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Recent Professional Highlights

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Beth Gardiner

Beth Gardiner's book "Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution" (University of Chicago Press), comes out in April. It is a global look at one of the world's most pressing health dangers: dirty air. Gardiner travels the world to tell this critically important story, taking readers from the halls of power in Washington and the diesel-fogged London streets she walks with her daughter to Poland’s coal heartland and India’s gasping capital. In a gripping narrative that’s alive with powerful voices and personalities, she exposes the political decisions and economic forces that have kept so many of us breathing dirty air. Gardiner, an American journalist based in London, has written for publications including the New York Times, the Guardian, National Geographic and Smithsonian, and she is a former longtime Associated Press reporter. Associated website

Jen Reeder

Jen Reeder won The Fear Free Pets Award from the writing competition of the Dog Writers Association of America (DWAA). The winning article, published in Just Labs Magazine, profiled Fear Free veterinary practices that work to reduce fear, stress and anxiety for pets. She accepted the award, which came with $2,000 prize and mirrored plaque, on February 10 at the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan during the DWAA Awards Banquet. Associated website

Judy Kirkwood

Judy Kirkwood's first book of poems, Prelude to a Divorce, is now available on amazon.com for pre-order. At the moment it is on Amazon's list of best sellers for short reads. Associated website

Antonia Malchik

Antonia Malchik's first book, "A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom One Step at a Time," will be published on May 7. The book delves into our relationship with walking from the perspectives of paleoanthrolopogy, disability, robotics, and more; how we lost access to walking throughout the 20th century, and how we're getting it back. Associated website

Vanessa McGrady

Vanessa McGrady's ROCK NEEDS RIVER: A MEMOIR OF A VERY OPEN ADOPTION debuts at top of Amazon memoirs & biographies list Associated website

Jan Yager

Award-winning author in 34 languages published by major houses as well as self-published offering all-day seminar in NYC day before ASJA Conference Associated website

Karen Asp

Karen Asp's new book, Anti-Aging Hacks, was released on January 1 by Adams Media, a division of Simon and Schuster. The book features 248 easy diet, fitness, beauty and lifestyle strategies to help individuals preserve their appearance and health as well as combat -- or prevent -- the most common ailments, conditions and risks associated with aging. In the end, readers walk away with a playbook to age-proof their body and mind. Associated website

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

 

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  • 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
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    – Marguerite Yourcenar
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