Executive Director
Nathalie Thill
nathalie@adirondackcenterforwriting.org
Nathalie Costa Thill has been the Executive Director of the Adirondack Center for Writing, the literary organization serving the entire six-million-acre Adirondack Park, pretty much since its inception in 1999. She launched ACW’s most beloved programs including our high school writing retreat, our prison writing program, our Howl Story Slam series, our Raining Poetry and PoemVilliage programs, Kickass Writers Festival, and our Anne LaBastille Memorial Writers Residency.
Nathalie sits on the board of LiTNET, a nation-wide group whose mission is to share challenges and best practices of literary organizations and presses and to raise the level of awareness of the literary arts throughout the country. She has been asked to speak numerous times on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts about her exceptional prison writing program.
Before moving to the Adirondacks, Nathalie received her Bachelor of Arts in Near Eastern Archaeology and then traveled the world as an archaeologist, with a concentration in Anatolia (Modern day Turkey).
Program Manager
Obi Taswell
info@adirondackcenterforwriting.org
Obi Taswell is a poet and educator who taught preschool and elementary school before spending the past several years teaching Ethics and English to middle and upper school students across New York City. They have experience in developing cross-cultural and community-based programming, creating inclusive and accessible literary spaces, and engaging communities through writing and storytelling.
Although they grew up in Maryland, Obi has been coming to the Adirondacks their whole life and is on their way to becoming a 46er. When they’re not hiking or writing, they’re most likely cooking with friends, singing in choir, or reading a book.
Communications Manager
Kaet O’Brien
kaet@indywildproductions.com
Kaet has spent the past several years working in communications with expertise in social media management, digital marketing, photography, videography, and graphic design. She is the owner of a communications and marketing company, Indy Wild Productions.
Outside of her professional work, Kaet spends summers in Saranac Lake with her partner and two dogs and heads south to New Orleans in the winter months. She enjoys all the Adirondack activities like paddling and hiking, but also loves staying home to garden or binge cozy British mysteries.
Board of Directors
Ken Aaron
Ken Aaron loves telling a good story – and helping people and organizations find creative, compelling ways to share the things that make them special. He is a partner in GreatRange, a Saranac Lake branding and communications firm, and has done work for Brandeis College, Manhattanville College, The Nature Conservancy, the Wild Center, College for Every Student, and several other clients. After moving to the Adirondacks in 2006, Ken became director of communications for Paul Smith’s College, where his duties included editing the alumni magazine, Sequel. Before that, he spent 10 years as a newspaper reporter. His work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Adirondack Life and several others. He is an alumnus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Johns Hopkins University. Ken lives in Saranac Lake with his wife, Hadley Kruczek-Aaron, and two children. He skis in the winter, hikes in the summer, and is addicted to crossword puzzles and coffee year-round. http://www.greatrange.org.
Doug Deneen
After years writing, producing and editing commercials promoting WABC7 in New York City and training writer/producers at TV stations and cable networks throughout the US, Canada and the UK, Doug Deneen recently retired as a lifetime member of the Writers Guild of America. Born in Warren, Ohio, he received a BA degree in Public Policy Studies from Duke University. An award-winning photographer, he received regional NEA grants and was juried into shows at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Doug and his husband now own TREES Adirondack Gifts and Books in Bolton Landing, a shop featuring authors, artists and jewelers inspired by Lake George. Twice selected for ACW’s Anne LaBastille MemorialWriters Residency, his personal essays can be found in RA Press publications and Adirondack Life magazine. treesadirondackgifts.com
Dorothy Federman
Dorothy Swern Federman grew up in Philadelphia, PA. and then attended Barnard College in NYC where she majored in Philosophy followed by University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine for medical school. She trained in Calgary, Alberta as a resident, worked in Canada and England, and then moved to Saranac Lake in 1975 when she and her husband Jay joined Dr. Frank Trudeau at Medical Associates, practicing through 2018. Her husband’s grandfather came here with TB in 1908, and his mother and 6 sisters grew up here, so they feel deep ties through their own family and through Frank Trudeau. She has a lifelong love of reading and writing and of course huge respect for writers and the words they use. Additionally, she has a strong interest in Public Education and has worked with ACW for many years in local public schools bringing written and spoken word artists to our local children. Her other very strong interests, in addition to her love of the outdoors, are piano chamber music, Planned Parenthood, and the Trudeau Institute.
Kathy Ford
Kathy was born and raised in Albany, NY, the oldest of five girls, and has lived in Saranac Lake with her husband and soulmate, Lonnie, since 1978. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Skidmore College, with a major in Fine Arts and a minor in Business Management. Kathy retired in 2019 after a 40-year career in advertising/PR with Adworkshop in Lake Placid, where she was Senior Designer and Production Manager, responsible for day-to-day production of creative design work. After retiring, Kathy set up a studio in her home where she enjoys painting with watercolor and acrylics. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the region as well as in Vermont. Kathy currently serves on the Arts and Culture Advisory Board for the Village of Saranac Lake, and is a member of the LPCA Advisory Board. Her hobbies and interests besides painting include canoeing, boating, camping, cross-country skiing, knitting, calligraphy, dance, reading, travel, and she loves to bake. Kathy is passionate about the arts and creative expression, and wants to ensure that the arts are accessible to all.
Sunita Halasz
Sunita Halasz calls the Adirondacks her “Six-Million-Acre Neighborhood” where everyone is a friend due to the shared experience of life in the North Country. She currently serves as a co-coordinator of North Country Homeschooling, a multi-county group of over 900 families who organize classes, field trips, sports, clubs, and volunteer opportunities for home-instructed students. She was a member of the Gag Reflex Improv Comedy group, serving Adirondack communities, recovery centers, and the incarcerated with numerous workshops and shows. Sunita was formerly with the Adirondack Park Agency helping to coordinate federally funded wetlands programs, work with local governments, and review State Land Unit Management Plans. She holds a BS and MS from Cornell University in plant pathology and forest ecology. She is a multi-sport youth coach in snow, sleet, mud, wind, and rain, and sometimes sunshine. Sunita lives in Saranac Lake with her husband, Steve, and their two children, who are very busy crafting their own life stories.
Julie Hay
Julie Hay is a Canadian now living in the Adirondacks. She is currently Vice President of Strategic Initiatives for the US Consumer group at American Express. Since 2001, she has worked for Amex leading product management, operations, and strategy in the US, the UK and Canada. She has a passion for fostering environments to drive connection, debate, and effective collaboration to achieve shared goals.
Julie received an MBA from Schulich School of Business, an MEd from the University of Toronto and a BA from the University of Western Ontario. She was an Internal Board Director for Amex Bank of Canada from 2016 to 2023. She has previous not-for-profit board experience with a theater company from her time in Toronto and is currently on the board for the Burlington Writers Workshop. Prior to working for American Express, Julie was an instructor at Champlain College and McGill University and had her own business designing language curriculum.
Patrice Mullen Keet
Patrice Mullen Keet was born and raised in Saranac Lake, NY. After high school she attended Syracuse University and graduated with a BA in English with a minor in German and went on to receive a Masters in Special Education from Syracuse University.
After moving to Santa Cruz, California, Patrice received a MA in Marriage Family Therapy which led to her thirty-year career as a therapist in private practice. During that time, she became active in the community and served on several Boards of Directors .
After she retired from private practice in 2012, Patrice co-founded the Santa Cruz Children’s Museum of Discovery which opened in 2014 and has an average attendance of 2,000 visitors per month. She retired as Executive Director in 2017 and began writing a dual narrative memoir, Melissa Come Back, which was published in 2023 by Atmosphere Press. She does speaking engagements and book talks, serves as an officer on the Santa Cruz Textile Arts Guild and has been a member of the Pendragon Theater Board since 2023.
She has a deep interest in organizational development and strategic planning, community networking, event planning and marketing.
Andrea Maikowski
After attending Ithaca College as an English major and their first ever Writing minor, Andrea was in the inaugural class of the Denver Publishing Institute and subsequently spent the early part of her career working as a publicist at several NYC publishing companies including Random House, Dell and Oxford University Press. She later moved on to working at several small magazines and political journals. Moving to Central NJ, Andrea and a friend started a small before and after school program in their local school district that eventually grew to serving over 1200 students in 18 schools in 8 towns across the state, a company she enjoyed running for the next 30 years. In 2013, after spending many summers with their children in the Adirondacks, Andrea and her husband bought a Camp on Upper Saranac Lake that they intended to use on weekends, but that soon became their full-time residence. Andrea considers one of her life’s purposes to teach the world the difference between “less” and “fewer!”
Pam Palumbo
In this age of specialization, Pam is proud to call herself a “generalist” with experience in all facets of development and nonprofit management. She has created fundraising programs from the ground up, led capital and annual campaigns, designed both cultivation and fundraising events, supervised development staff, and developed short and long term strategies to build organizational capacity. Pam received her Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Seton Hall University. She has also achieved the following certifications: Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE), Association of Fundraising Professionals, Certificate in Leadership & Excellence in Nonprofit Management, University of Wisconsin, Certificate in Human Services Management, Rutgers University, Certificate in Nonprofit Management, Center for Public Service, Seton Hall University. Since 2000, Pam has raised over $25 million in annual fund revenue and $12 million in capital campaign revenue. Pam has been a featured speaker in the AFP – NJ Chapter program series presenting “Growing a Major Gifts Program from the Ground Up,” and has presented fundraising workshops at Drew University and Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center. For her exemplary accomplishments in fundraising, Pam was chosen a 2009 Fundraising Star by Fundraising Success Magazine and received the 2010 Robert J. Smythe Outstanding Professional Fundraiser Award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals, New Jersey Chapter.
Previous board members
Rob Carr
Bobby Clark
Michael Coffey
Laura Curley
Betsy Folwell
Dr. Rich Frost
Amy Godine
Tony Holtzman
Marilyn McCabe
Jerry McGovern
Craig Milewski
Rachel Person
Deborah Roedel
Nancy Rosenthal
Mary Sanders Shartle
Chris Shaw
Gary Smith
Izzie Worthen
Sherri York
Advisory Board
In loving memory of Russell Banks
Russell Banks was the internationally acclaimed author of eighteen works of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, The Book of Jamaica and Lost Memory of Skin, and six short story collections, as well as several works of non-fiction, most recently Voyager: Travel Writings. Banks was a PEN/Faulkner Finalist (Affliction, Cloudsplitter, Lost Memory of Skin) and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist (Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter). Banks was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was New York State Author (2004-2008). He is survived by his wife, the poet Chase Twitchell, who lives in upstate New York.
Mahogany L. Browne
Mahogany L. Browne is a California born, Brooklyn based writer, educator, activist, mentor, and curator. While Mahogany L. Browne was coordinating the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam at New York’s Brooklyn campus of Pratt Institute, PBS NewsHour featured her poem, a Brief But Spectacular take on “Black Girl Magic” and the struggles facing African-American women in modern society. www.mobrowne.com.
Joseph Bruchac
Joseph Bruchac, Abenaki writer and traditional storyteller, lives in northern New York in the house where he was raised by his grandparents. Author of over 130 books, his experiences include running a college program in a maximum security prison and teaching in West Africa. www.josephbruchac.com.
Adam Falkner
Dr. Adam Falkner is an artist, researcher and educational consultant. He is the author of Adoption, winner of the 2017 Diode Editions Chapbook Award, and his work has appeared in a range of literary and academic publications as well as on programming for HBO, NBC, NPR, BET, Upworthy, in the New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the pioneering diversity consulting initiative, the Dialogue Arts Project, and Special Projects Director for Urban Word NYC, a nationally acclaimed youth literary arts organization. A former high school English teacher in New York City’s public schools, Adam has toured the United States as a guest artist, lecturer and trainer for thousands of students, educators and culture workers, and was the featured performer at President Obama’s Grassroots Ball at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. He holds a Ph.D. in English and Education from Columbia University, and B.A. in Creative Writing & Sociology from the University of Michigan.
Sue Halpern
Sue Halpern’s sixth and most recent book, A Dog Walks Into A Nursing Home, was published in May, 2013 by Riverhead. She has written for any number of magazines–from Rolling Stone to The New Yorker and everything in between: The New York Times Magazine, Glamour, The New York Review of Books, Good Housekeeping, Mother Jones, and Conde Nast Traveler to name more than a few. At Middlebury College, where Sue is a scholar-in-residence, she runs the Narrative Journalism Fellowship, and at The New York Review of Books, she is the editor of NYRB Lit, the electronic imprint of NYR Books. She is also the human half of a therapy dog team, was a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow, and remains hopeful that ice cream is the key to world peace. www.suehalpern.com.
Christine Jerome
Christine Jerome is a former managing editor of Car and Driver and New England Monthly magazines. Her work has also appeared in Boston Globe Magazine, Outside, Adirondack Life, and Countryside. She is the author of An Adirondack Passage: The Cruise of the Canoe Sairy Gamp, now in its third edition. She lives in western Massachusetts.
Christine McDonald
Christine McDonald was the Director at Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls for 33 years and in her time initiated and coordinated the library’s popular film program in 1980. She applied for and received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, as well as increased business and foundation support for the program. She started the Black History Month Film Program in 1999 with the cooperation of the Glens Falls Chapter of the NAACP. She served as the treasurer for the New York State Library Association through 2013, and is athe secretary for Saratoga Opera (formerly the Lake George Opera), as well a as a member of the board of the Glens Falls Medical Mission and is a Glens Falls Rotarian.
Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books on environmental issues, and the founder of 350.org, the world’s main grassroots global climate campaign. He recently was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel prize.’
Ellen Rocco
Born and raised and schooled in Manhattan, Ellen Rocco moved to the North Country farm she still lives on in 1971. She has been at the station since 1980; station manager since 1985. Ellen served six years on the NPR Board (tenure ended about 18 months ago), and has been a panelist for CPB, the NYS Council on the Arts, and other media and cultural organizations. She’s at NCPR because it’s great to do good work…in this place. She has never had ambitions to climb the ladder to bigger, better known stations. She works there because she lives there, and is part of that community. www.ncpr.org
Jon Sands
Jon Sands is a writer known for electric readings, and the author of The New Clean (2011, Write Bloody Publishing). His work has been featured in The New York Times, published widely in various journals, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2014. He starred in the award winning web-series Verse: A Murder Mystery from Rattapallax Films, is the co-founder of Poets in Unexpected Places, and a facilitator with the Dialogue Arts Project. He is a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC, and teaches creative writing for adults at both Bailey House in Harlem (an HIV/AIDS service center) and the Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange in Manhattan). He tours extensively, but lives in Brooklyn.
Bill Smith
Bill Smith, who’s also well known as a traditional Adirondack ash splint basket maker and storyteller, learned old songs as a boy from his mother and from the radio. Here he talks about his early life on the Featherbed section on the northwestern foothills of the Adirondacks, his early musical influences, getting his first guitar as a boy, how itinerant local men shaped his love of stories and storytelling, his career as a performer of old songs and stories in the last 30 years, writing his own songs, and planning for a show— for local audiences and for outsiders. bilsalsmit@aol.com.
Chase Twichell
Chase Twichell’s most recent book is Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2010), which won both the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A new book, Now’s Dream, is forthcoming in 2018. She lives in Keene with her husband, the novelist Russell Banks.
Lauren Whitehead
Lauren Whitehead is a writer, performer and MFA recipient in Dramaturgy (Columbia University). She writes in several forms including poetry, nonfiction, adaptations and drama. Her writings have been published in Apogee Journal, Winter Tangerine, HEArt Online Journal and in selected anthologies including Break Beat Poets, Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. Most recently, Lauren adapted Ta-Nehisi Coates’ award winning memoir, “Between the World and Me,” for staging at the Apollo Theater and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts (Dir. Kamilah Forbes). Lauren teaches dramaturgy and playwriting at The New School in New York. www.laurenawhitehead.com.
Fran Yardley
Writer, retreat director, storyteller, and workshop leader, Fran is committed to exploring diverse ways to use storytelling for healing. As co-founder and Executive Director of Creative Healing Connections for sixteen years, she led retreats for women with cancer and chronic illness and women veterans. Currently she is writing a book, Finding True North: A history of one small corner of the Adirondacks. She has four recordings of stories. franstory@gmail.com.