eyes at the Window, her first published novel (Good Books, 2003), was based on the account of an infant being smothered to death in an Amish community in Pennsylvania in 1810. In 2014 she self-published Everyday Mercies, a book of literary fiction set on an early-21st century dairy farm in Wisconsin. Using historical and literary techniques, her new trilogy, Scruples on the Line: A Fictional Series Set During the American Civil War, was published by Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock Publishers), in 2020 and 2021. Her 2022 trilogy project of creating an Audiobook format with the help of friends and Audio for the Arts in Madison, Wisconsin will be available this fall.
Melanie Springer Mock
Melanie Springer Mock (she/her) is a professor of English at George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon, where she primarily teaches first-year writing, memoir, and journalism courses. She is the author or coauthor of six books, including Finding our Way Forward: When The Children We Love Become Adults (forthcoming from Herald Press, 2023). Her essays and reviews have appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Nation, Christian Feminism Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Runner’s World, and Christianity Today, among other places. She regularly reviews books for several publications, including Anabaptist World. She lives in Dundee, Oregon, with her husband, and they have two 20-year-old sons. Melanie is also a stepmom to two adults, and Nani to two grandsons. She enjoys running, swimming, biking, knitting, and watching reality television, and spends too much time on Twitter at @springermock.
Abby Nafziger
Abby Nafziger (she/her) graduated from Goshen College in 2006 and spent time in Chicago and Seattle before returning to Goshen to work at her alma mater’s library. She co-hosts the podcast Just Plain Wrong, where she and two other Mennonite librarians (Tillie Yoder and Erin Milanese) discuss the way Amish and Mennonites are depicted in pop culture. When not working, Abby can be found enjoying books, board games, and regular re-watches of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as spending time with her husband and two adorable children.
Tim Nafziger
Tim Nafziger (he/him) is a Mennonite writer who lives in the Ventura River watershed on the traditional lands of the Chumash people in southern California. He has been engaging with digital communities and social justice movements for over 20 years as an organizer and strategist. He was the first blogger for the Mennonite magazine and wrote for that publication twice a month from 2007 to 2014. Tim thrives on writing poetry, cross-pollination, relationship building and small teams working for change. He works as a digital engagement consultant and web developer at Congruity Works.
Barbara Nickel
Barbara Nickel (she/her) is a poet and author. Her third collection of poetry, Essential Tremor, was released in April 2021. Her first collection, The Gladys Elegies, won the Pat Lowther Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including The Walrus, The Cresset, Poetry Ireland Review, and Best Canadian Poetry 2021. Nickel is also an award-winning author of books for young people; her children’s novel Hannah Waters and the Daughter of Johann Sebastian Bach won a BC and Yukon Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. A picture book, A Boy Asked the Wind, was shortlisted for the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award. Dear Peter, Dear Ulla, a children’s novel, is currently a finalist for a BC and Yukon Book Prize, the 2023 Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award, the 2023 Rocky Mountain Book Award, the 2022 High Plains Book Award, and the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People. Barbara is a graduate of Goshen College, as well as the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing, where she has also taught. She lives and writes in Yarrow, BC, Canada, on the Stó:lo territory of the Pilalt and Ts’elxwéyeqw.
Hope Nisly
Hope Nisly (she/her) spent her working life first as a labor archivist and then as an acquisitions/collection development librarian. Her writing has appeared in Mojave River Review, Fredericksburg Literary and Arts Review, Persimmon Tree, and Dead Housekeeping, among others. She works mainly in creative nonfiction, with a particular interest in flash nonfiction. She is passionate about her work for voting rights, reproductive health rights, and GOTV efforts. In retirement, she is the book review editor for the Pacific Journal, edits book manuscripts, creates not-your-grandmother’s embroidery designs, and is a jigsaw puzzle fanatic. She grew up in the Midwest, but now makes her home in Reedley, California on land traditionally tended by Choinumne and Yokuts people. She and her husband have two adult children. She is on Instagram as @hopefulnicely and on Twitter as @NislyHope where she retweets far more than she tweets.
Joel Nofziger
Joel Nofziger (he/him) is an independent scholar based in Tylersport, Pennsylvania. He is the executive director of the Mennonite Heritage Center (Harleysville, Pa.) and the coordinating editor of Anabaptist Historians. A native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his research focus is on Mennonite identity and memory with a special interest in narrative constructions of self and belonging. He has a BA in History and Peacebuilding & Development from Eastern Mennonite University and an MA in religion from Eastern Mennonite Seminary.
Mary-Catherine Pazanno
Mary-Catherine Pazanno is well known in Ontario for her work in jazz and classical music and as a recording artist, music educator, vocal coach, and music director. Performance highlights include the American debut of CA Weaver’s Songs for My Mother at Symphony Space (NYC), jazz performances at the iconic Birdland Jazz Club (NYC), and headliner at: Uptown Waterloo Jazz Festival, Jazz Bistro (Toronto, ON), The Rex (Toronto, ON), The Jazz Room (Waterloo, ON), and The Registry Theatre (Kitchener). She has also been a featured soloist with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. When Mary-Catherine isn’t performing, she keeps busy in a Music Education capacity. In addition to her private voice studio, she is Artistic Director of two community music programs: Jazz for Adults, and Jazz in the Schools. She is the Music Director at Knox Church in Waterloo, ON, and is the new Music Director of the Waterloo Regional Police Chorus. Her debut album “You’re Gonna Hear From Me” was released to critical acclaim and received airplay across North America. Her new album “Christmas: Live at the Jazz Room” will be released in November 2022. Her website is www.marycatherinepazzano.com.
Jessica Penner
Jessica Penner (she/her) earned a BA in English Literature and Theater from Eastern Mennonite University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and a certificate in TESOL from the School of International Training. Her work appears in Wordgathering, Journal of Mennonite Writing, Journal of Mennonite Studies, Bellevue Literary Review, Luna Luna, Necessary Fiction, The Fiddleback, and Rhubarb, as well as the anthologies Tongue Screws and Testimonies and Gush. Her memoir essay, “Mustard Seed,” was nominated by Bellevue Literary Review for a Pushcart Prize. Her first novel, Shaken in the Water (Foxhead Books/Workplay Publishing), was named an Editors’ Choice by the Historical Novel Society. She teaches ESL and Citizenship Test Preparation at 32BJ, a building service workers’ union, and academic and creative writing at New York City College of Technology and Saint Francis College. She lives in Brooklyn. Links to her work can be found on her website: jessicadawnpenner.com.
Casey Plett
Casey Plett (she/her) is the author of A Dream of a Woman (2021), which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; Little Fish (2018), winner of a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award in Canada; and A Safe Girl to Love (2014), also a winner of a Lambda Literary Award. She was the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers (2017) alongside Cat Fitzpatrick. Plett has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. She is the publisher at LittlePuss Press. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ontario. She is Goshen College’s S.A. Yoder lecturer for 2022.
Erin Ponnou-Delaffon
Erin Ponnou-Delaffon (she/her) is an associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at Illinois State University. Her research investigates the intersections of contemporary French literature, cinema, ethics, and religion, and she also works on issues in contemporary parenting, childhood, and education. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, Forum for Modern Language Studies, French Forum, The French Review, Contemporary French Civilization, and Women in French Studies. Her most recent publications, both from this year, include an article on Albert Camus and antitheodicy in Études Francophones and one on Pierre Péju and secular pilgrimage in Orbis Litterarum. She approaches Miriam Toews’s work via an interest in existentialism, on which she has led undergraduate and graduate seminars. She is grateful for the opportunity to participate in this gathering for the first time.
Keith Ratzlaff
Keith Ratzlaff’s most recent books of poetry are Who’s Asking?; Then, A Thousand Crows; and Dubious Angels: Poems after Paul Klee all from Anhinga Press. Poems and reviews have appeared recently in The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Arts and Letters, Colorado Review, and The American Reader. His awards include the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Award, two Pushcart Prizes and inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2009.
Magdalene Redekop
Magdalene Redekop (she/her) is Professor Emerita in the English Department, University of Toronto. Her publications include Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro (1992) and Making Believe: Questions about Mennonites and Art (2020). Her essay “Taste and See: Looking at the Pictures in Voices Together” (2021) was written for a brochure edited by Rachel Epp Buller, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the visual art in the Mennonite hymnal Voices Together (2020).
Steve Rubin
Steve Rubin is a documentary photographer whose work highlights numerous critical and contemporary issues including health disparities, rural poverty, refugee migration, immigrant detention, and the social and environmental impacts of energy development. Prior to coming to Penn State, he worked for more than two decades as a freelance photojournalist, traveling on assignment around the world and throughout the United States. A Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in northeast India, he is also the recipient of the Leica Medal of Excellence, a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship and a grant from The Fund for Environmental Journalism. As a Community Fellow with the Open Society Institute (Baltimore), he co-directed the innovative program Healing Images, providing digital cameras, instruction, and therapy to survivors of torture. He was also a Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute (New York), which supported his timely photographic investigation of the federal government’s detention and treatment of immigrants – work that has been widely circulated by Amnesty International and Human Rights First. His current projects investigate the rise of wind energy in the Midwest, the precarious conditions of Burmese Chin refugees in India, the upsurge of diabetes and other non-communicable diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the social and environmental impacts of Marcellus Shale gas development in Pennsylvania. His book, Shale Play – Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields with documentary poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf, was published in August 2018.
Sofia Samatar
Sofia Samatar (she/her) is the author of five books, most recently the memoir The White Mosque, which tells the story of her trip to Uzbekistan to research a group of Mennonites who followed a charismatic preacher to Central Asia in the nineteenth century. Her first novel, the epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria, won the 2014 William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time and Esquire Magazine’s list of the 50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. Samatar also received the 2014 Astounding Award for Best New Writer. A second novel, The Winged Histories, completed the Olondria duology, and was followed by the short story collection Tender, a World Fantasy Award Finalist. Sofia’s genre-bending book Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar, was a finalist for the Italo Calvino Prize and one of NPR’s Best Books of 2018. Sofia lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia and teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.
Adam Schrag
Adam Schrag (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer at the Carlson School of Management and faculty in Security Technologies at the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota. Before that, he was an Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies at Fresno Pacific University. He teaches risk communication, intercultural communication, visual rhetoric, and multimedia storytelling. He has written things about photography in the age of Instagram, war and photography, early cinema in the age of animated gifs, the cinema of precarity, and the uses and abuses of slides to communicate risk. He grew up in Freeman, South Dakota.
Jennifer Sears
Jennifer Sears (she/her) is the recipient of creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her essays and stories appear in North American Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading series, Guernica, Fence, the Nabokov Studies Journal, and elsewhere. She graduated from Bethel College where she took her first creative writing classes with Raylene Hinz-Penner. Jennifer is currently Associate Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, City University of New York.
Ruth Derksen Siemens
Ruth Derksen Siemens is a first-generation Canadian of Russian Mennonite descent. Her home was in Vancouver but she also lived for a few years in a traditional Mennonite village in the Fraser Valley. Music teaching and performance was her first profession but she returned to university to study rhetoric, discourse analysis and applied linguistics. Her PhD in the Philosophy of Language (University of Sheffield, England) examines a corpus of letters written by Russian Mennonites from Stalin’s Gulag prison camps – through a rhetorical, linguistic and socio-historical lens. The first volume of letters appears in her publication in 2007, Remember Us: Letters from Stalin’s Gulag (1930-37). The documentary film produced for television broadcast in 2008, Through the Red Gate, traces the journey of the letters from Russia to an attic in Carlyle, Saskatchewan. An award-winning publication in 2013, Daughters in the City: Mennonite Maids in Vancouver (1931-61) is an ethnographic project that draws on interviews of young Mennonite maids associated with two Mennonite Girls’ Homes in Vancouver. Having taught rhetoric and writing at various universities over several decades, Ruth is now an emerita professor at the University of British Columbia.
Jessica Smucker
Jessica Smucker (she/her) is a singer-songwriter, poet, and essayist based in Lancaster, PA. Her poems and essays have appeared in Turnrow, Spoon River Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Hawaii Review, The Dirty Goat, The Mennonite, Mennonot, CMW Journal, Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology, and A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry. She has performed extensively across the United States and won several national songwriting awards. Her discography includes three full-length albums, two EPs, and a handful of singles, with a new album, After the Meteor, coming next year. She is currently working on a memoir in essays (working title: Reluctantly Yours), loosely arranged around the themes of marriage, divorce, remarriage, neurodiversity, and the emotional unwieldiness of family.
Esther Yoder Stenson
Esther Yoder Stenson (she/her) grew up Amish Mennonite in Stuarts Draft, Virginia. She lived and taught in El Salvador for nearly three years in the 1970s before earning a BA in Education from Sterling College in Kansas (1985). She completed an MA in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University in 1988 and taught English in China (5 years). While teaching in China, she met her Minnesota Lutheran husband. Upon returning from China in 1995, she worked in the writing center at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia and earned an MA in English/Creative Writing (2008). She also taught English Literature and Writing at JMU until 2014. In the spring of 2015, she and her husband spent six months teaching English in Port Said, Egypt. Most recently, she taught in the Intensive English Program at Eastern Mennonite University. Besides publishing her recent memoir Doors Through the Great Wall (Masthof Press, 2022), Esther has published a book of poetry titled Miracle Temple (Cascadia Press, 2009) and a chapbook titled Showing Up (Finishing Line Press, 2020).
Hildi Froese Tiessen
Hildi Froese Tiessen’s first published work on Mennonite writing (an article on Rudy Wiebe) appeared fifty years ago, in 1973. In 1990, working alongside the editorial committee of New Quarterly, she programmed the first conference on Mennonite/s Writing. She co-chaired a number of the conferences in the Mennonite/s Writing project and has served on the planning committees of all nine. Hildi has edited special issues on Mennonite/s writing for New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Conrad Grebel Review, Rhubarb, and Journal of Mennonite Studies, and assembled a Pinchpenny Press chapbook of tributes to Rudy Wiebe in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Peace Shall Destroy Many. She has published numerous essays on, and interviews with, Mennonite writers and (with her husband Paul Tiessen) has edited artbooks featuring visual artists of Mennonite heritage. Hildi is Professor Emerita at Conrad Grebel University College (University of Waterloo), where she taught courses in Canadian and Mennonite Literature, served for ten years as Academic Dean, and hosted many readings and lectures by Mennonite writers. Among her recent projects are Rhubarb 42: 11 Encounters with Mennonite Fiction (2017) (ed.) and an essay on Mennonite poet/epidemiologist, David Waltner-Toews, in the online journal Hamilton Arts and Letters 13.2 (2020-2021).
Paul Tiessen
Paul Tiessen taught English and Film Studies for 37 years at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he is Professor Emeritus. He recently published essays on relationships between Canadian writers Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, and with international colleagues edited a trilogy of novels (2013-15) by Malcolm Lowry (University of Ottawa Press). His “Mennonite” publications include, with Hildi Froese Tiessen, L.M. Montgomery’s letters to Ephraim Weber (University of Toronto Press) and Woldemar Neufeld’s Canadian landscapes (Wilfrid Laurier University Press). He has published essays on Mennonite novelists including Miriam Toews, Sandra Birdsell, David Bergen, and Dallas Wiebe. His recent essays on Rudy Wiebe include: “The Confessions of Rudy Wiebe: Re-positioning the Peace Shall Destroy Many Event of 1962-63” (Journal of Mennonite Studies); “Archival returns: Rudy Wiebe and the coming back of Thom Wiens” (Rhubarb); “Re-framing the reaction to Peace Shall Destroy Many: Rudy Wiebe, Delbert Wiens, and the Mennonite Brethren” (Mennonite Quarterly Review); “Memoir and the re-reading of fiction: Rudy Wiebe’s Of this earth and Peace Shall Destroy Many” (Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture). Besides new work on Wiebe and the Mennonite reader, he has work underway on Marshall McLuhan’s modernist moviegoer and on Malcolm Lowry’s imaginary cinema.
Andrew Unger
Andrew Unger (he/him) is best known as the author and founder of the Mennonite satirical news website The Daily Bonnet. Since launching the website in 2016, Andrew has written more than 2400 humorous “fake news” articles, occasionally drawing the attention of real news outlets. The Daily Bonnet has been mentioned in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, and even cited in debate in the Canadian House of Commons. A collection of Daily Bonnet articles called The Best of the Bonnet was released in December 2021 by Turnstone Press. Andrew’s novel Once Removed, also published by Turnstone Press, tells the story of a struggling ghostwriter trying to preserve local history in a small Mennonite town. Once Removed won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for best first book at the 2021 Manitoba Book Awards. Andrew is a writer, public speaker, and educator from southern Manitoba, whose work has also appeared in Geez, Rhubarb, Ballast, Preservings, CBC.ca, Winnipeg Free Press, Alberta Views, and Friends Journal, among others. He is a graduate of the University of Manitoba and lives with his wife Erin in Steinbach, Manitoba. If you go back far enough, he is probably related to you.
Carol Ann Weaver
Carol Ann Weaver’s genre-bending music, often focused on the natural environment and human courage, heard throughout North America, Europe, Africa, Korea and Paraguay, ranges from classical to jazz, avant garde to folk, creating new fusions of roots and art music, often colored by African music. With nine CDs and with choral music published by Cypress Press, she is Professor Emerita of Conrad Grebel/University of Waterloo, Vice Chair of CASE (Canadian Association for Sound Ecology, www.soundecology.ca), and recent Chair of ACWC (Association of Canadian Women Composers, www.acwc.ca). She has attended each Mennonite/s Writing conference from its inception and presented music at every one after 1990, composing music on texts of such Mennonite writers as Connie Braun, Julia Kasdorf, Ann Hostetler, Rudy Wiebe, Di Brandt, Dora Dueck, Jeff Gundy, Sheri Hostetler, and others. Her Sound in the Land Festival/Conferences at UWaterloo, focusing on music by Mennonite composers, have brought together composers, performers, scholars, eco- and ethnomusicologists from across North America, Europe, South Korea, Cuba and Africa. Hailing from Harrisonburg, Virginia, with its rich Mennonite heritage of a cappella singing, and with a Doctorate in Composition and Piano Performance, she is now a dual American/Canadian citizen.
Johnny Wideman
Johnny Wideman (he/him) is a playwright, short storyist, and occasional poet. As an author his short stories and essays have appeared in a handful of magazines and journals. As a storyteller, he founded Full Bodied Short Stories, a storytelling and culinary event which uses the tasting notes of food and libation as the thematic catalysts for custom story pairings. As a theatre-maker (you’ll have to excuse his Canadian) he is a member of the Playwright’s Guild of Canada, and the founder of Theatre of the Beat (a grass-roots, touring theatre troupe which uses live performance to tackle difficult topics). His plays have been performed over 260 times throughout predominantly non-traditional, site-specific venues (such as Mennonite churches and prisons) across Canada, and throughout midwest America. His published works include a collection of short stories and poems entitled To Aid Digestion, a biographical interview with lifelong touring artists entitled Endurance Test, and three plays: Gadfly: Sam Steiner Dodges the Draft (which was staged at Goshen College’s homecoming in 2013), This Will Lead to Dancing, and Selah’s Song (with music by Bryan Moyer Suderman). He lives outside of Toronto, Canada in a community with his partner Leah, their friends, plus a dog, a cat, and five chickens.
Matilda 'Tillie' Yoder
Matilda “Tillie” Yoder (she/her) graduated from Goshen College in 2012, and now splits her time working as a librarian for both the GC Good Library and the Mennonite Historical Library. She is a co-host of the podcast Just Plain Wrong, where she enjoys critiquing pop culture related to Amish and Mennonites, particularly when she gets to rant about inaccuracies related to farming. In her downtime, she likes to travel, bake, read all types of fiction, and neglect her garden.
Rachel Yoder
Rachel Yoder (she/her) is the author of Nightbitch, named a best book of the year by Esquire and Vulture, finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize, and an Indie Next pick. She is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and also holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. A founding editor of draft: the journal of process, Rachel grew up in an intentional Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio and now lives in Iowa City.
Robert Zacharias
Robert Zacharias (he/him) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at York University in Toronto. He is author of Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature and Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism, and the editor of After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America. He is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Mennonite Studies.