JOURNALISM MENTOR:
JACQUI BANASYNSKI

JACQUI BANASZYNSKI holds the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism and is on the visiting faculty of The Poynter Institute. She has worked as a reporter and editor for more than 30 years, most recently as Associate Managing Editor of the The Seattle Times, where she was in charge of special projects and staff development.

She spent 18 years as a beat and enterprise reporter, then worked as a projects editor at newspapers in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. While at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, her series "AIDS in the Heartland" - an intimate look at the life and death of a gay farm couple - won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and a national SPJ Distinguished Service Award.

She was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer in international reporting for coverage of the Ethiopian famine, and won the national AP Sports Editors deadline writing contest with a story from the 1988 Summer Olympics.

Her work has exposed a fraudulent developer, explored the plight of Kurdish refugees in Iraq and followed a dogsled expedition across Antarctica.

She has edited several award-winning projects, including work that won the 1997 ASNE Best Feature Writing Award and the 2003 Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Writing. In 2004, she edited a four-part investigative series on the failure of public defense that was a finalist for the Goldsmith Award and for the Selden Ring Award. That same year, a series she edited on the global economy won the prestigious Leob Award for economic journalism. In 2008, she was named to the American Society of Sunday and Feature Editors Hall of Fame.

Banaszynski, a native of a Wisconsin farm village, is a 1974 graduate of Marquette University. She leads workshops for editors and reporters around the world, is a regular presenter at APME NewsTrain and the National Writers Workshops, has taught at API, the University of Kansas and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, and has served as a Pulitzer juror.

CREATIVE NON-FICTION SECTION MENTOR:
LINDA JOY MYERS

Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D. is a practicing therapist of thirty years in Berkeley, California.  She has taught writing as a healing courses to her clients and has trained therapists in this method.  She is President and Founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers and author of The Power of Memoir: Writing Your Healing Story.   

Linda’s writing has appeared in various literary journals and earned numerous awards.  An excerpt of her novel-in-progress, Secret Music, was a finalist in the 2006 San Francisco Writing Conference contest.   She is past-president of The California Writers Club, Marin branch, past vice-president of the Women’s National Book Association, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Story Circle Network. She offers ongoing memoir-writing workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area, and manages her business as the president of the National Association of Memoir Writers, highlighting writing as healing as one of the important aspects of her teaching and presentations. Visit Linda’s website at. www.namw.org.

FICTION SECTION MENTOR:
MICHELE SCOTT

Michele Scott is the author of Murder Uncorked, the Wine Lover's Mystery Series as well as the Horse Lover's Mystery Series published by Berkley Prime Crime (Penguin). Michele began writing at 9 years old as has never stopped. After twelve years of pursuing her passion, she signed her first book deal with Berkley. Her debut novel Murder Uncorked, nominated for a best first mystery award by Romantic Times BookClub, hit the Barnes Nobles mystery bestseller list and the Independent Mystery Bestseller list.  Michele has been featured in The Writer, Romantic Times, San Diego Magazine, and Touring Tasting. She graduated from The University of Southern California with a degree in communications where she studied journalism and hoped to be a reporter. For more about Michele, visit her website at http://www.michelescott.com/. 

BOOK REVIEW MENTOR:
BECKY LEVINE

Becky is the author of The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide: How to Give and Receive Feedback, Self-Edit, and Make Revisions. The Survival Guide was published by Writer’s Digest in January, 2010.

Becky also writes fiction and nonfiction for children, as well as  nonfiction books for adults. She is a book  reviewer and freelance manuscript editor.

Through her ten years as a freelance editor and her more than fifteen years participating in critique groups, Becky has learned firsthand the support and motivation that writers can give to each other on their writing paths. She is a passionate advocate of the benefits of critique groups and the value in working to build a strong, productive group.

Becky lives in California’s Santa Cruz mountains with her husband, her son, the cat, and their most recent addition–a cockatiel named Bard.

 POETRY SECTION MENTOR:  
BRAD BUCHANAN   

Brad is not unfamiliar to publishing, having published poems in more than 120 journals worldwide. His first book of poems, entitled The Miracle Shirker, was published in 2005 (Poet’s Corner Press), and won an Honorable Mention in the 2005 Writer’s Digest Book Awards.  His book-length study of the fiction of Hanif Kureishi appeared from Palgrave Macmillan Press’s New British Fiction Series in 2007, and a revised version of his dissertation is currently under consideration at a major academic press. Most recently, his book of poems, Swimming the Mirror: Poems for My Daughter is a celebration of the relationship between a father and his daughter - published by his own company, Roan Press.

Brad earned a B.A. in English from McGill University (in Canada), a M.A. in English from the University of Toronto (also in Canada), and a PhD in English from Stanford University (2001).  Currently, Brad teaches at Sacramento State University.  He believes that students can appreciate poetry best when they understand its formal qualities and can analyze it as something qualitatively different from prose.  He has great hopes that a return to a measure of formalism in poetry can reawaken the younger generation’s innate love of recurring speech rhythms (as evinced by the popularity of rap and hip-hop).

Brad is an active member of the poetry community.  He is Executive Board Member of the Sacramento Poetry Center, where he also serves as the editor of the Tule Review, the biannual poetry magazine, and as a member of the Sacramento Poetry Center Press’s editorial and publicity committee. In addition, he is the founder and chief organizer of two poetry contests for the Sacramento Poetry Center: a free contest for local high school students and an annual book manuscript contest.  For the last three years, Brad has been a coach, contest judge and visiting poet for Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest sponsored by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation. Finally, in January of 2008, he had the unusual pleasure and privilege of testifying about the importance of poetry before the Arts and Entertainment Committee of the California Legislature.

Journal Assistant Mentors

JOURNALISM ASSISTANT MENTOR:
ALEXA RIVIENDERA

Alexa has been with Capitol City Young Writers as a youth advisory board member since its inception in 2007 and has now become a board member after graduating from high school in 2010.  She has taken part in many CCYW programs including the Master Mentor Program, A Day in the Life of a New York Editor internship program and earned a Writer’s Digest Conference scholarship.  Alexa is an avid writer having self-published her fourth YA novel, Confessions from the Heart of a Teenage Girl, at an early age of fourteen. She also took part in a teen author panel and for the Reading Specialists Council of Suffolk in January, 2010, and was invited to speak about her book and her writing at a school in Westchester, New York. Alexa has been working with published author Shirley Jump on her fifth manuscript, A Blessing in Disguise, as part of the CCYW Master Mentor Program. Alexa attends the University of Delaware where she is majoring in sociology and journalism.

CREATIVE NON-FICTION ASSISTANT EDITOR: KALINA CONVERSE

FICTION ASSISTANT MENTOR:
KELLIE EDSON

Kellie is a board member to CCYW.  Currently, she attends Sacramento State University, finishing her degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. She plans to continue school with a MA in Creative Writing. Kellie is an aspiring writer with a strong interest in going into the publishing field. She has volunteered for the San Francisco Writers Conference, the Maui Writers Conference and the California Association of Teachers of English.  At a young age she fell in love with music, theater and musicals. She was an avid actress in Musical Theater throughout high school. Now a piano teacher, she brings her love of writing, music, theater and all of the arts. Her other interests include her love of animals, reading any and all genres, playing softball, and playing her saxophone in the Sacramento Symphonic Winds.

BOOK REVIEW ASSISTANT MENTOR:
LORRI GOUDIE

POETRY ASSISTANT MENTOR:

SONGWRITING ASSISTANT MENTOR:
KATIE JANE GOUDIE

On stage Katie Jane’s held back kind of manner allows for her music to be delivered in the most intimate way, like a quiet conversation between friends, at midnight, on a back porch. With a sweet sounding airy voice and clear honesty, Katie addresses her innermost thoughts through her music. The unique songwriting style of Katie Jane contains a sound that transcends genres. Throughout the last few years Katie Jane has performed with a five piece band and also as a soloist. She has picked up many instruments along her musical development including piano, guitar, flute and drums.

Katie Jane has collaborated with other musicians and producers in and around Northern California. Her voice has been featured in the album, Chasing Silhouettes, by an acoustic folk rock band called 2me, and her piano playing can be heard on David Fletcher’s latest album, Lunchbox Cowboy. In addition to creating and performing, Katie Jane enjoys teaching music to children. She is currently a music teacher at the J&S Center for Performing Arts and a music director for the Rocklin Youth Theatre Company.

 ‘More To Lose’ Katie Jane’s debut single is now available on iTunes and Amazon.com. She is currently focusing on the completion of her first full length album.  Visit her website at www.ktjane.com.