Jeri Watts worked as a public school teacher for 27 years. She has written numerous short stories as well as the picture book Keepers. Kizzy Ann Stamps is her first middle-grade novel. She is currently an assistant professor at Lynchburg College.
Jeri will be a speaker at the 2012 JRW Annual Conference. She recently shared how this event contributed to her writing career.More
Phaedra Hise, a founding member of James River Writers, is the senior editor for COLLOQUY. Previously, she was a contributor to Fortune Small Business, a staff writer for Inc., and a contributing editor for Virginia Living. Her award-winning work has been anthologized and published in the Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Salon, Forbes, Popular Mechanics, and Smithsonian Air & Space. She has written five books, most recently The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter, published in 2011.More
Jason Tesauro co-authored with Phineas Mollod The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice; The Modern Lover: A Playbook for Suitors, Spouses & Ringless Carousers; and The Modern Gentleman Second Edition. As contributor to The New York Times and Sommelier Journal, Jason is also an award-winning journalist and his lifestyle columns have appeared in Men’s Health, Maxim, The Sunday Paper in Atlanta, and Richmond Magazine. He’s also a guest expert on the TBS show Trends With Benefits.
For his testimonial, Jason waxes poetic about James River Writers and the value of literary arts in Richmond:
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In a deep hole I had been living 12 years. And I had climbed up out of that hole, and it was a long way upward, that climb. Looking back is scary: the depth of that hole. We’ll be nice and call it the “cave.”
By 2008, when brain damage had finally been diagnosed and treated, I regained my focus to finish the manuscript of a book begun many years before.
I learned to send an e-mail, and even an attachment, and this constituted my social contact with the world. Then Sarah and I heard about a writers’ group in Richmond called James River Writers. More