New Board Members

Delmarva Discussions is happy to welcome three new members to its Board of Directors. This Fall, Billie Travelini, James McCloskey, and Alice Bahr will join the group steering Delmarva Discussions through rough economic times!

Billie Travelini is no stranger to the reagion's writing enthusiasts. Her literary nonfiction book, Bloodsisters, was a finalist for the Bakeless Literary Publication Prize and the James Jones Fellowship and won the Lewis and Clark Discovery Prize and the Delaware Press Association First Place Award for biography/nonfiction. In March 2008, her book, Teaching Troubled Youth: A Practical Pedagogical Approach was published. On the Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers will be published August 2008, by the University of Delaware Press. In June 2005, her essay "Wholeness and the Short Story" was published in Writers on Writing: Short Story Writers and their Art.

A graduate of the University of Delaware and Temple University, she has earned fellowships in poetry and fiction from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Her paper, The White Gaze: Defining Blacks in American Short Fiction, was presented at the 6th International Conference of the Short Story in English at University of Iowa and published. She has read her short stories at the 7th 8th, 9th, and 10th Conferences. Her recently published interviews were conversations with poets Rita Dove and Fleda Brown. Currently, she teaches literature and writing at Lincoln University and Wilmington College and is a fiction editor for The Journal of Caribbean Literature. In her spare time she works with at-risk teenagers in the Boys & Girls Clubs of Delaware's Pegasus ArtWorks program, and is Founder and Director of the New Castle Writers' Conference.

James McCloskey is the Director of the The Robert C. and Dorothy M. Peoples Library at Wilmington University in New Castle, Delaware. Jim has been key in bringing bestselling authors, such as Lauren Groff, author of The Monsters of Templeton; Christopher Castellani, author of the Saint of Lost Things and A
Kiss from Maddalena; and poet Nikki Giovanni to campus.

He has also guided the library through unprecedented growth in services to faculty and students, including online access to authoritative reference sources, extracurricular workshops for students (and faculty), and partnerships with organizations such as the Delaware Center for the Book, Delaware
Division of Services to Children, Youth and Families, and the Rehoboth Beach Public Library.

Our third new member is Dr. Alice Bahr. Alice is Dean of libraries and instructional services at Salisbury University. She is responsible for supporting the library collection and disseminating academic information on campus, as well as managing Blackwell Library, the Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture, and the Teaching-Learning Network/Instructional Resources Office.

The addition of these involved people will assist Delmarva Discussions in creating and providing relevant, high quality humanities programming for community sites across the region. See the rest of the Board here...