Executive Committee

Co-Founders and Artistic Directors

Jack Boulware
Jack Boulware is co-author of the upcoming Journey to the End of the East Bay, an oral history of Bay Area punk rock (Penguin). He’s written two previous nonfiction books, Sex American Style and San Francisco Bizarro. Along with Jane Ganahl, he is the co-founder of Litquake.

Jane Ganahl
Jane Ganahl wrote the memoir Naked on the Page: The Misadventures of My Unmarried Midlife, which is based on her popular Single Minded column in the San Francisco Chronicle. She also edited the anthology Single Woman of a Certain Age. Jane and Jack are to blame for Litquake.

Executive Director

Elise Proulx
Elise Proulx is a literary agent with San Francisco’s Frederick Hill Bonnie Nadell Literary Agency. Previously, she was the news editor at Napa County’s only daily newspaper, features editor at FoxNews.com, and an editor at Henry Holt and Owl Books.

Festival Coordinator

Gravity Goldberg
Gravity Goldberg is the editor of Instant City: A Literary Exploration of San Francisco. She is also a writer and and a MFA candidate at SFSU. Her work has appeared in such journals as: Kitchen Sink, San Francisco Bay Guardian, SFGate, Stretcher, Watchword, and more.

Executive Committee

Alan Black
Alan Black wrote Kick the Balls - An Offensive Suburban Odyssey. He founded The Swearing Festival. He is a bartender by trade.

Robin Ekiss
Robin Ekiss is a former Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford, and recipient of a 2007 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award for Emerging Women Writers. She’s also a 2008 Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two cats, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Jeannine Klein
Jeannine Klein is a writer, a teacher of writing, and certifiably addicted to the reading of writing. Currently abusing her literature Ph.D. by working as a technical writer, she is responsible for a slew of manuals as well as the award-winning Building Enhanced HTML Help with DHTML & CSS (Prentice Hall). Jeannine maintains the Litquake website and is responsible for any glitches found there.

Deborah Krant
Deborah Krant, CMP, has over 30 years of experience in event planning and marketing to targeted audiences. She started out as a circus performer and actress and then spent 20 years setting up events & performances for arts and theatrical organizations, both for adults and children, and the last 10+ years as the Conference Director for NCEO, a national association of businesses who offer stock plans to their employees. She has set up events ranging from one hour to month-long in length.

Nina Lesowitz
Nina Lesowitz has worked in book publishing for over 10 years, most recently for Backbeat Books in San Francisco. Her marketing and publicity company, Spinergy Group, provides a range of services for publishers, authors and other clients who strike her fancy. Co-author of the bestselling book, The Party Girl Cookbook (Conari Press), Nina loves a good party and enjoys a great read even more.

Rosie Levy Merlin
Rosie Levy Merlin, a third-generation San Francisco native, is a Program Outreach Librarian at San Francisco Public Library. She manages the One City One Book: San Francisco Reads project and other programming initiatives. A graduate of UC Berkeley and San Jose State University, she has also been a book publicist at local publishing companies, done freelance corporate archives work and edited the SF Station Literary Arts section.

Kemble Scott
Kemble Scott is the author of the bestselling novel SoMa, the story of twentysomethings on the prowl for thrills in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. He’s the editor of SoMa Literary Review and has been honored with three Emmy awards for his work in television news.

Ransom Stephens
Ransom Stephens is a writer, physicist, and public speaker—the author of over two-hundred articles ranging from particle physics to parenting teenagers. His first book, Fade to Pink: From Goth to Graduation, is available for publisher review, and his second, The God Patent, a novel of physics and religion, will be ready early next year. Ransom is represented by Sarah Jane Freymann./p>

Christie Ward
Christie Ward is an actress/voiceover artist in San Francisco, and has produced theatre and fundraising events over the past 15 years. She has worked with everyone from Eddie Izzard and the Discovery Channel, to Dolores Eats, Maitri, New Leaf, Leap, PAWS, and the Harry Bridges Project.

Production Committee

Andres F. Bella
Andres Bella has been producing Web articles and prose, technical manuals, promotional material, and poems and personal essays in both English and Spanish for a couple of decades. He enjoys writing about cultural topics and is currently completing a novel that celebrates counterculture themes in the heart of San Francisco.

Yanina Gotsulsky
Yanina Gotsulsky is a writer, editor and translator. Her work as well as her translations of Akhmatova and Pasternak have appeared in national and international publications. Her new novel, The Speed of Life, about all things Russian from Anna Karenina to run-ins with the KGB is currently making its rounds among NY publishers. Yanina hosts the Blackpoint Writers’ Collective, is on the board of Interpoezia Inc., an international poetry consortium, is a co-producer of the popular SF reading series Insidestorytime and is the editor-in-chief at Numina Press.

Summer Dawn Laurie
Summer Dawn Laurie is an independent children’s book editor. Summer is also a children’s specialist at independent bookseller Books Inc. where she has started the “Wild Girls Mother-Daughter Book Club.” During the ten years she spent at independent publishers Tricycle Press and Chronicle Books for Children, Summer edited over 50 books. She is dependent on books, under-eye concealer, and chocolate.

James Warner
James Warner is a bibliophile and sesquipedalian. His short fiction has been published in Narrative, Identity Theory, Fiction Attic, Eclectica, and other places. He is an assistant editor at 42 Opus magazine, and runs the San Francisco event series InsideStoryTime.

Todd Zuniga
Todd Zuniga is the founding editor of Opium Magazine and a co-founder of the Literary Death Match reading series. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his fiction has appeared in Small Spiral Notebook, and at various places online. His (hopefully) debut novel is in submission and he is hard at work on his second.

Festival Intern

Sean Castillo
Sean Castillo is an undergraduate student at San Francisco State University, currently enrolled their Creative Writing program. His work has appeared in such publication as The Contra Costa Times and Thrasher Magazine. He is also the editor of Scratch, a San Francisco-based zine focusing on underground music, art, and literature.

Festival Photography

Derek Powazek
www.powazek.com

Sita Rupe
www.sitarupe.com

Misty Richmond
www.mistyrichmond.com