Home > Our Members > Member News

Member News

Recent Professional Highlights

ASJA Members: To add your professional highlights to this page, go to Submit Member News.

Iyna Caruso

Iyna Bort Caruso completed two Potomac riverboat tour scripts of Washington, D.C.-area attractions. She’s previously written tours of Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Fair, Yellowstone National Park and Amsterdam. Associated website

Leta Hong Fincher

ASJA member Leta Hong Fincher's new book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (Verso 2018), was named one of Vanity Fair's top eight political books of fall 2018 and one of Newsweek’s best books of 2018. Associated website

Lauren B. Stevens

Lauren B. Stevens’ essay, “Georgia On My Mind,” received first place in the Missouri Humanities Council Warriors Anthology Writing Competition. Lauren’s essay, published in Proud to Be: Writing By American Warriors (Southeast Missouri State University Press, December 2018) explores the meaning of home and identity. Associated website

Pamela Toler

Pamela Toler's Women Warriors: An Unexpected History (Beacon Press) comes out February 26. Toler examines the stories of historical women for whom battle was not a metaphor: using both well known and obscure examples, drawn from the ancient world through the twentieth century and from Asia and Africa as well as from the West. Looking at specific examples of historical women warriors, she considers why they went to war, how those reasons related to their roles as mothers, daughters, wives, or widows, peacemakers, poets or queens—and what happened when women stepped outside their accepted roles to take on other identities. She considers the ways in which their presence on the ramparts or the battlefield has been erased from history and looks at the patterns and parallels that emerge when we look at similar stories across historical periods and geographical boundaries. She looks at ordinary women who did extraordinary things as well as the truly exceptional. Women warriors are assumed to be historical anomalies—Joan of Arc, not G.I. Jane. By comparing the stories of individual women across historical periods and geographical boundaries, Toler uncovers a different story. Women have always fought, not in spite of being women but because they are women. Associated website

John Moir

John Moir’s article, “A Kindness While Dying,” received the First Place Award for Feature Article from the 87th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. The article, which was published in Catamaran Literary Reader, examines end-of-life challenges. The piece also received the Opinion/Op-Ed Honorable Mention in the 2018 ASJA Writing Awards. Associated website

Shawna Kenney

I’m serving as a guest editor at Narratively magazine,developing a series of stories for the Renegades vertical, with renegades defined as “Fearless rebels who are doing things their own way — and changing the world while they're at it.” Read the section to get a feel for what moves us. Pitch me at shawna dot kenney at gmail dot com. Associated website

Nancy Peske

My coauthored book, the multiple-award-winning Raising a Sensory Smart Child: The Definitive Handbook for Helping Your Child with Sensory Processing Issues, has been updated and reissued by Penguin Books in its 3rd edition. Associated website

 

© 2018 American Society of Journalists and Authors | All Rights Reserved | Contact Us
  • A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.
    – Sidney Sheldon
  • A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
    – Kenneth Tynan
  • A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self–addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
    – Ring Lardner
  • A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
    – Marguerite Yourcenar
  • All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary – it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
    – Somerset Maugham
  • Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
    – Christopher Hampton
  • Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.
    – Lawrence Kasdan
  • Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.
    –Wilson Mizner
  • Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
    – Flannery O'Connor
  • I just wrote a book, but don't go out and buy it yet, because I don't think it's finished yet.
    – Lawrence Welk
  • I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
    – Douglas Adams
  • I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
    – Stephen Wright
  • It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
    – Robert Benchley
  • It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
    – Andrew Jackson
  • Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.
    – Richard Curtis
  • No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self–deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.
    – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  • There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
    –Somerset Maugham
  • Writing a novel is like paddling from Boston to London in a bathtub. Sometimes the damn tub sinks. It's a wonder that most of them don't.
    – Stephen King
  • Writing a novel is like spelunking. You kind of create the right path for yourself. But, boy, are there so many points at which you think, absolutely, I'm going down the wrong hole here.
    – Chang–rae Lee
  • Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
    –Samuel Johnson