About Us


MW's MISSION:  To encourage and support writers of all ages, skill levels, and genres in the Great Lakes state by providing opportunities for networking, publication, and education.



Michigan Writers, Inc. was launched in the summer of 2001 when more than two dozen Traverse City-area writers pooled talents and resources to form a group dedicated to helping writers hone their craft and publish their work. 

 

We host regular events where members can meet and mingle, including potluck buffets, workshops, and writers critique groups.  We publish Dunes Review and operate the MW Cooperative Press, which publishes chapbooks by members. 


Once a month we sponsor Michigan Writers On the Air on Interlochen Public Radio,  which interviews local and visiting writers.  We hold workshops on all aspects of writing and publishing for writers at all levels of their development. And we help members keep in touch and informed through this web site and through MW News, a regular e-mail newsletter.

 

Our membership continues to grow as we find new ways to support and enhance our community of writers and readers. So now that you know who we are and what we do, Won't you join us?
MW Board Members

President, Teresa Scollon

Teresa is a native of Michigan's Thumb and an alumna of Interlochen Arts Academy. Her chapbook, Friday Nights the Whole Town Goes to the Basketball Game, was published by the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press in 2009, and her first full-length collection, To Embroider the Ground with Prayer, is due out from Wayne State University Press in 2012. Former Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy, Teresa is a recent recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She teaches, writes, and lives in Traverse City.

Vice President and Newsletter Editor, Jennifer Steinorth

Jennifer began her affair with art and meaning, rhythm and movement in grade school.  She studied dance for many years with the Houston Ballet and is a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy where she was awarded their highest honors for artistry in dance.  She is a builder and designer for a small, green building company in Traverse City, Michigan, and her homes have won numerous awards and been featured in Fine Homebuilding, Northern Home and Cottage, and others.  Her poems have appeared in Dunes Review, Bear River Review, Re:Union, and she is a frequent contributor to Foreword Reviews.  In 2010 her first collection of poetry, Forking the Swift, was published through Michigan Writers Cooperative Press.  Jennifer lives in Traverse City, with her husband and two curious sons.


Treasurer, Mary Jo Zazueta

Mary Jo is an editor, book designer, and publishing shepherd. Since 1994, she has helped writers across the United States and Canada achieve their goal of publishing memoirs, fiction, self-help, business, and children's books. She takes them from manuscript stage to printed books, guiding them each step of the way to ensure the process is fun and rewarding and that they have a trade-quality book to sell. Many of the books she has edited and designed have won national awards. Most recently, one took First Place in Romance and another was a Finalist in the Mystery genre for the 2009 ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards. Last but not least, she is the proud mother of two children who are aging faster than she!


Director, Diane L. Dupuis

Diane is a writer, editor, and publisher whose 30-year career has remained anchored in Michigan. She studied creative writing with Conrad Hillberry at Kalamazoo College and completed the University of Denver's graduate program in publishing. Diane joined the editorial staff at Detroit-based Gale, and moved through positions in marketing and new product development there, eventually becoming publisher of Gale's trade imprint, Visible Ink Press. She transitioned to the nonprofit sector, filling communications and grant-writing roles at an internationally renowned arts education institution in northern Michigan. Her poetry and prose have appeared in the Interlochen Review, and her reference publications include The Olympics Factbook and The Handy Space Answer Book.


Director, John Mauk
John teaches writing and rhetoric at Northwestern Michigan College. He has an MA in language and literature and a PhD in rhetoric from Bowling Green State University. After graduate school, he did some scholarly work in rhetoric, and then co-wrote two textbooks on college composition. He moved to the Traverse City area from Toledo, Ohio in 2002 and quietly studied fiction. He joined Michigan Writers in 2008. In 2010, he was one of three winners in the Michigan Writers Coop Press chapbook contest. For MW, John co-ordinates the Chapbook Contest.


Director, Elaine McIntosh

Elaine has been writing poems, some of them published, since she was 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. For MW, Elaine researches funding opportunities and helps organize writers critique groups.


Director, Holly Wren Spaulding

Holly received degrees from the University of Michigan and from Trinity College, Dublin where she was a fellow at the Oscar Wilde Center for Irish Writing. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Ecologist, Z Magazine, Alternet.org, Corpwatch.org, The New Internationalist, and in the book, We Are Everywhere (Verso Press). She worked as a researcher and consultant for the award-winning documentary FLOW, about the global water crisis. Her poems and essays have received numerous distinctions, including five Hopwood Awards, Northern Ireland's CuChulainn to Kavanaugh Award for Poetry, The Leelanau Poetry Prize, Shaman Drum Poetry Prize, The Current Poetry Prize, and N.M.E.A.C's Environmental Journalist of the Year Award (2003), and she is the literary editor for The Dunes Review. Her first collection of poems, The Grass Impossibly, was published by Michigan Writers Cooperative Press in 2008. She teaches writing at Northwestern Michigan College and runs her own design business. For MW, Holly helps edit Dunes Review and is a judge for the Chapbook Contest.


Ex Officio, Anne-Marie Oomen

Anne-Marie 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.