WOW! Voices Now

WOW! Voices Now, an annual conference at Skyline College featuring women on writing will be held Saturday, March 3, from 9:30-12:30 p.m.

Where: Skyline College, 3300 College Drive, San Bruno, CA 94066 Building 6, Room 6202, Second Floor

This event honors International Women’s Day and brings together students, faculty, staff and the community to celebrate writers and readers. All are welcome. WOW! Voices Now was founded by Marijane Dotson, a retired English professor from Skyline College, and is coordinated by adjunct professor Kathleen McClung. The conference is free, but donations are welcome and appreciated.

Two featured authors, Maw Shein Win, and Lori Ostlund will present, followed by twelve additional San Francisco Bay Area women writers who will read their prose and poetry during the Open Reading portion of the morning’s program.

Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and works in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in many journals and several anthologies, including Cimarron Review, Fanzine, The Fabulist, and others. She was an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. Her collaborative book with paintings by Los Angeles artist Mark Dutcher, Ruins of a glittering palace, was published by SPA/Commonwealth Projects. She was co-editor of Comet, a literary, arts, and culture magazine based in the Bay Area. A recipient of the Creativity Workshops Women Writers Fellowship in Italy and the Judson Jerome Scholarship from Antioch Writers Workshop, she also had a residency at Can Serrat in Spain. Her most recent poetry chapbook is Score and Bone on Nomadic Press and her full-length collection, Invisible Gifts, Poems, will be published by Manic D Press in April 2018. Her poetry was featured in artist Megan Wilson’s mural, Flower Interruption, a public artwork in the exhibition Flower Power at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum. She is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California.  

Lori Ostlund’s novel After the Parade (Scribner, 2015) was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Her first book, a story collection entitled The Bigness of the World (UGA Press, 2009; reissued by Scribner in 2016), won the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the 2009 California Book Award for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, ZYZZYVA, and New England Review, among other places. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a finalist for the 2017 Simpson Family Literary Prize. In 2017, she was invited to serve as the inaugural co-Visiting Writer for a fellowship program in Tianjin, China, one of the highlights of her writing career. Lori has been a teacher for over twenty years, in the US and abroad, and lives in San Francisco with her wife and cats, though she spent her formative years in Minnesota, cat-less.