HITCHED: THE FEMININE VOICE featuring GAYLE BRANDEIS with TISHA REICHLE and LAUREL ANN BOGEN with HELENA LIPSTADT

Hosted by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

GAYLE BRANDEIS is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), Dictionary Poems (Pudding House Publications), the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, Self Storage (Ballantine) and Delta Girls (Ballantine), and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns (Holt). Gayle's poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies (such as Salon.com, The Nation, and The Mississippi Review) and have received several awards, including the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelley Peace Poetry Award, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her essay on the meaning of liberty was one of three included in the Statue of Liberty’s Centennial time capsule in 1986, when she was 18. In 2004, the Writer Magazine honored Gayle with a Writer Who Makes a Difference Award. Gayle holds a BA in Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation and Healing from the University of Redlands, and an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from Antioch University. She currently teaches at Antioch and has taught at universities, libraries, community centers, and writing conferences around the country; she is also on the national staff of the women's peace organization CODEPINK and is a founding member of the Women Creating Peace Collective. Gayle lives in Riverside, CA and has a son in college, a daughter in high school, and a one year old boy.

LAUREL ANN BOGEN was born in Los Angeles and has lived within twenty miles of the hospital that spawned her for her entire life. She is the author of ten books of poetry and short fiction the most recent of which is Washing a Language published by Red Hen Press, which will also be publishing her New and Collected Poems. She teaches in the Writers' Program at UCLA Extension where she received the Outstanding Instructor of the Year Award in 2008. Her work has been published in more than 100 literary magazines and anthologies.

HELENA LIPSTADTis the author of two chapbooks, Leave Me Signs and If My Heart Were A Desert. Leave Me Signs was written during a residency at Arad Arts Project in Arad, Israel. Her work has appeared in Bridges, Lilith, Sinister Wisdom, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.