Mark Harris
Mark Harris is a former environmental columnist with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and the author of the signature book on green burial Grave Matters. A recipient of the Leadership Award from the Green Burial Council, an international nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable burial practices, he helped start the Lehigh Valley’s only natural cemetery, Green Meadow. Mark is an adjunct professor of writing at Moravian University and the faculty advisor to the student-run newspaper, The Comenian.
No River Twice
No River Twice is a group of published poets who offer poetry readings in which the audience and poets actively interact to decide the direction of the performance, co-creating a reading that is never the same twice. NRT's mission is to connect audiences to poetry readings in meaningful and playful ways that surprise, move, and delight and to promote an important communal experience.
The poets reading at this event will include Grant Clauser, Joanne Leva, Lynn Levin and the following:
Chad Frame is the author of Little Black Book (2022, Finishing Line Press), Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County, PA, Poetry Editor of Ovunque Siamo, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival and Retreat.
Liz Gray, appearing as Liz Chang, has published four books of poetry. Her most recent collection is entitled Museum of Things from Finishing Line Press (2023).
Hayden Saunier is the author of A Cartography of Home and four other collections of poetry. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and the Pablo Neruda Prize. She is the founder/director of No River Twice.
Jan Cohen-Cruz
Grounded in the resistant theater of the late ‘60s/‘70s, Jan (PhD, NYU Performance Studies) performed in street theater and co-facilitated a theater workshop in a maximum-security prison. She taught in the NYU Drama Department for 28 years, initiating a minor in applied theater and rising to full professor. In 2012, she received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement. Jan wrote or edited eight books on socially-engaged performance, most recently See Me: Prison Theater Workshops and Love. She was director of field research for A Blade of Grass and director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, co-founding its journal, Public. Jan was evaluator for the US State Department/ Bronx Museum cultural diplomacy initiative smARTpower and for seven of NYC Department of Cultural Affairs’ Public Artists in Residence (PAIR) projects. With Pam Korza, she wrote a field guide for artist/municipal agency partnerships. Jan has facilitated writing workshops at the Central Library, Brooklyn, and the Bethlehem Area Public Library. She recently taught in Touchstone Theatre’s Masters in Performance Creation and is currently an Art Guide with the Brooklyn Museum.
Jerry Wemple
Jerry Wemple has published four poetry collections. His most recent, We Always Wondered What Became of You from Broadstone Books, is a collection of prose poems about his adoption from a coal town orphanage and being raised as a biracial child in small town Central PA. Wemple’s poetry and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including internationally in Ireland, Sweden, and Chile. He also co-edited, with Marjorie Maddox, Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, an anthology from Penn State Press. A follow-up poetry anthology, Keystone Poets, is forthcoming, also from PSU Press. Wemple also edited a collection of essays about rural Pennsylvania forthcoming from Catamount Press. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Commonwealth University-Bloomsburg.
Lauren Rosenthal McManus
With more than two decades experience as a practicing visual artist, community leader, and educator, Lauren Rosenthal McManus challenges audiences and project participants to reimagine the boundaries of their communities, deepen their sense of place, and reconsider their notions of home by presenting water as the central life-giving element that defines our unique experience on this planet. Combining research-driven activism with material essentialism, her river-centric maps emphasize the innate beauty and universal importance of freshwater systems.
McManus is a member of the artist collective Think About Water and her work is held in several institutional collections, including the Charlotte Museum of History, Agnes Scott College, and the Bank of America Collection. She produced a permanent public commission for Mecklenburg County’s Stevens Creek Nature Center and has led arts-based environmental workshops for diverse community groups in partnership with Studio 345 in Charlotte, NC, the Nurture Nature Center in Easton, PA, Pocono Environmental Education Center in Dingman’s Ferry, PA, and South Hunterdon Regional High School in West Amwell, NJ. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she was an urban livability fellow.
Susan Phillips
Susan Phillips is a senior reporter/editor, covering climate, energy, and environment as part of the WHYY News Climate Desk. She is a founding member of the award-winning StateImpact Pennsylvania website and a member of NPR’s energy and environment coverage team. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004, covering politics, immigration, criminal justice, and education.
She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She directed and produced an award-winning series on gun violence in 2007 called “Life Stories.” In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake and produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania’s gas rush called “The Shale Game.” She’s also won the Associated Press Sandy Starobin Award for uncovering threats to drinking water related to gas drilling. She has received ten Edward R. Murrow awards and was a finalist for an Online News Association Award in 2015. She spent a year at MIT studying climate change as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow.
Susan studied environmental science as a Metcalf Fellow and an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow. In addition to several trips to Haiti, her reporting has taken her to Japan, Costa Rica, France, Guatemala, Cuba, and Morocco, where she reported on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. She earned her M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in 2003.
Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez
Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez is a graphic novelist most notably recognized as the writer and creator of the critically acclaimed and bestselling superhero series La Borinqueña. In addition, he is the recipient of Eisner's Humanitarian Award for his philanthropic efforts via the benefit anthology Ricanstruction: Reminiscing & Rebuilding Puerto Rico featuring La Borinqueña teaming up with Wonder Woman, Superman, Batman and other DC Comics heroes. He self-published this anthology under his own studio Somos Arte and to date Edgardo has raised close to a quarter of a million dollars for grassroots organizations in Puerto Rico via the La Borinqueña Grants Program. As the Creative Director and owner of Somos Arte, a Brooklyn-based creative services studio he has worked with such notable clients as Atlantic Records, Columbia University, Sony Pictures and Marvel. Edgardo is also an Arts Envoy for the U.S. Department of State giving talks and leading workshops in Latin America about how La Borinqueña speaks to social justice issues as a graphic novel. In addition, Edgardo is a curator of art exhibitions having already produced three original Marvel comic book art exhibitions and his very own La Borinqueña for the Smithsonian Museum and Fundación Cortés in Puerto Rico.
Kate Brandes
Conference Co-Director
Kate Brandes lives in the small river town of Riegelsville, Pennsylvania, with her family. Her writing weaves together many of her preoccupations including rural narratives, characters with a strong sense of place, the inner workings of small towns, and environmental issues that impact landscape, culture, and family dynamics. Kate has also worked as a geologist and environmental scientist for more than twenty years. She currently teaches creative writing and environmental studies at Moravian University, where she also co-directs the Moravian Writers’ Conference. Stone Creek is her second novel.
Liz Gray
Conference Co-Director
Photograph by Adrianne Mathiowetz
Liz Chang was 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Exit 7, Rock & Sling, Breakwater Review and Stoneboat Literary Journal, among others. Her fourth collection, a chapbook called Museum of Things, from Finishing Line Press was published in early 2023. Her creative nonfiction has recently appeared in Oyster River Pages, and her flash fiction has been published internationally. Chang’s translation of Claude de Burine’s work is anthologized in Paris in Our View from l’Association des Amis de Shakespeare & Company. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Moravian University (as Liz Gray).
