The Morning Glory Project

Cynthia Lim thought she had the perfect life with her family in Los Angeles. A loving marriage to husband who was a successful attorney, a fulfilling career in education, two teenaged sons. Then in 2003 her husband suffered cardiac arrest that resulted in profound brain injury, changing their lives forever. Married for twenty years at the time, Cynthia doesn’t know how much of her husband’s former self will return. In her memoir, Wherever You Are: A Memoir of Love, Marriage and Brain Injury, Cynthia shares her caregiving journey It’s the story of re-envisioning life with disability and discovering the real truth of love and marriage. Cynthia holds a doctorate in social welfare and is retired from the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is a writer, traveler, quilter and hiker. She is currently working on a second memoir about her family’s immigration history from China.

Anita Gail Jones is a writer, visual artist, and oral tradition storyteller originally from Albany, in southwest Georgia. In response to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and the long odds on the campaigns for two Georgia senate seats, Anita co-founded “The Peach Corps,” a grassroots organization that focused on voting turnout in the community where she grew up. In tandem with efforts of others throughout Georgia, this resulted in the wild upset elections of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Southwest Georgia is also the setting for her debut novel, Peach Seed Monkey. The manuscript was recently selected as a Top 10 Finalist in the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Anita is also Executive Director of The Gaines-Jones Education Foundation, a small family charity she co-founded with her husband, Robert Roehrick 18 years ago. Gaines-Jones need-based scholarships are awarded to eligible Black students in southwest Georgia and the San Francisco Bay Area where Anita and family live.

Diane M. Barnes, M.D. is a writer, actor, speaker and retired radiologist. A graduate of Stanford, and Yale School of Medicine, she trained at UCSF and Stanford, and practiced at Kaiser. After a brain hemorrhage, Diane segued from medicine to performance. Her stroke and recovery is chronicled in her first award winning solo show, My Stroke of Luck. Now a Meisner trained actor, Diane studied improvisation at BATS and with Keith Johnstone, and solo performance with Anna Deveare Smith. Her latest show, Not One of Us, about the intersection of class, race, privilege, gender and medicine in her life, premiered to great acclaim at the recent Playground Solo Performance Festival on Zoom.

Myriam Martinez has never been one to keep quiet, but she was born into a Peruvian immigrant family that valued “not rocking the boat”. When an uncle molested her when she was eleven, true to form, Myriam told…loudly. The molestation stopped, but the family encouraged her silence and still gathered for events with the perpetrator of her abuse. She became a depressed, self-destructive teen who attempted suicide. It was during hospitalization after her suicide attempt that Myriam discovered what it felt like to be cared about, heard, and to have her voice honored. She later set limits with her family, refusing to be at events with a molesting uncle.

Lisa Dailey is an avid traveler and writer. In her time abroad, she unearthed new ways of looking at her life through her discoveries in remote corners of the world, and she continues to enrich her life through travel. Square Up is her first book detailing a seven-month trip around the world with her husband and two teenage sons on the heels of extraordinary loss.

When Barbara Abercrombie’s husband died, she found the language of condolence, no matter how well intended, often unhelpful and sometimes downright irritating. In her grief, she yearned for words that acknowledged the reality of what it felt like to survive a loved one’s death and that could unflinchingly speak to the sorrow and loneliness (and sometimes even guilt and anger) that can show up in the mourning process. When she searched for a book that might help, they were all either too clinical or too flowery. She ultimately created the book that she needed. Finding that ordinary language wouldn’t do, she discovered that it was poetry that cut to the chase.

Patricia Maisch is an unlikely activist. She led a modest, non-public life with no desire for a public one. She and her husband owned and operated an HVAC business in Tucson, Arizona. They raised their son, saved their money, and planned for retirement. But her life changed when she decided to attend a “Congress on Your Corner” event on January 8, 2011. It was at this event that Patricia became first, a witness to a mass shooting, then a survivor, and finally one who could not stay silent about gun violence. At this event a murderer killed six citizens, including a 9-year-old girl, and injured 18 others, including then Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Patricia was not only a witness to the shootings, but played an instrumental role in robbing the murderer of the opportunity to take even more lives. She has since testified before the US Senate and dozens of other law-making bodies and media outlets. This modest woman has also been detained in the US Capitol for protesting their rulings, but she remains undaunted, supporting organizations that assist gun violence survivors and work toward sensible gun laws.

Judy Bebelaar loved teaching in San Francisco public high schools for 37 years, where she nurtured young poets and writers in her classes, many of them winning writing prizes, including eight on the national level. As a co-founder of Opportunity I and II, public alternative schools, never could she, or really any of the educators then, have imagined that literally dozens of the Opportunity students would die in the tragedy of Jonestown under the twisted spell of Jim Jones of the People’s Temple.