Our Writers

Since our official launch on April 1, 2017, Birds & Muses has worked one-on-one with more than 170 writers in 26 states and 13 countries. We’re delighted to introduce you to some of our writers and their current projects.

Suzanne Biro
Suzanne Biro is a writer as well as a public health researcher and adjunct lecturer.   Her fiction writing was shortlisted for the 2015 Montreal Summer Literary Series Flash Fiction contest, and was runner up in the 2016 Little Bird Contest. Her poetry has been published in Lake Effect 8, and Unlost Journal.  A weekly food columnist for two community newspapers in Ontario and British Columbia for several years, Suzanne writes a food blog that is really more about the challenges of staying married, but with a recipe tacked on, usually for a stiff cocktail. Her story collection in progress illuminates the social determinants of health. She is also writing to discover intersections between science and art, uniting her chosen passions: research and creative writing.  Suzanne lives in Ontario, Canada, halfway between Montreal and Toronto, in the tiny hamlet of Wilton. 
Email: suzannebiro@gmail.com
Website: foodgearhead.com

Kathy Bratkowski
Kathy Bratkowski is a fiction writer and film producer/director. Her fiction has appeared in Old Northeast Review and Drunk Monkeys. She has an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She is the recipient of eleven Mid-America Emmy Awards for her documentaries and shorts, and her films have been featured in the New York Television Festival and the St. Louis International Film Festival. She is working on a novel set in a river town in the Midwest that was the site of an environmental catastrophe.
Email: kathybratkowski@gmail.com
Website: kathybratkowskiproductions.com

S. Isabel Choi
A lawyer by training, S. Isabel Choi is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized with a Notable Mention in The Best American Essays series, her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Slice, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, and The Rumpus. Isabel is at work on a memoir about the avoidance of pain and grief from the premature deaths of the women in her family, only to find that she must confront this legacy of loss and illness when she becomes a mother. Her book was inspired by the story of her grandfather, the Chief Justice of South Korea’s Supreme Court who crossed one river during the Korean War to escape a death march—and leapt into another river decades later to take his own life. 
Email: isabel@sisabelchoi.com
Website: sisabelchoi.com

Melissa Cronin
A recipient of a Vermont Arts Council Development Grant and a Vermont Studio Center Merit Grant, Melissa Cronin’s work has appeared inThe Washington Post, Narratively Magazine, Brevity, Saranac Review, and more. She is completing a memoir about anger and forgiveness based on the 2003 Santa Monica Farmers Market Crash, and is working on her first novel: the story of a nurse who falls victim to a sociopath, testing her perennial belief that self worth comes from caring for others. A freelance writer and journalist, Melissa lives with her husband in Vermont.
Email: Melissa.cronin818@gmail.com
Website: melissacronin.com
Twitter: @CroninMelissa
Facebook: facebook.com/melissa.cronin.395
Instagram: @melissacronin18

Maureen Cummins
Maureen Cummins is a visual artist who has been combing text and imagery in the form of artist's books for the past 30 years. The project she is working on as part of Bookgardan is titled Ghost Diary. The book explores—through the discovery of how and why her mother took her own life—the way in which stories create our reality and lived experience. 
Email: maureenkcummins@gmail.com
Website: www.maureencummins.com

Marcia DeSanctis
Marcia DeSanctis is the New York Times bestselling author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales/Solas House, 2014). She is a regular contributor to Vogue, Town & Country, BBC Travel, Departures, and Travel & Leisure and has also written for Marie Claire, The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub,  O the Oprah Magazine, Architectural Digest, The Sunday Telegraph, Tin House and many other publications. The recipient of five Lowell Thomas Awards for excellence in travel journalism for her essays from Rwanda, Haiti, Morocco, France, and Russia, she is working on a memoir in essays about travel. 
Website: www.marciadesanctis.com
Twitter: @DeSanctisWriter
Instagram: @marciadesanctis1

Deirdre Gainor
Deirdre Gainor has produced theater, feature films, and new schools. She is a graduate of Spalding University's MFA program in Creative Writing and has taught kindergarten through high school as well as creative writing and theatre to men and women inmates in three southern California state prisons. Her fiction pieces have been included in the LA Lit Crawl, Marathon Review, Literary Yard, 13MynaBirds and the New Short Fiction Series.
Email: deirdregainor@gmail.com

Judith Haran
Judith Haran is a psychiatrist and archivist who began writing at age sixty. Her work has appeared in The Persimmon Tree and Dark Mountain, and she is currently revising her historical novel, The House on Rusalka Street. A part-time document analyst for the Nuremberg Trials Project at Harvard Law School, Judith’s writing focuses on the period of the Second World War and the Holocaust. She lives on a farm in Massachusetts with her husband and cats. 
Email: thejudithharan@gmail.com
Website: judithharan.com
Twitter: @judithharan

MaryLee McNeal
MaryLee McNeal is working on Saint Kate’s, a novel that takes place in 1958 at a girls’ boarding school on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, Utah. Three linked short stories from her manuscript Another Wyoming have been published, one nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  She won the Clark Award at San Francisco State University for her unpublished novel. MaryLee has two chapbooks of poetry, The Space Between Us and The Way We Fall, and her poems have been published in various literary magazines and anthologies. She taught poetry in the Bay Area for many years. Now retired from teaching, she lives and writes in San Francisco.
Email: mleemcneal@gmail.com

Mishi Saran
Mishi Saran is an author based in Hong Kong. Her first novel, The Other Side of Light, was shortlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize. Her first book, Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang, was shortlisted in 2006 for India's Hutch Crossword prize for non-fiction and long-listed for Germany’s Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage. Her short stories have won awards and been broadcast on the BBC. She has curated and co-edited two anthologies and contributed to several others. She is presently completing a novel set in Shanghai in the 1930s. 
Email: mishisaran@gmail.com
Website: www.mishisaran.com 

Kari Wergeland
Kari Wergeland is working on a set of linked short stories about life along the Pacific Coast at the end of the twentieth century, hence the title Edgewalker. Her work has appeared in many journals, including The Delmarva Review, New Millennium Writings, Pembroke Magazine, and Calliope. Her chapbook, Breast Cancer: A Poem in Five Acts, was published by Finishing Line Press.
Email: kariwergeland@pacificu.edu
Website: kariwergeland.com
Twitter: @Kari_Wergeland

Patricia Zaballos
Patricia Zaballos is a former elementary teacher currently writing a memoir in lyric essays of the twenty years she spent homeschooling her three kids. Her essays have appeared in Mothering Magazine, Literary Mama, Life Learning Magazine and elsewhere, and she was a columnist at Home School Life Magazine. She lives with her family in Oakland, California.
Email: patricia@patriciazaballos.com
Website: patriciazaballos.com
Twitter: @wonderfarm
Instagram: @wonderfarm