Meet Our Board

Michigan Writers directors each serve three-year staggered terms. An election of directors and officers is held at the Annual Membership Meeting, just prior to the Spring Potluck, every April. The 2009 Board of Directors are:

Denise Baker

Denise Baker is Managing Editor of Dunes Review and Advancement Director for the Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay.  She is also the owner of SmartypantsWrite.com, a freelance writing business serving nonprofits and socially responsible businesses. She served as Associate Editor of Whisper in the Woods nature journal for two years and as Managing Editor of Monitor, Indiana's environmental magazine, for 14 years. Her poetry has appeared in Bitter Oleander, Dunes Review, Whisper in the Woods and Branches. Her articles, essays and e-books have appeared in Trailhead, Whisper in the Woods, Monitor and myriad health, fitness and outdoors websites. Denise and her husband, Andy Knott, divide their existence between working for the Watershed Center and herding their five cats. She enjoys regarding dusk, talking to sunflowers, savoring fine dark chocolate, and swashbuckling at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

Marcy Branski spent her professional years as a high school English teacher and librarian. She has always dabbled in poetry, but during her working years her prose was limited to newsletter articles, reports and instructional tracts. "It never occurred to me to write fiction, " she says. Since moving to Traverse City a couple of years ago, Marcy has continued to write poetry, as well as short stories, and has completed her first novel. She has published one story, Raw Images, and several poems. She is the coordinator for novel groups within Michigan Writers.

Ann Bardens-McClellan

Ann Bardens-McClellan received her Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska, 1983. She has taught literature, composition, and creative writing at several colleges and universities, including the University of California-Irvine and Central Michigan University. She has published dozens of poems and articles in anthologies and literary magazines across the country, and her poems have won many awards, including the National Poetry Competition from the Chester H. Jones Foundation and the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award. She has been Poet-in-Residence in colleges and elementary schools from California to Michigan.

Now a resident of Interlochen, Ann works with visual artist Eileen Paul Millard of Frankfort on book projects, performances combining poetry, art, and music, and "Words and Color" workshops. Canoe Press published a book of their poetry and art in 1999, Stone and Water, and their second book, Journey to the Centre, is press-ready. Ann also leads a poetry group for Michigan Writers. Visit her website at anniethebard.com.

Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown is the author of six collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, and many other journals. She has a collection of memoir essays, Driving With Dvorak, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 2010. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-2007. Both she and her husband are retired from the University of Delaware English Department and make their home in Traverse City.

A native of Traverse City, Michael Callaghan received his BA in English and a Graduate Writing Fellowship from Western Michigan University. Michael's first chapbook-length collection of poems, The Grace of the Eye, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize upon publication by the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press in November of 2005. Michael lives in Interlochen with his son, Seamus.

Bill Corbett

William A. Corbett received his BA in journalism from the University of Michigan (1969). He began his writing career as a newspaper reporter before becoming a freelance writer. He is author of Financial Guide for Catholics (Our Sunday Visitor, 1989). His non-fiction articles have appeared in Catholic Parent, Our Sunday Visitor, Sea Magazine, Argosy, and numerous other publications. Additionally, he served as editor and publisher of two nationally circulated quarterly newsletters. His published fiction includes one short story; he is currently working on a novel. Bill is employed as a Certified Financial Planner ® professional at a regional brokerage firm, and lives in Traverse City with his wife, Deborah Holden. They have four grown children.

Mardi Link

Mardi Link is the author of two bestselling true crime books, When Evil Came to Good Hart, and Isadore's Secret, both published by The University of Michigan Press in 2008 and 2009 respectively. Isadore's Secret was named a Michigan Notable Book for 2010. Mardi is the co-founder and past executive editor of ForeWord and Small Press magazines and was the 2007 Antioch Writer's Workshop Creative Non-Fiction Scholar. Mardi was the featured writer in the 2007 issue of Bear River Review and a finalist for the 2008 Annie Dillard Creative Non-Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Publishers Weekly, The Bookseller, Traverse Magazine, Country Lines, Detroit Free Press and other publications. She lives on a small farm in Traverse City with her three sons.

Elaine McIntosh has been writing poems, some of them published, since a teen.

She has also worked a long career as a nurse-practitioner, retiring so she could pursue her writing. Living in Fife Lake, she is able to enjoy her other passions: kayaking, hiking, and snowshoeing. She is currently facilitating a monthly writer’s group in Fife Lake.

Anne-Marie Oomen

Anne-Marie Oomen is author of Pulling Down the Barn, which received a Michigan Notable Book Award; and House of Fields (Wayne State University Press); two chapbooks of poetry, Seasons of the Sleeping Bear, and Moniker with Ray Nargis; and the Uncoded Woman, a collection of poems (Milkweed Press). She is represented in New Poems of the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry. She edited Looking Over My Shoulder: Reflections on the Twentieth Century, an anthology of seniors' essays funded by Michigan Humanities Council; has written and produced several plays including the award-winning Northern Belles, as well as Wives of An American King based on the James Jesse Strang story. She recently stepped down as Chair of Creative Writing at Interlochen Arts Academy where she is faculty editor for the Interlochen Review. She and her husband have built their own home in Empire, where they live with a large cat named Walt Whitman.

Heather Shaw grew up on a cherry farm in Yuba, Michigan. She is editor-in-chief of ForeWord Reviews and senior editor of Spirituality & Health Books. Recent projects include The Virtue of Wealth by Paul Sutherland, Going Out Green by Bob Butz, Cooks' House by Eric Patterson and Jennifer Blakeslee, and Kitchen Alchemy by Ann Bowen-Jones and Phillippa Lee.