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Gift of Freedom Past Selection Panel Members

Susan Straight

A professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Gold Medal for Fiction from the San Francisco-based Commonwealth Club for Highwire Moon. Straight's other critically acclaimed fiction includes a collection of short stories, Aquaboogie, for which she won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and the novels A Million Nightingales, I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, The Gettin' Place, and Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights. She has also written two children's books, Bear E. Bear and The Hallway Light at Night. She sets her novels in the fictional town of Rio Seco, California, a loose parallel to her hometown, Riverside. Straight has received the prestigious Lannan Foundation Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a writer for Salon, the online magazine, and her essays on motherhood appear in the best-selling collection Mothers Who Think. Straight is also the single mother of three girls.

Kim Ponders

She has published two novels, The Art of Uncontrolled Flight, a BookSense pick which the Los Angeles Times compared with the work of Joseph Heller and James Salter. Ponders' second novel, Blue Mile, was released by Harper Collins in May, 2007. Both novels deal with the experience of women in the military. Ponders' work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Chattahoochee Review, and the Washington Post. Ponders has worked as a journalist and as a crew member on U.S. Air Force E-3 AWACS surveillance planes during and after the Gulf War. She later served in Korea and Germany. Ponders holds an M.S. in international relations from Troy State University in Geilenkirchen, Germany, and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She currently lives in southern New Hampshire with her husband and two boys, where she is a major in the Air Force Reserves and works part-time as a speechwriter for the Pentagon. Ponders also writes about current events on www.blogher.org.

Lee Gutkind

“Make no mistake about it, creative nonfiction is not just a genre—it’s a movement.”
—Lee Gutkind

Lee Gutkind is founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the only quarterly creative nonfiction publication, and author of eight published creative nonfiction books including Many Sleeples Nights, The World of Organ Transplantation, Stuck in Time: The Tragedy of Childhood Mental Illness, and, most recently, Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather. Considered the “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” by Vanity Fair magazine, Mr. Gutkind is also credited by Harper’s magazine as the founder of the creative nonfiction movement. Former Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh and creator of their MFA program in creative nonfiction, Mr. Gutkind is currently professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition, Mr. Gutkind is also the Director of the Creative Nonfiction Writer’s Conference at Goucher College in Baltimore and an award-winning documentary filmmaker, a published novelist, and an NPR contributor.

Kim Barnes

“I hope to make the connection between being in the literal wilderness and the wilderness that was something other than physical.”
—Kim Barnes

Kim Barnes is author of the memoir In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in the nonfiction category, a finalist for the PEN Martha Albrand Award, and recipient of the 1995 PEN/Jerard Fund Award. Ms. Barnes is an author and editor of nonfiction, fiction and poetry, whose work has appeared in numerous journals including Shenandoah, Georgia Review, and Folio. Ms. Barnes has published one other book of nonfiction, Hungry for the World, and is coeditor of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers. Making her fiction debut in 2003 with her novel Finding Caruso, Ms. Barnes is currently at work on another collection of nonfiction and a second novel entitled Becoming Paradise.

Toi Derricotte

“Speaking the unspeakable is not hard. The difficulty is in finding a way to make it perfect, to make it have light and beauty and truth inside it.”
—Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships. Her memoir, The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, was New York Times’ Noteable Book of the Year for 1998 and was nominated for the PEN Martha Albrand Award for the art of the memoir. The Black Notebooks is also a recipeint of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Nonfiction Award. Her poetry books include The Empress of the Death House, Natural Birth, Captivity, and Tender, winner of the 1998 Patterson Poetry Prize. Ms. Derricotte is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and she is cofounder of Cave Canem, the historic first workshop/retreat for African-American Poets.