meet our instructors
instructor bios
A - F
- Marilyn Atlas
An award-winning producer and personal
manager, Marilyn R. Atlas is equally at home in the worlds of
film, television, and live theater. Among her credits as film producer
are “Real Women Have Curves” for HBO, which won the Audience Award
at the Sundance Film Festival, “A Certain Desire,” starring Sam
Waterson, and “Echoes,” which won the Gold Award at the 1991 Texas
International Film Festival. In addition to producing a variety of programming
for the cable/ pay TV market, Marilyn has served as a production consultant
on the film “Call Me.” She was also involved as a producer in the
development of the MOW “Nightwalker” and “Playing for Keeps. Marilyn
has served as Casting Director for feature films, including John Frankenheimer’s
“The Equals” and “The Whiz.” She is a founding member of Women
in Film’s Luminas Committee which supports the portrayal of women
in non-stereotypical roles in film and television. Along with director
and actress Dorothy Lyman, Marilyn founded ADT, a director’s theatre,
and served on its advisory board. Marilyn is a member of
NALIP, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. She
has spoken at their Writers’ and Producers’ retreats, the DGA-sponsored
LA Asian Film Festival, as well as various other symposia and universities
across the country. In addition to Marilyn’s film/TV credits,
she has sold the novels “Chasing the Jaguar” to HarperCollins “Hungry
Woman in Paris” to Grand Central Publishing, and the “Ave Maria
Bed & Breakfast” to Hachette Publishing. Marilyn is committed
to projects that reflect diversity and the portrayal of non –stereotypical
characters.
- Ben Berman
Ben Berman has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He has received honors from the New England Poetry Club and is a recipient of a 2008 Poetry Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and has poems published in Salamander, The Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Connecticut Review and other journals, as well. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and high school English teacher, he now coaches Humanities teachers in the Boston Public Schools.- Christopher Boginski
Christopher Boginski is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the University of Washington, where he taught creative writing and English as a second language and where he was a research assistant for David Shields. He lives in Boston and is in the process of finishing his first book, a memoir that explores the influence of the past upon the present in everyone from himself to Camus.
- Lisa Borders
Lisa Borders' first novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, was chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing's Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel and was published in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land also received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her essay "Enchanted Night" was published in Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Lisa has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, CrossConnect and other journals. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and residencies at Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. She was also a visiting writer at the University of Pennsylvania. Lisa holds an MA in Creative Writing from Temple University in Philadelphia, where she taught undergraduate writing. More information on Lisa and her work is available at lisaborders.com.- Stace Budzko
Stace Budzko has recently been published in Southeast Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Long Story Short, The Binnacle, Diner, and has work forthcoming in Quick Fiction. His work can be found in Norton's Flash Fiction Forward and Rose Metal Press' Brevity and Echo Anthology. He was a finalist for the Raymond Carver Short Story Award as well as the 2006 Richard Yates' Short Story Award and World's Best Short-Short Story. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College where he currently teaches writing. In addition, he is the writer-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. At present, he is working on his first novel.- Glenna Collett
Glenna Collett is a book designer
whose work can be seen at www.glennacollettdesign.com.
- John Cotter
John Cotter's first novel, Under the Small Lights, was published in the summer of 2010 by Miami University Press. He is a founding editor of the online arts magazine Open Letters Monthly and has published short fiction in Hanging Loose, Lifted Brow, Lost, and genre fiction in New Genre (forthcoming) and Lifted Brow.
- Elaine Dimopoulos
Elaine Dimopoulos is currently serving as the 2010-2011 Boston Public Library Children’s Writer-in-Residence. While in residence, she will complete her second novel, a dystopia for young adults called Eco-Chic. Elaine is an instructor of children's literature at Boston University and has lectured at Simmons College. In 2008, she received an Emerging Artist Grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation to conduct research for her first novel, Scratching the Stillness. She is a graduate of Yale, Columbia, and most recently, Simmons College, where she earned an M.F.A. in Writing for Children. To learn more about Elaine, visit elainedimopoulos.com.- Hallie Ephron
Hallie Ephron came to writing after careers as a teacher and marketing copywriter, and has been making up for lost time. She’s published six novels, including her latest Never Tell A Lie (2009) which was nominated for several awards including the Mary Higgins Clark Award. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly called it “stunning” and a “deliciously creepy tale of obsession.” Her new novel, Come and Find Me, is due out in winter 2011 from Wm. Morrow. She is also the crime fiction book reviewer for the Boston Globe, and the author of two books about books, including The Bibliophile’s Devotional. Her book on mystery writing was a finalist for both the Edgar and Anthony awards.- Sorche Fairbank
Since establishing Fairbank Literary Representation in 2002, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank has had the pleasure of working with a dynamic and varied list, representing best-selling authors, Edgar recipients, award-winning journalists, and of course one of her favorite kinds of client -- the first-time author. Her tastes in novels tend toward literary fiction, international voices and women's voices, and the mystery/suspense genre. On the nonfiction side, she is most likely to take on books that tackle current events and societal issues with a narrative treatment. She has a strong interest in women's voices and class and race issues, quality lifestyle books (food, wine, and home design), sports, memoir, humor, and pop culture. And to date, she has signed on three terrific clients through Grub Street, with more certain to follow.
Subjects and genres not of interest by Sorche and Fairbank Literary include: sci-fi and fantasy, children's and YA, self-help, romance, sports fiction, and generally anything that opens with a dream scene and/or exhaustive descriptions of weather. Unless, of course, it's really really really good.
Notable authors and books represented by Fairbank Literary include: O. Henry Prize winner Charlotte Forbes; Pulitzer nominee and LA Times Cairo Bureau Chief Jeffrey Fleishman; Matthew Frederick and his best-selling 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School; Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development and author of Solar Revolution; Darci Klein's To Full Term, A Mother's Triumph Over Miscarriage; Jonathan McCullough's A Tale Of Two Subs: An Untold Story Of World War II, Two Sister Ships, And Extraordinary Heroism; the estate of Robin Moore (The French Connection, The Green Berets, etc.); Xaviera Hollander (The Happy Hooker); syndicated cartoonist Man Martin (Days of the Endless Corvette); Edgar-winning mystery writer and host of Anatomy Of A Mystery, Rex Burns; and Robert McKinnon, founder of Yellow Brick Road and editor of the forthcoming Legacy: Today's Leaders on Tomorrow's World, a collection of essays by such luminaries as Al Gore, Paul Simon, Mia Hamm, Richard Louv, and others.
Updated information on Sorche Fairbank and Fairbank Literary, their clients, and recent deals can be found at www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/SorcheFairbank- Mark Fogarty
Mark Fogarty is the president and Co-founder of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative (RIFC), a non-profit created to help local filmmakers find resources in the Ocean State. The RIFC has more than 1,900 members and has been involved in the production of dozens of films. For more information, visit www.rifcfilms.com. Mark started Exile Movies in 2003 and has worked as a director of photography and editor on feature-length and short films. Mark recently directed the feature-length epic, smalltown, from his screenplay. You can find out more about the film at www.smalltownmovie.com. As an actor, Mark has been in dozens of films and uses his knowledge of acting to inform his writing. Mark graduated from Emerson College with a degree in filmmaking, and works as a freelance editor and writer. - Rebecca Morgan Frank
Rebecca Morgan Frank’s first book, Little Murders Everywhere, is forthcoming from the Irish press Salmon Poetry, and her second manuscript was selected by Marilyn Hacker as the winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2010 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress. Her poems have appeared in Guernica, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Best New Poets 2008, and elsewhere. A graduate of Vassar and Emerson Colleges, she has received fellowships and scholarships from such places as the Virgina Center for Creative Arts, the Writers' Room of Boston, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and she is currently completing her PhD in creative writing and literature through an Elliston fellowship at the University of Cincinnati. She has taught at Emerson and Emmanuel Colleges and currently teaches writing to visual artists in MassArt's low residency MFA program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She also serves as editor-in-chief of the online magazine Memorious.org, which she co-founded in 2004. - Matthew Frederick
Bio coming!
