Who We Are

Daniel Bacon

I was born in NYC and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. At an early age, I sensed a mysterious intangible infusing the City, an intertwining of East and West, fog and sea, romance and reality. This led me to create the Barbary Coast Trail, San Francisco’s official historical walk.

I am the author of Walking San Francisco on the Barbary Coast Trail. which has sold 35,000 copies, and Frisco, a novel set in San Francisco in the 1930s.

I am a graduate of San Francisco State University, magna cum laude. I served on the Board of the San Francisco Historical Society for many years. My writing has been published in Hemispheres Magazine, Where Magazine, North Beach Now, Grand Times, and Library Journal. I have been featured in numerous television programs, including Bay Area Back Roads, Saving the Bay, and KQED’s program, Sin, Fire, and Gold! the days of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast.

I completed a novel entitled The Wild Turkeys of Peacock Gap, which I am currently pitching to literary agents. I’m now working on another novel set in the distant past.

I was in a writing group that last five years. It was most helpful. I’m open to joining or starting another group.

John Byrne Barry

John Byrne Barry is a writer, designer, actor, bicycle tour leader, and crossing guard. He is author of When I Killed My Father: An Assisted-Suicide Family Thriller; Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher, which won Best Book 2015 from the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA); and Wasted, a “green noir”  mystery set in the Berkeley recycling world. 

Patricia Cannon

Patricia Cannon has been a Registered Nurse for almost twenty years at UCSF Medical Center and has practiced in cardiac critical care, neuro intensive care, heme oncology, and currently specializes in research. Her passion is her Faith, photography, and the written word in all its forms. Her poetry has been published in various magazines and books.

Judy Field

Judy’s fiction stories have appeared in Birdland Journal and Shark Reef, along with two poems in The Garden Gazette. As a journalist she syndicated travel articles over USA Today Wire Services. She also wrote feature articles and a science column in Marinscope’s weekly newspaper and was their San Rafael city editor. Judy holds a BA from UC Berkeley in Sociology/English and an MA in Radio/Television from San Francisco State University, where she specialized in communications. She completed fiction courses of study with both UC Extension and Writer’s Studio. Currently, she’s finishing a fiction short story anthology, a fiction craft book, and chairs a committee to write the San Francisco Garden Club’s 100-year history.

Hannah Fliegel

Hannah has lived in Marin County since she was four years old and has been working in real estate for 22 years. While sharing her adventures with family and friends over the years, many of them remarked, “you should write a book!”  Finally, she is doing just that.  She is excited to share these stories and the lessons she has learned. She plans to self-publish this combination of memoir and vignettes. 

Anita Garner

Anita Garner has enjoyed a lifelong career in broadcasting, from her family’s gospel music radio shows in the Deep South in the 1950’s to years on the air in Los Angeles, then hosting nationally syndicated shows.  For two decades she was a voice for KCET-TV/Hollywood/PBS for Southern California.  She’s written short stores, a musical for the stage, and blogs regularly at theagingofaquarius.com, a website shared with a fellow broadcaster/writer. She is a recipient of a Marin County Arts Grant in literature.  Her story, Hank Williams Was A Friend Of Mine, won a John Steinbeck award and her short story, Still Life appears in Saturday Evening Post’s Great American Fiction, 2015.  A memoir, The Glory Road, will be published soon by the University of Alabama Press. 

Roberto Haro

Roberto Haro is a retired professor and senior university executive with career service at major research universities in California, Maryland and New York. He earned the B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley. He has three advanced degrees, including a doctorate with concentrations in American studies, public policy, and higher education. Haro worked as an academic librarian, completed the doctorate, and became a faculty member and taught American studies and public policy. He led the team that planned the development of the California State University at Monterey Bay.

During his professional career, he published five monographs and over eighty articles in professional and scholarly journals. Haro served with the U.S. President’s Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for the Spanish Speaking, and as a consultant for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. An American Council on Education Fellow in 1986, he also completed the Harvard University Institute for Educational Management in 1987. Haro was an elected Trustee of The College Board, and an elected board member of the University of California Alumni Association.

After retiring in 2003, Haro started writing novels under the pen name Roberto de Haro. Hs books include: The Mexican Chubasco, Camino Doloroso, Alejandro’s Story, Twist of Fate, Intermezzo of the Longing Hearts, For Nadine’s Love, The Wayward Zephyr, and The Hawk’s Reemergence.

Rebecca Jones

A singer, teacher, writer, seeker, lover, Rebecca Olivia Jones has published her poetry collection, Beachsight, https://www.blurb.com/b/10679609-beachsight, entries to www.writespot.com, written a training manual Sing Right from the Start, a newsletter and blog for her School of Vocal Arts, www.vocalarts.com, a one-woman show, and children’s plays. She received a B.A. in Creative Writing from New College of California and continued her studies with poets Suzanne West and Tom Centollella, authors Sarah Broderick and Peller Marion. In addition to CWC, she is a member of Marin Poetry Center. A native Californian, Rebecca’s father, born in Wales, gave her the music in her blood and the poetry in her soul.

Jean Gordon Kocienda

Jean is carving out time to write the book she has been thinking about for 30 years.  The Accidental Feminist: The Life and Poetry of Yosano Akiko is the true story of a tragic love triangle, and the story of a working mom with 11 children who argued for the rights and dignity of women in Japanese society. It is filled with original translations of Akiko’s scandalous, gorgeous 31-syllable tanka poems.

Jean lived in Japan, worked in the intelligence community, conducted historical research, and briefed Silicon Valley CEOs on geopolitical risk before embarking on her latest career as a writer. 

Deanna Lutzeier

Deanna Lutzeier is a lifelong learner who has spent the past decade immersed in creative writing. She graduated from Emerson College’s MFA program with high marks and earned a merit-based scholarship. “Utopia 40,” a short story created in a Gothic Literature class, was featured in the CWC Literary Review for 2020. She is working on a Young Adult novel under a pen name and various short stories. In addition to writing, Deanna enjoys Hula, ballet, learning French, and volunteering.

Mary Mitchell

Mary Mitchell worked for forty years as a teacher and graphic designer. Now she compiles books, slide presentations, animations, and even ballads to pass family stories on to her children and grandchildren. She became obsessed with genealogy and historical research when she wrote her first book, which was about her father. The Man in the Purple Cow House and other Tales of Eccentricity was published in 2005. It took her twelve years to write. Since then, she has published seven more print books, mostly about her family’s history, and one online book about the Portuguese trying to cross the Atlantic.<

In the process, Mary has uncovered direct family lines to fourteen ancestors who traveled to New England on the Mayflower, eighty-one European kings and queens, numerous margraves, counts, earls, and barons, and as a huge surprise, ten ancestors who were canonized by the Catholic church as saints complete with their own saint’s days. Her favorite part about it all is uncovering the amazing stories of how our ancestors lived so many years ago.

Priscilla Royal

Priscilla Royal writes the Prioress Eleanor / Brother Thomas medieval mystery series. She grew up in British Columbia and earned a BA in World Literature at San Francisco State. A theater fan, reader of history, mystery and fiction of lesser violence, she belongs to California Writers Club, MWA, and Sisters in Crime. Fifteen of her books were published by Poisoned Pen Press. Both “Elegy to Murder” and her seventeenth and latest, “Prayers of the Dead”, are independently published.

Mike Van Horn

Mike Van Horn has a galaxy in his mind. Full of worlds and alien peoples, constantly pestering him with their stories. He has no choice but to get them down as best he can.

He started a short story about a singer who nursed the surviving alien from a spaceship crash back to health. They communicated by singing. This story metastasized into a trilogy, which is just about finished (late 2018). The titles are:

• Aliens Crashed in My Back Yard
• My Spaceship Calls Out to Me
• Space Girl Yearning

Since his main character is a singer, Mike wrote lyrics for songs she performed. Once he had lyrics, he needed music. So he got music composed and sung, and now has seven songs produced. Sci fi with a sound track!

His biggest influences are Ursula Leguin and David Brin, because they are masters at drawing many loosely connected stories out of a consistent universe.

Diane Vickers

After a successful career in integrative medicine, health education and marketing, Diane is following her passion to write.   She is currently working on her first fantasy novel, a paranormal suspense.

Previously, two of her prose poems “India” and “I Remember” were published in 2016 by Vistas & Byways.  She also participated in the writing and editing of a non-fiction book Power Choices by psychologist Dr. Brenda Wade.

Jett Walker

Jett Walker was raised in Long Beach, California. After college she taught school in Long Beach and Compton. She lived in Italy, Delaware, Washington D.C. area, and Aspen, Colorado before settling in Tiburon 33 years ago. Once in the Bay area she attended the Academy of Art. She did a lot of writing in college at Long Beach but turned her creative endeavors to art working in paint, etchings, and sculpture. She is a past president of Marin Society of Artists. Ten years ago she started her first novel. It has been edited and reedited umpteen times. It awaits its finished draft. In the meantime she has just completed her second novel’s first draft. She loves words and is fairly fluent in Italian and Spanish, having studied in Spain, Peru, Mexico, and Costa Rica. 

Dave Oliver

Dave was born near Indianapolis, joined the Navy, married an attorney and lived sixteen different places around the world during their forty-plus year careers. Dave is a former Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, and a former CEO of EADS North America. He and his wife retired to Trinidad to live near their grandchildren. Dave has published three leadership books, two novels and two books about the Pentagon. He is currently finishing a fictional historic autobiography of his mother and is working on a novel involving Russia and their anthrax threat.

Diane Waite