Voices: Bay Area Women Writers Speak Out

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

How Current World Events and Changes Affect What Bay Area Writers Write;
National Writers' Union Women Speak Out At May 3 Event

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- As bombs explode in Iraq, homeland freedom and democracy in the U.S. continue to erode. Media control by large corporations and the right wing makes it more difficult for the voices of writers to be heard. A diverse panel of Bay Area National Writers' Union women writers will discuss how events and changes in the world today are affecting what they write.

The panel entitled "Voices: Bay Area Women Writers Speak Out" will take place at the San Francisco Public Library Sunset Branch at 1305 18th Avenue (at 18th and Irving) in San Francisco on May 3 at 7 p.m. The event is open to the public. Admission: Free. (Directions: From downtown San Francisco, take the N-Judah to 19th and Judah. Get off and walk one block down 18th. The library is on the corner of 18th and Irving.). Enter by lower side entrance.

Panelists:

Daphne Muse, author of more than 200 feature articles, op-ed pieces, essays and reviews, and Children of Africa, Prejudice: A Story Collection and The New Press Guide to Multicultural Children's Literature for Young Readers;
Non-fiction writer Karin Evans's whose book The Lost Daughters of China--Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past chronicles the author's adoption of a little girl from China and also explores the backdrop of events and conditions for women in China;
Laura del Fuego, a California Arts Council Fellowship recipient for Literature and past featured poet in the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, has won several awards for fiction, and is the author of Carmen Garcia Was Here C/S (which describes growing up Chicana) and Maravilla, (a story of coming of age in East L.A.). Del Fuego's poetry, essays and stories have been widely published in journals and anthologies. She is also a screenwriter and an editor for Sonoma County Women's Voices;
Gwendolyn Bikis' whose novella, Cleo's Gone has appeared in Hers3, Close Calls, The Persistent Desire, Does Your Mama Know? The Best Lesbian Erotica 1998 and 2000, and also in The Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica and was a recipient of the John Preston Erotic Writing Award, and runner-up for the Astraea Foundation's Emerging Writer's Award;
S. Elise Peeples' whose book of philosophy The Emperor Has a Body: Body-Politics in the Between is a feminist take on philosophy and the proposal of ways to incorporate woman and body into philosophy, economics, politics, medicine, religion.

Panel facilitator Margaret Benshoof-Holler is a journalist, a writer of fiction and poetry, a teacher and . author of Burning of the Marriage Hat, a fictionalized account in part of the author's growing up and coming of age in Wyoming during the McCarthy and post-McCarthy era of the 1960s. Her articles and essays have covered a range of topics focused on social issues and have been published in a number of publications including the soon to be released Houghton Mifflin, Mariner anthology Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West due out in May, 2004.