The AWWP Team

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project works to nurture and support the voices of Afghan women, who traditionally have not had any outlet for sharing their powerful, often heart-breaking stories and their compelling voices. AWWP believes that having the freedom to tell one’s own story is a human right too often denied to Afghan women. The project’s successes to date are due to an amazing volunteer team of creative, energetic visionaries, each of whom has made their own stamp on AWWP, creating and enriching its tapestry. Here’s who they are:

	Acting Executive Director Elisabeth Lehr is a college history instructor and writer. She brings to the AWWP extensive management experience in higher education, the creative arts, and non-profit organization, along with in-depth knowledge and respect of Afghan history and culture, and a passion for women’s words. Elisabeth began her association with AWWP as Workshop Director in February 2010, and completely overhauled and updated the workshop portal. In August 2011 she moved to the position of Associate Director and became Acting Executive Director in December 2011.
	Editing Director Susan Postlewaite is a journalist who has covered Cambodia and the Middle East for Business Week, the Asian Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle and others. She has also taught journalism at universities in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and in India as a Knight International Press Fellow. She began her career with AP, then moved to the Miami Daily Business Review. She was an editor and writer at the Phnom Penh Post and later an AP correspondent on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. She co-authored “Losing Ground: Forced Evictions and Intimidation in Cambodia.”
	Workshop Director Richelle McClain brings business, writing, and teaching expertise to the AWWP. She worked in the newspaper industry for over a decade, both at the New York Times and the Contra Costa Times. With an MFA in Creative Writing, she has taught English and Composition at both the high school and college levels. Given her interest in women’s issues, she has facilitated courses for the Women’s Initiative for Self-Employment and teaches regularly for the International Guild of Women Writers.
	Country Director Tina L. Singleton is an international human rights advocate with 18 years’ experience managing international projects targeted at marginalized populations, including persons with disabilities, women, and survivors of conflict. A nonfiction writer, Tina is a Hedgebrook alumna and writes about her experiences living and working abroad. She is on the Strategic Planning Committee of AWWP.
	Webmaster Stefan Cooke worked for twenty years in a variety of jobs at Harvard University—as a molecular biology lab technician, lab administrator, copy editor, training coordinator, and web designer—while earning a Bachelor’s degree at the Harvard Extension School. He is now a freelance web designer and lives with his wife, Resa Blatman—a painter of extraordinary paintings—and their cats, Grizzly, Minx, and Little Mouse. A current project is Farksolia, a website that publishes the lost writing of Barbara Newhall Follett.
	Editor Katherine J. Barrett holds a PhD in Botany and Ethics from the University of British Columbia, but (love of plants notwithstanding) has turned her career toward the written word. She writes a monthly column for Literary Mama called Mother City Mama, and contributes to The Pomegranate, a site for Canadian women writing nonfiction. Katherine edits profiles and book reviews for Literary Mama, and fiction for Page Forty-Seven. She lives in South Africa.
	Editor Darcy Courteau has mentored young writers in Calcutta, Arizona, and New Orleans. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Oxford American, The American Scholar, The Wilson Quarterly, New Orleans Review, and many other publications. She lives in Washington, D.C.
	Poetry Editor Nancy H. Mohr is a published poet, teacher, and arts administrator. She is a retired teacher in the California Teachers in the Schools and the San Mateo County Jail Alternatives Program and a former Development Director for the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, CA. She has published poetry in many journals and literary magazines and is currently working on a second collection of poems. In addition, she is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her nonprofit work includes Trustee Emeritus of the San Francisco Ballet, the Governing Board of Filoli Center, the International Mental Health Research Organization, and the Stanford University Athletic Board.
	Editor Mary Reed has a Master’s degree in English from Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, CA. She has published articles in Youth! and Parenting for High Potential magazines and the Acta Astronautica journal. Currently, in addition to her work for AWWP, she is doing the important job of being a stay-at-home mom to three kids.
	Editor Lynne Tweardy was a newspaper editor for 16 years in South Florida and taught high school English for seven years. She now works with students with learning disabilties at Barry University in Miami. She received her B.A. from Penn State University.
	Editor Valerie Wallace is a poet, teacher, and editor with RHINO Poetry, with an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of “The Dictators’ Guide to Good Housekeeping” and has received grants from the Barbara Deming Fund for Women, the Illinois Arts Council, and others. She lives and works in Chicago.
	Social Media Coordinator Neha Bawa began working with AWWP as a mentor in the fall of 2009. She both writes poetry and teaches writing.
	Education Outreach Coordinator Allison Hoover Bartlett is the author of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession (Riverhead Books). She has written on a variety of topics, including travel, art, science and education, for the New York Times, the Washington Post, San Francisco Magazine, and other publications. Her original article on book thief John Gilkey was included in the Best American Crime Reporting 2007, and the book was selected for Barnes and Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” program. Bartlett was named a San Francisco Library Laureate in 2010, and is a member of the writers’ groups North 24th and Word of Mouth Bay Area (WOMBA).
	Theater Outreach Coordinator Nicole Eschen is a professor of Theater and English at UCLA and California State University Northridge, She earned her Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA.  Her dissertation, “Performing the Past: Theatrical Revisions of Cold War Culture,” focuses on contemporary U.S. theater that references, recreates, and re-imagines the 1940s and 1950s, with a particular focus on the performance of gender and sexuality. She is currently serving as the Conference Coordination Representative for the Women and Theater Program of the Association for Theater in Higher Education and as a member of the Los Angeles Theater Jury for the GLAAD Media Awards.
	Living Room Fundraiser Coordinator Pamela Hart, a former journalist, is writer-in-residence at the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, where she directs a visual literacy program called Thinking Through Art: Young Artists & Writers. She was the inaugural poetry fellow in 2011 at the SUNY Purchase College Writers Center. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was published in 2006 by Toadlily Press and her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such journals as Kalliope, BigCityLit.Com, The Cortland Review, Rattapallax and others. She’s currently completing a manuscript, Penelope at the Shooting Range. She has been an AWWP mentor since 2010.
	Intern Stephanie C. Prato, Adjunct Board Member and Board Secretary, is a senior pursuing a B.A. in English Literature and a double minor in Gender Studies and Classics at Sweet Briar College. She is involved in the Honors Program and is currently researching and writing a senior honors thesis. This summer she studied abroad at Oxford University. She currently resides in a New York City suburb.

AWWP Founder

Masha Hamilton is the author of four novels and the founder of two world literacy projects, the Camel Book Drive (2007) and AWWP (2009). A Brown University graduate, she teaches at writing workshops around the U.S. and has also taught in Afghanistan. Her novels have been translated into Italian, Dutch, and Mandarin Chinese. As a journalist, she spent five years based in the Middle East for the Associated Press, followed by another five years in Moscow, Russia, where she reported for the Los Angeles Times and NBC-Mutual Radio and wrote a monthly column, “Postcards from Moscow.”