Betsy Damon
Alum 1999Betsy Damon is an internationally acclaimed artist who has been called a practical visionary and a humanist. Her work has been widely reviewed, exhibited, and taught. She’s known for her performance works The 7,000-Year-Old Woman (1976) and The Living Water Garden (1998) in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. She has directed many collaborative public performance events, mostly notably in Chengdu and Lhasa, China. Betsy’s awards include the Bush Foundation, Heinz foundation, NEA, UN Habitat, Waterfront Center Top Honor, 5 awards from the ASLA, and others.
Ann Boese
Alum 1999Ann Boese is currently a real estate advisor in Savanna, Georgia. Her publishing/writing background includes marketing for international luxury travel corporations as well as cultural, conservation, and human services non-profit organizations. Her articles about Savannah have been published in the Miami Herald, Town & Country, The South and others. Ann previously worked as a free-lance writer and co-owner of Bone Island Press in Key West.
Mary Clark
Alum 1999Mary Clark is a retired professor of biology and was formerly Drucie French Cumbie Chair in Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. Her previous books include Contemporary Biology and Ariadne's Thread: The Search for New Modes of Thinking.
Gray Brechin
Alum 1999Dr. Gray Brechin is an historical geographer and author whose chief interests are the state of California, the environmental impact of cities upon their hinterlands and the invisible landscape of New Deal public works. He received a B.A. in history and geography, a M.A. in art history and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California at Berkeley with which he has been closely associated for nearly fifty years. He was the first director of the Mono Lake Committee and worked during the 1980s as journalist and TV producer in San Francisco.
David Bollier
Alum 1999David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger and consultant who spends a lot of time exploring the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. In 2010, he co-founded the Commons Strategies Group, a consulting project that works to promote the commons internationally. More recently, he became Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. David's work on the commons takes many forms—as an author and blogger; frequent international speaker; conference and workshop organizer; contributor to book anthologies; designer of courses on the commons; and advisor and strategist.
Dean Baker
Alum 1999Dean Baker co-founded the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress and the OECD’s Trade Union Advisory Council. His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the London Financial Times and the New York Daily News.
Stephen Altschuler
Alum 1999Stephen Altschuler is a writer, teacher and cancer survivor who hopes to help raise consciousness through his efforts. He has a master's degree in counseling and has been a student of Buddhism for four decades and a golfer for five decades. He has written the award winning The Mindful Hiker, and his newest work is The Mindful Golfer.
Diana Winston
Alum 2000Diana Winston is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and the author of The Little Book of Being: Practices and Guidance for Uncovering Your Natural Awareness. Called by the Los Angeles Times “one of the nation’s best-known teachers of mindfulness,” she has taught mindfulness since 1999 in a variety of settings including hospitals, universities, corporations, nonprofits and schools in the US and Asia. Her work has been mentioned in the New York Times, O Magazine, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, Women’s Health and in a variety of magazines, books and journals.
Evelyn White
Alum 2000Evelyn White is an author and editor, who wrote an authorized biography of Alice Walker. She has published articles, essays and reviews on issues relating to women of African descent in publications that include The Vancouver Sun, Smithsonian, Essence, Ms., Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Enquirer, Seattle Times and The Washington Post. As a former legal advocate for the Battered Women's Program in the Seattle City Attorney's office, she has continued to study intimate partner violence as the author of Chain Chain Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships.
Samuel Western
Alum 2000Samuel Western has served in the Swedish Merchant Marine, worked as a commercial fisherman, a longshoreman, logger and a hunting guide. He has published in the Economist, LIFE and Sports Illustrated. A two-time recipient of the Wyoming Literary Fellowship for fiction, he is also a finalist for the High Plains Books Award for poetry. He lives in Sheridan, Wyoming.
Donna Vitucci
Alum 2000Donna Vitucci is Development Director of Covington Ladies Home, the only free-standing personal care home exclusively for older women in Northern Kentucky. She is a life-long writer, and was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize in 2010. Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of print and online journals and anthologies. At Bobby Trivette's Grave takes place ninety miles south of Donna’s home in Covington, Kentucky.
Kimberly Ridley
Alum 2000Kimberly Ridley is a science writer, essayist, editor and children’s book author who has been writing about nature, science, health and the environment for more than 25 years. She is the former editor of Hope Magazine, a national magazine that for nine years reported on people creating positive change. Kimberly is now a contributing editor to Ode Magazine, former editor-at-large for Bioneers, and her articles and essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, Down East and other print and online venues.