Wyoming Writers, Inc. - 2008 Conference Faculty

2008 Conference Faculty

Robert Ben Garant - Screenwriting

Garant was born in Cookeville, Tennessee. He spent the early '90s appearing in Off-off Broadway theaters (bars) in New York City with the comedy group The State. The State had a three season run on MTV, which led to a 44-minute run on CBS. He then created, wrote, produced, and occasionally appeared in three seasons of Viva Variety on Comedy Central.

Since relocating to Los Angeles, Garant and his writing partner, Thomas Lennon, have written feature films for Disney, Spyglass, Imagine, Warner Brothers, Columbia, Paramount, New Line, Dimension, and Universal Pictures, and Night at the Museum I and II for Twentieth Century Fox. He has written and directed two feature films, Balls of Fury, for Universal and Spyglass, and Reno 911!: Miami for Fox and Paramount. In his spare time, he writes, directs, executive produces, and stars in Reno 911! – Comedy Central’s second or third biggest show.

Ray Gonzalez: Poetry

Gonzalez is the author of ten books of poetry, including five from BOA Editions—The Heat of Arrivals (1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award), Cabato Sentora (2000 Minnesota Book Award Finalist), The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (winner of a 2003 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry) and Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems (2005) and the forthcoming Cool Auditor (2009). (Arizona, 2000), a mixed-genre text, received the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. His poetry has appeared in the 1999, 2000, and 2003 editions of Turtle PicturesThe Best American Poetry (Scribners) and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000 (Pushcart Press).

He is also the author of three collections of essays: The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden Landscape (Arizona, 2002), which received the 2003 Carr P. Collins/ Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Book of Non-fiction, was named one of ten Best Southwest Books of the Year by the Arizona Humanities Commission, named one of the Best Non-fiction Books of the Year by the Rocky Mountain News, named a Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Memoir, and selected as a Book of the Month by the El Paso Public Library; Memory Fever (University of Arizona Press, 1999), a memoir about growing up in the Southwest; and Renaming the Earth: Personal Essays (Arizona, 2008). He has written two collections of short stories, The Ghost of John Wayne (Arizona, 2001, winner of a 2002 Western Heritage Award for Best Short Story and a 2002 Latino Heritage Award in Literature), and Circling the Tortilla Dragon (Creative Arts, 2002). His second mixed-genre text, The Religion of Hands (volume two of the Turtle Pictures trilogy) was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2005. He is the editor of twelve anthologies, most recently No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets (Tupelo Press, 2002).

Gonzalez has served as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review for 22 years and founded LUNA, a poetry journal, in 1998. He is Full Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and also teaches in the Solstice low residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College in Boston.

Visit Ray Gonzalez's web site

Masha Hamilton - Fiction

Hamilton is the author of three novels: Staircase of a Thousand Steps, a Book Sense pick by independent booksellers and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection; The Distance Between Us, named one of the best books of 2004 by Library Journal, and The Camel Bookmobile, also a Book Sense pick.

She worked as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press for five years in the Middle East, then spent five years in Moscow, where she was a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a newspaper column, "Postcard from Moscow," and reported for NBC/Mutual Radio. She reported from Afghanistan in 2004, and traveled in Kenya in 2006 to research The Camel Bookmobile, and to interview street kids in Nairobi and drought and famine victims in the isolated northeast.

Hamilton has taught creative writing classes and workshops for Gotham Writer's Workshop, 92nd Street Y, and a number of writer's workshops around the country,including the September 2007 Wyoming Book Festival.

Visit Masha Hamilton's web site

Rita Rosenkranz - Literary Agent

Rosenkranz founded Rita Rosenkranz Literary Agency in 1990 after a career as an editor with major New York houses. Her adult non-fiction list stretches from the decorative—Flowers, White House Style: More Than 125 Arrangements by the Former White House Chief Floral Decorator by Dottie Temple and Stan Finegold (Simon & Schuster)—to the dark—Saving Beauty From The Beast: How to Protect Your Daughter from an Unhealthy Relationship by Vicki Crompton and Ellen Zelda Kessner (Little, Brown; Books for a Better Life Award, 2003).

Rosenkranz represents health, history, parenting, music, how-to, popular science, business, biography, sports, popular reference, cooking, spirituality, and general interest titles. Rita works with major publishing houses, as well as regional publishers that handle niche markets. She looks for projects that present familiar subjects freshly or lesser-known subjects presented commercially.

Visit Rita Rosenkranz's web site

Katharine Sands - Literary Agent

Sands, an agent with the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency in New York, has worked with a varied list of authors who publish a diverse array of books. Highlights include XTC: SongStories; Make Up, Don't Break Up with Oprah guest Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil; Ford model Helen Lee's The Tao of Beauty; Elvis and You, to name a few. She is the agent provocateur of Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent's Eye, a collection of pitching wisdom from leading literary agents.

Actively building her client list, she likes books that have a clear benefit for readers' lives in categories of food, travel, lifestyle, home arts, beauty, wisdom, relationships, parenting, and fresh looks which might be at issues, life challenges or popular culture. For compelling reads in faction, memoir, and femoir, she likes to be transported to a world rarely or newly observed; for fiction, she wants to be compelled and propelled.

Visit the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency web site

Wyoming Writers, Inc.