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. She spends the rest of her time chauffeuring her daughter around the San Francisco Bay Area.
	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.
	Poetry Editor Rachel de Baere is a writer, teacher, and director of writing workshops and retreats with long experience as a consultant to a number of not-for-profit boards. She is a regular workshop leader for the International Women’s Writing Guild. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including most recently the G.W. Review, the South Carolina Review, River Oak Review, and the California Quarterly. With childhood summers spent in Morocco and France, Rachel is fluent in French and Spanish. She began involvement with AWWP in 2009, first as a teacher, then as an editor, before accepting the Director position.
	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.
	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 and Minx.
	Editor & Social Network Coordinator Valerie Wallace is a poet who received her MFA in Writing from the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared in a number of poetry journals, including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Waccamaw, and Santa Clara Review. She is the recipient of awards from the Illinois Arts Council and Illinois Center for the book, and was a finalist for the 2009 Dana Poetry Prize. She also leads workshops for the Neighborhood Writing Alliance and is an associate editor with RHINO Poetry.
	Creative Outreach Coordinator Neha Bawa began working with AWWP as a mentor in the fall of 2009. She both writes poetry and teaches writing.
	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. She also is preparing to move back to the California Bay area in the spring of 2011.
	Editor Darcy Courteau has mentored young writers in Calcutta, Arizona, and New Orleans. She currently is an editorial assistant at the American Scholar. Her fiction and essays have appeared in several publications, most recently TheAtlantic.com, Oxford American Magazine, and New Orleans Review.
	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.”