PRESIDENT

Heidi Wakeman has been writing and evaluating since the fifth grade, when each day in her diary received a letter grade. These days she is less interested in grading, and more interested in gratitude. Heidi is an educator, poet, naturalist, community activist, Gen-Xer, feminist, mother, wife, recovering perfectionist. Her pandemic quote is, “Let’s not waste a good crisis.”

VICE PRESIDENT

Mary Baine Campbell is Professor of English Emeritus at Brandeis University, where she taught medieval and early modern literature and directed the Creative Writing program. She is the author of The Witness and the Other World: European Travel Writing 400-1600, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for the Best Book of 2001), and two books of poetry. She has held research fellowships at Brown and Columbia Universities, the National Humanities Center (US), the Max Planck Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, and Birbeck College, University of London.

A founding partner of Cohan Rasnick Plaut LLP, Bob Cohan’s practice focuses on complex business disputes. He has been selected as a Massachusetts Super Lawyer each year since 2011. He is a former Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General, a past lecturer for Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education’s Business Litigation Conference, and the author of significant articles on the subject of business litigation. He has taught and lectured in the areas of business and consumer law. He is also a past member of the Executive Board of the Boston Inn of Court. He is past co-chair of Jewish National Fund’s Lawyers for Israel and currently serves as their national co-chair of the Spectacular Sunday telethon. Bob joined the GWC board in 2022 and was a friend of Vincent Ferrini.

JoeAnn Hart is the author of the novel Arroyo Circle, forthcoming from Green Writers Press in October 2024. Other books include the prize-winning collection Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, the crime memoir Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, as well as Float, a dark comedy about plastics, and Addled, a social satire. Her short fiction and essays have been widely published, appearing in Slate.com, Orion, The Hopper, Prairie Schooner, The Sonora Review, Terrain.org, and many others. Her work explores the relationship between humans, their environments, and the more-than-human world.

Joseph Rukeyser is a short story writer whose work appears regularly in the Catfish Review, an online website. A former university professor and health and medical writer, he is the author of numerous patient and clinical education articles and texts. He has five children and has lived in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in New York City and now lives and writes in Rockport, Massachusetts, with his wife and two cats.