Write it! Send it!

After over twenty years at the Bronx Council on the Arts, Ed Friedman co-founded and served as the first Executive Director of Lifetime Arts, a non-profit dedicated to providing opportunities for older adults in arts learning. He’s commitment-phobic when it comes to literary forms, and flits from short plays, to short fiction, to short non-fiction, and says he has a high degree of success solving the New York Times crossword puzzle—except for Saturdays when he resists the urge to jump out his eighth story window. He’s a playwright whose work has been staged throughout New York and around the country, and his monologues and prose appear in many anthologies and literary journals. (112)

Martha Mitchell is a graphic designer and writer who’s lived in New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Arizona, Utah, and California. She now lives in Maine, in a repurposed, 150-year-old textile mill overlooking a dam—a home she shares with an elderly hound-dog named Hank and a cat named Professor who alerts her to bats and ghosts. Martha’s attended The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and the Westport Writers Workshop, and took note when her niece Johanna said, “Shhhh, Aunt Martha’s telling a story!” Deciding to broaden her audience, she came in second at her first Moth story-slam, and she’s flattered when asked why her parents would name her after someone connected to Watergate since she was absolutely born before 1972. (121)

Colin Broderick was raised Irish Catholic in the heart of Northern Ireland. In 1988, at the age of twenty, he moved to the Bronx to drink, work construction, and pursue his dream of becoming a writer. For the next twenty years, as he drank himself into oblivion: there were failed marriages, car wrecks, hospitals and jail cells. Few people who have been a slave to an addiction as vicious, destructive, and unrelenting as Broderick’s have lived to tell their tale. Orangutan is the story of an Irish drunk unlike any you’ve met before. Broderick has written a play, Father Who, and published articles in The Irish Echo, The Irish Voice, and The New York Times. (115)

Ruth Pennebaker morphed from being a lawyer into a writer so she wouldn’t have to narrowly define herself—and because she’s always been attracted to low-paying work. Over the years – well, decades, if you want to get fussy – she’s written columns, features, and op-eds for magazines and newspapers. She’s also written five novels (two adult, three young-adult), a book about aging, a collection of newspaper columns, and two humor books. She’s blogged and aired public radio commentaries. Ruth has written about everything from autumn in Texas (which, she says, may only last one day) to marriage and children, from politics to death, from cancer to wrinkles. She’s a feminist, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a believer in science and good journalism, and a Texan – sometimes in spite of herself.