Women of Our Words

Women of Our Words

FREE EVENT
Date: Sunday – September 30
Time: 2 to 4 PM
Location: Milford Theater

A memoir, a novel, a novella. Non-Fiction, Fiction, Biography. Essays and Blogs. Film and Television. Lyrics. Women of Our Words.

Now more than ever, women’s words – women’s voices – are not only needed, they are necessary. Most of us have a story we want to share, a secret we want to spill, a topic we want to tackle, a film or a play we want to write. Many of us have a story that bubbles and bakes and stays with us for so long we know every single character – inside and out. And sometimes the stories – the characters, the books, the films, the plays, the topics and the issues, the lyrics and the words – find us.

Please join these extraordinary women writers as they discuss the irrefutable power of the written word and how writing has changed and maybe even saved their lives.

The Pen is mightier than the sword.

Moderated by JUDY WHITE

Tina Alexis Allen

Tina Alexis Allen

As a break-out star on WGN’s hit series “Outsiders, ”actress/playwright/author/director Tina Alexis Allen most recently starred as Shurn, a force to be reckoned with in the clash-of-cultures drama rooted in coal mining Kentucky. With Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti on board as an executive producer, Allen acted alongside Tony-nominated David Morse (“The Iceman Cometh,” “Treme,” “Hurt Locker”) and Ryan Hurst (“Sons of Anarchy,” “Bates Motel”). As an author, Tina’s coming of age memoir, Hiding Out, was recently published by HarperCollins and praised by the likes of Megyn Kelly, Fr. Richard Rohr, Rosie O’Donnell, and The Washington Post which said, Hiding Out “brims with sexuality, drunkenness and urgency…a can’t put down read.”

Allen wrote and performed her critically acclaimed solo show, SECRETS OF A HOLY FATHER, in New York and Los Angeles. Based on her life, Allen yearned to understand the complicated and highly secretive double life of her father. By transforming herself into him, she took her father’s journey exploring the universal themes of family betrayal, redemption and forgiveness in a tour-de-force performance.

Hiding Out by Tina Alexis Allen
Sherry Amatenstein

Sherry Amatenstein

Sherry Amatenstein, LCSW wrote a novel when she was 9 – Marcy and the New Girl.  It was lost in an attic soon after, which was likely an appropriate editorial comment.  Her first career was in publishing, where she worked as an editor at various magazines and websites.  She has published essays, reported, lifestyle and advice pieces in many publications, including Washington Post, vox.com, Playboy, Marie Claire, Observer, This Week, and New York. She has published three non-fiction relationship books and edited an anthology, 2016’s How Does That Make You Feel? True Confessions from Both Sides of the Therapy Couch ). For many years she was an adjunct professor in the humanities departments at New School for Social Research and New York University.  For the last two summers she co-led a weekend workshop at the Omega Institute called Women Writing to Change the World with two glorious human beings – including the incomparable Amy Ferris.  Last spring Sherry spoke about Ripping Off Your Mask at the 2018 https://healingsummit.org in Berlin.  For the last 11 years she has been a practicing psychotherapist and lives in Long Island City, New York. Writing was her first and enduring true love.

Suzi Banks Baum

Embodied creative Suzi Banks Baum is devoted to illuminating the gifts within each person she meets and providing a sacred space for those gifts to be experienced and shared. An actress, writer, artist, and community organizer, Suzi uses the written word, hand-bound books, and photographs to say what she means. Her first literary publication, An Anthology of Babes: 36 Women Give Motherhood a Voice, celebrates the work of women artists. Deeply curious about the thresholds we cross in to creative practice, she teaches & interviews women across the world, including Gyumri, Armenia where she leads a book and literary arts residency called New Illuminations. She teaches yearly for the International Women’s Writing Guild, weekly at her public library, and online in her Powder Keg Writing Workshop. Published work includes poetry, fiction, narrative non-fiction, and articles in a variety of publications. Experience her work at SuziBanksBaum.com & in-person in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

Anthology of Babes
Joules Evans

Joules Evans

Occasionally radioactive with a chance of superpowers, Joules Evans uses them to fight cancer and also to write. She’s an author, speaker, runner, road-tripper, photographer, writing workshop leader, and international cancer activist based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Shaken Not Stirred…a Chemo Cocktail (A comedy about my tragedy) is her first book, a literary roadmap of her breast cancer journey. Joules became an activist through her cancer memoir and her work with David Jay’s internationally acclaimed The SCAR Project “Breast Cancer is Not a Pink Ribbon” exhibit, and traveling the U.S. with Charise Isis’s national The Grace Project breast cancer and body image exhibit.

Currently, Joules is working on her second book Why Did The Tortoise Cross the Road? (and companion photo exhibit #postcardsfromthemotherroad) about surviving surviving. The book is about a bucket list road trip she took of Route 66, channeling Mary Oliver and trying to figure out what to do with her one “wild and precious life”—take 2. It’s about life and death and bucket lists and second chances and not waiting to find out you might be dying to really live. It’s about doing all the things you’re meant to do and all the things you dream of doing.

Shaken Not Stirred
Angela M. Giles

Angela M. Giles

Angela M Giles work appears online at The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Mothers, Medium: Human Parts as well as other journals. She has been featured in print at The Healing Muse and is a contributor to Shades of Blue, an anthology on depression and suicide from Seal Press. Angela is also an editor at The Manifest-Station.

Angela prides herself on being exactly who she is: An accidental warrior working to make grace and kindness sexy again. Her full-time passion is her son, who is proof that her heart exists outside her body.

Angela lives in Massachusetts where she conquers the world, one day at a time.

Alexia LaFortune

Is the author of Sex, Love, and Spirit: A Memoir. LaFortune is devoted to the transformative power of the creative arts. With an MA, in Developmental Clinical Psychology, MARI, FAMI, she is a therapist, writing coach and screenwriter. Her personal essays have been published internationally and she conducts creativity workshops nationally. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband – and in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Julie Maloney

JULIE MALONEY is the author of A Matter of Chance, her debut novel, published in April, 2018 (She Writes Press). She is the founder/director of WOMEN READING ALOUD, a non-profit international organization devoted to promoting women writers.  She is a trained workshop leader in the Amherst Writers and Artists Method and holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is a frequent speaker on “Writing as a Life Tool.” She leads writing workshops throughout the year. She has just celebrated leading the 10th annual Writer’s Weekend Retreat in Sea Girt, New Jersey.

US WEEKLY Magazine selected A Matter of Chance as a trending book.  Critics and reviewers are calling this debut novel, “effortlessly readable . . . beautifully written and impossible to forget . . . (and) a remarkable, riveting journey.”

www.juliemaloney.net and www.womenreadingaloud.org

Julie Maloney, A Matter of Chance

Judy White

JUDY WHITE – moderator is a feature film screenwriter, Lies I Told My Little Sister. She is also
author/ photographer of the award-winning books, Taylor’s Guide to Orchids and Bloom-Again Orchids, and was an editor-in-chief for Time Life.

Bloom Again Orchids by Judy White