Founder and President - Marianne Monson is the author of eleven books for children and adults with an emphasis on women's history. Her book Frontier Grit, released in 2016, was nominated for an Amelia Bloomer award by the American Library Association. Marianne holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches at Clatsop Community College. When she moved to Astoria with her two teenage children in 2017, she felt for the first time she was truly home.
Vice President - Shawn Deal is the author of over 25 stage plays. Since 2016, he has had 15 original productions through out Oregon, Washington, and California. His plays have won 7 awards in various competitions. In 2018, his play The Map My Heart Created was named a semi finalist in the Samuel French Off Broadway Short Play Festival. Mr. Deal’s plays range from comedy to drama, absurdist to heart wrenching. He is best known for his quartet of one act youth plays and for his collection of magical realism plays. His most recent published play Loopy, a scientific comedy, featured a diverse set for teenage characters, one who has ADHD and another who is autistic.
Secretary - Lauren Mallett (she/her/hers) is a poet, teacher, birth doula, and mushroom forager. She has lived and studied in Guanajuato and Xalapa, Mexico. Lauren taught dual-language immersion fifth grade in Richmond, California. She earned her MFA and was the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Purdue University. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Seventh Wave, Salamander, Passages North, and other journals. Lauren is a 2016, 2019, and 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives on the homelands of the Clatsop and Chinook tribes, also known as Oregon's north coast. https://www.laurenmallett.com/
Treasurer - Meg Green is a retired CPA who has a special fondness for creative people and especially for the Writer's Guild of Astoria. She has many years of experience helping nonprofits reach their goals. She is also an amateur musician and book lover.
Digital Media Coordinator - Flax Glor was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, where he spent his formative filmmaking years before moving to Hollywood to work on large studio movies and television productions while earning dozens of credits in several departments. He has won awards for his short films and music videos, which have played at festivals such as the Cannes Independent and Bay Area Short Film Festival, along with three different films in his hometown Santa Cruz Film Festival. He is the author of Filmmaking Simplified and is pursuing a graduate degree in screenwriting.
Library Outreach - Jennifer Nightingale’s greatest honor, was to have her poem, “Where the Heart Once Stood” translated into the Welsh Language, by the esteemed poet, Aled Lewis Evans and read in both languages throughout the UK. She debuted her first novel, Alberta and the Spark, in May 2019. Jennifer has also had a 30-plus year career in healthcare administration. In the quiet hours in between, she devotes her time to writing poems and stories inspired by the North Coast.
