2008 Mesa Residents List

Fall 2008

Monette Tangren Clark, Moab, UT

Monette Clark is a consultant providing writing, editing, and desktop publishing services. Since 2001, she has been literary assistant to author Terry Tempest Williams. At Mesa Clark will be working on a memoir of her hometown, Moab, in southeast Utah. Her memoir will combine the history of her pioneer ancestors, her own story of growing up in Moab’s biggest junkyard, and reflections on the environ¬mental degradation that has occurred since white settlers arrived in the 1870s.

Charlie Cray, Washington, DC

Charlie Cray is the co-author of The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy (Berrett-Koehler, 2004), as well as numerous articles about war profiteering, corporate crime, environmental justice, and pollution pre¬vention. After working with Greenpeace for ten years, he jump-started his writing career as associate editor of Multinational Monitor magazine. At Mesa he will work on a new book to be published by Oxford University Press.

Kim Eisele, Tucson, AZ

Kimi Eisele is a writer, dancer, choreographer, and educator. She conducts com¬munity dance projects and writes about issues related to globalization, U.S-Mexico border issues, the environment, the food system and the arts. She is currently at work on a novel about a post-apocalyptic U.S. landscape and various strategies of adaptation and survival amidst severe economic and environmental change.

Amy L. Jenkins, Wauwatosa, WI

Amy L. Jenkins is a writer whose work has recently appeared in the Seal Press anthology, The Maternal is Political, Earth Island Journal and The Florida Review. She teaches writing at Carroll University. At Mesa she will be working on a book about legacies of Aldo Leopold.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Syracuse, NY

Robin Kimmerer is a professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She has published numerous articles in environmental, science and literary journals. Her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003) received the 2005 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding natural history writing. At Mesa she will be working on Stories of Reciprocity, looking at reciprocal relationships in nature as a model for sustainable human and ecological communities.

Jimmy Langman, Matthews, NC

Jimmy Langman is a freelance journalist based in Chile. He has written on environmental, Latin American and other issues for Newsweek, The Nation and other publications. At the Mesa Refuge, he will be working on a book about environmental change and development conflicts in Patagonia.

Karen Litfin, Seattle, WA

Karen Litfin is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washing¬ton in Seattle. She has published two books and many articles on global environ¬mental politics. Having visited 15 ecovillages on 5 continents, she is writing a book about the emergence of a holistic consciousness in the global ecovillage movement.

Nicole McClelland, San Francisco, CA

Nicole McClelland is a staff writer and copy editor at Mother Jones magazine. At Mesa McClelland will be working on a book about the Burmese refugee crisis and the uncrushable spirit of ethnic Burmese refugees in Thailand.

Alexandra Murphy, Lincoln, VT

Alexandra Murphy is a freelance writer whose work focuses on connecting people and place. For six years, she served as director of education for Vermont Family Forests, which inspired the book she'll be working on at Mesa Refuge. Re-wilding the Working Landscape: First Lessons from a Self-willed Family Forest will explore ways to cultivate a sustainable, soulful relationship with forests.

Deborah Richie Oberbillig, Missoula, MT

Deborah Richie Oberbillig is natural history writer and author of a 2008 children's book, Bird Feats of Montana. Her writing ranges from interpretive exhibits, articles and brochures to handbooks on open space and wildlife viewing. At Mesa, she will work on a creative nonfiction book entitled Halcyon: A Kingfisher's Guide to Acts of Daily Wonder.

Torie Osborn, Santa Monica, CA

Torie Osborn has been a social activist since high school in the mid-60s. She has served as the executive director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Liberty Hill Foundation, LA's social-change foundation. Most recently she served in the cabinet of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. At Mesa she will be writing about innovative "inside/outside" strategies on economic and environmental justice.

Margaret Paloma Pavel, Oakland, CA

Paloma Pavel is president of Earth House Center – dedicated to building healthy, just, and sustainable communities through multi-racial leadership development, strategic communications and media tools. At Mesa Refuge, Pavel is completing her second book Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability with Justice in the Next American Metropolis, to be published by MIT Press.

Jonathan Schechter, Jackson, WY

Jonathan Schechter is the founder and executive director of the Charture Institute, a Jackson, WY-based think tank focusing on issues of growth and change in commu¬ni¬ties located in beautiful natural settings. At Mesa he will work on a book about sustainability efforts in Jackson Hole and the Tetons.

Marina Sitrin, San Francisco, CA

Marina Sitrin is a San Francisco-based writer, teacher and activist. She is the editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, an oral history of the autonomous social movements in Argentina. She is currently working on a book entitled Insurgent Democracies: Latin America's New Powers.

Alison Swan, Suagatuck, MI

Alison Swan is a co-winner, with her husband David Swan, of the Michigan Envi¬ron¬mental Council’s Petoskey Prize for Grassroots Environmental Leadership; creator and editor of Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes; and advisory board member of the Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance. Her poetry and prose have appeared in many publications. She is at work on a book-length essay about the Saugatuck Dunes, a mostly wild stretch of Lake Michigan’s eastern shore under immediate threat of development.

Nina Wise, San Rafael, CA

Nina Wise is a writer, performance artist and educator. Her book, A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life was published by Broadway Books in 2002. She is currently working on a play entitled The Kepler Project: When Science Lost the Soul in collaboration with Ralph Abraham. The play is about a contemporary astronomer who runs into professional and personal challenges due to her radical notion of the nature of the universe: that it is coherent, intelligent, interconnected.

Margaret Wrinkle, Oakland, CA

Margaret Wrinkle is a writer and filmmaker from Birmingham, Alabama. Her award-winning documentary film on race was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition. She teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute while finishing a novel based on the relationship between an ancestor of hers and a West African man he held as a slave. At Mesa, she will work on a non-fiction account of her own personal journey through the tangled racial landscape of the American South.

Irene Zabytko, Apopka, FL

Irene Zabytko is the author of the novel, The Sky Unwashed, based on the lives of elderly residents still living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. She is currently filming two documentaries featuring Chernobyl inhabitants: Life in the Dead Zone and Epiphany at Chornobyl. At Mesa, she will be writing a companion book of essays.

Spring/Summer 2008

David Bacon, Berkeley, CA
David Bacon has been a writer and documentary photographer for 18 years, covering issues of labor, immigration and international politics. He is an associate editor at Pacific News Service, and writes for The Nation and The Progressive, among other publications. For twenty years, Bacon was a labor and immigrant rights organizer. At Mesa he will be working on his latest book Living Under the Trees, in which he photographs and interviews Mexican migrants working in California’s fields.

Lawrence Bogad, Berkeley, CA
Bogad (Associate Professor, University of California at Davis) is a scholar and writer/performer focusing on the intersection between art and activism. His book, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, is an international study of performance artists who run for public office as a prank. Bogad will be working on his next book, Serious Play, which examines the use of satire and theatrics in nonviolent activism.

Ray Boshara, Washington, DC
Ray Boshara is Vice President, Domestic Policy Programs, at the New America Foundation, a think-tank in Washington, DC. He is a recognized expert on savings and asset ownership strategies for low-income persons in the U.S. and abroad. He is working on a book entitled The Next Progressive Era with Phil Longman.

Elizabeth Bruhn Catalan, N. Las Vegas, NV
Raised in St. George, Utah, Ms. Catalan witnessed first-hand the beginnings of atomic testing in Nevada. She has testified and written about the effects of the testing. At Mesa Refuge she will be working on an historically-based novel dealing with people living downwind from the testsite.

Chris Colin, San Francisco, CA
Chris Colin is the author of What Really Happened to the Class of '93, and has written about chimpanzee culture, eco cities and ethnic cleansing for the New York Times, Smithsonian and Mother Jones. At Mesa he'll write about the human dimensions of San Francisco's gentrification crisis.

Robert Collier, Berkeley, CA
Robert Collier is a visiting scholar at the Center for Environmental Public Policy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. He is writing a book on China’s role in global warming, to be published by University of California Press. Before taking his position at UC Berkeley, he was a reporter for 16 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, specializing most recently on global energy trends and climate change.

Ariane Conrad, San Francisco, CA
Ariane Conrad is a freelance writer with over a decade of experience in nonprofit communications, messaging, and fundraising. Her work is included in the LiP magazine anthology Tipping the Sacred Cow, and she has just sold a book about hula hooping for healing and wellness to Workman Press. At Mesa she will be finalizing the manuscript of Van Jones' forthcoming book The Green Collar Economy, which she researched and helped develop.

Milagros De Guzman, San Francisco, CA
Milagros De Guzman is a freelance writer and editor. She has almost two decades of experience as a community activist and recently started a writing workshop for Filipino seniors at the Canon Kip Senior Center in San Francisco. She will devote her time at Mesa Refuge working on her book Sisters in Struggle, Sisters in Victory about women's leadership in Philippine social justice movements.

Linda Faillace, Warren, VT
Linda Faillace is the author of Mad Sheep: The True Story behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm. A champion of organic and sustainable farming, farmer's rights, and strong local communities, Linda will work on her second book, The Right to Eat: The Next Civil Rights Movement.

Bill Gallegos, Huntington Park, CA
Bill Gallegos, the executive director of Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), has more than 30 years of experience as a social justice activist. CBE helps communities of color fight disproportionate burdens of pollution and injustice, and has won landmark regulations to improve air quality. Bill will be writing a booklet, Building A Transformative Economy in California, that will address climate change, public health and alternative energy, all within the context of creating a green economy.

Andrea Godshalk, Amherst, MA
Andrea works in the local food movement and with youth leadership development. Her writing has been published in LOUDmouth, The Resister, The Bullhorn and The Rocky Mountain Chronicle. . At Mesa Andrea will be working on a book about urban farming organizations which are creating meaningful jobs and nourishing food.

Lisa M. Hamilton, Mill Valley, CA
Writer and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton focuses on stories of farmers and ranchers. She has written and photographed for many publications, including The Nation, National Geographic Traveler, Orion and the San Francisco Chronicle. Lisa's first book, Farming to Create Heaven on Earth, explores the Japanese spiritual farming and food movement called Natural Agriculture. Her current work is a narrative non-fiction book, Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, to be published by Counterpoint Press in 2009.

Caspar Henderson, Oxford, UK
Caspar Henderson is writing The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: a 21st Century Bestiary. Through a series of animal portraits, the book will explore animal and human being at a time of environmental crisis. Caspar lives in Oxford, England. His previous books include Our Fragile World (Thames & Hudson, 2005) and Debating Globalization (Polity, 2005).

Mark Hertsgaard, San Francisco, CA
Mark Hertsgaard covers climate change for leading magazines around the world, including Vanity Fair, L'espresso, Time and The Nation. He is the author of five books that have been translated into 16 languages. At Mesa Refuge he will be working on his next book, Living Through the Storm: Surviving the Next 50 Years of Climate Change.

Josh Kun, Los Angeles, CA
Josh Kun is a professor in the Annenberg School of Communications and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He writes about culture, the arts, and music for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other publications, and is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press). At Mesa, he will be working on a book about Tijuana, Mexico and the impact of borderlines on ecologies of culture.

Jeff Lustig, Berkeley, CA
Jeff Lustig is Professor of Government at California State University Sacramento. He is author of Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Thought, 1890-1920, and articles on politics, political thought and the corporatization of higher education. At Mesa Refuge he will work on a book about The Failure of Representation and Crisis of California Politics, and need for a new constitutional convention.

Barry C. Lynn, Washington, DC
Barry C. Lynn is a senior fellow and director of the Markets, Enterprise, and Security program at the New America Foundation in Washington. He has written on international industry, trade, politics, and the environment for more than two decades, and is author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (2005). At Mesa, he will work on a book about the economic and political effects of the massive consolidation of power that has taken place in the industries on which Americans rely for our food, clothing, machines, and services.

Wendy McLaughlin, Point Reyes Station, CA
Wendy McLaughlin is a radio producer and documentary filmmaker. At Mesa Refuge she will be working on her a book about Warren Weber, a pioneer of the organic farming movement in California.

Erik Mueggler, Ann Arbor, MI
Erik Mueggler is a cultural anthropologist who works with ethnic minorities who live in the mountains of Southwest China. He is the author of The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China. At Mesa, he is working on a book about botanical exploration in China and Tibet.

Ruth Needleman, Gary, IN
Ruth Needleman is a professor of Labor Studies at Indiana University, where her research focuses on worker education as a path to engaged citizenship. She is currently completing research on social change educaton in Brazil.. During her weeks at the Mesa Refuge, she will be developing a book proposal on transformational education for adults.

Tram Nguyen, Oakland, CA
Tram Nguyen was formerly the Executive Editor of ColorLines magazine. She is the author of We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities After 9/11, and the forthcoming Language is a Place of Struggle: Great Quotes by Americans of Color. At Mesa Refuge she will be working on a project about guestworkers and the U.S. immigration debate.

Nancy Nichols, Belmont, MA
Nancy Nichols is a writer, editor and broadcaster. Her work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the Chicago Tribune and theNew York Times Book Review. At Mesa she will be working on her book, Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town’s Toxic Legacy, which will be published by Island Press.

Cora Stryker, Berkeley, CA
Cora Stryker is a former tropical field biologist and urban gardener. At Mesa Refuge she will be working on her first novel, Manzanita, about resillience and survival in the post-petroleum era. Set in San Francisco, the novel will explore changes in urban landscapes, economy, ecology, and social relations following the decline of the petroleum-based economy.

Bryant Terry, Berkeley, CA
Bryant Terry is an eco-chef, food justice activist, and 2008-2010 Food and Society Policy Fellow. Over the past seven years, he has committed himself to feeding people and illuminating the connections between poverty, food insecurity, and institutional racism. He is the co-author with Anna Lappé of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen. At Mesa Refuge, Bryant will be working on a cookbook that reclaims the rich, diverse, and “green” culinary traditions of African Americans.

Eric Tipler, Washington, DC
Eric Tipler has spent the last three years teaching high school, first in the suburbs and then in the inner-city of Washington, DC. At Mesa he will work on a memoir exploring how public schools perpetuate social inequality and how we can break that cycle.

Sandy Tolan, Los Angeles, CA
Sandy Tolan is author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, written in part at Mesa Refuge, and a 2006 finalist for a National Books Critics Circle Award. He has reported from more than 30 countries, focusing on the intersection of land, water, ethnic identity, and the global economy. At Mesa Refuge in 2008, Sandy will be writing about water, power and concrete in California and the American Southwest.

Ayelet Waldman, Berkeley, CA
Ayelet Waldman is the author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter's Keeper. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vogue, Elle, More, Allure, Child and many other magazines and newspapers.

Brooke Williams, Moose, WY
Brooke Williams is a writer and consultant to businesses, local governments and non-profit organizations on issues of management, social entrepreneurship, and compatible economic development. He has authored Utah: A Celebration of the Landscape; Halflives: Reconciling Work, Wildness; and The Escalante: The Best Kind of Nothing. He is currently writing about the connection between wildness and sustainability.

Josh Wilson, San Francisco, CA
Josh Wilson is a San Francisco writer and editor with a background in commercial and nonprofit media. He is a former editor at SFGate.com, and a co-founder of Independent Arts & Media, a nonprofit producer's co-op and media/culture incubator. At Mesa Refuge, he will be writing a long-form essay series on public media, independent culture and “the dialogue of democracy.”

Jennifer Wolch, L.A., CA
Jennifer Wolch writes about nature in the city and the challenges of sustainable urbanism. Her Mesa Refuge project focuses on the global “carbon hoofprint” and links between human diet, society-animal relations, climate change and ethics.