The Morning Glory Project

Along with her dedication as a writer and coach to other writers, Pam Houston has had a long love affair with nature and has been a fierce advocate for environmental protections. Her memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, is a love story to the ranch she calls home and bounty of beauty that she’s found all over he world. The memoir won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Reading The West Advocacy Award. Her most recent work is, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine. She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and Sight Hound, as well as four other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande and teaches at UC Davis and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers and the fiction editor at the Environmental Arts Journal Terrain.org.

Edward Doyle-Gillespie is a walking stereotype buster who shatters assumptions among his colleagues and in his community. First headed toward a career in academia where he could study history, literature, and philosophy, the events of 9/11 redirected his path and he became a Baltimore City police officer where he now teaches community policing, ethics, and counterterrorism. In his department Ed found that he neither fit the stereotype of what many would presume a Black man in Baltimore might be, nor does he fit many of the stereotypes of police officers in general. Neither fish, nor fowl, Ed has chosen to learn, to grow, and to bring his own values and experiences to his work in his day job at the police academy, which still fulfills that original mission of protecting people from bad guys, while still writing and publishing poetry including Masala Tea and Oranges and On the Later Addition of Sancho Panza.

Terry Sue Harms is the author of her third book, a remarkable accomplishment for a woman who didn’t start reading until she was in her early twenties. This new release is a memoir titled The Strongbox. In it, she reveals the grit, tenacity, and courage it took to not only tackle her reading disability but also to find her absent biological father and face his rejections. Terry Sue didn’t begin writing until she was in her forties, but she’d been hairdressing since she was a teenager, and it’s the intimate story-telling nature of that profession that has fueled her personable, candid, and compelling writing style.

At age forty, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect the well-crafted myth of her famous family? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth? In her memoir, Poetic License, Cherington candidly retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. She examines what she calls both the gifts and the harms of her growing up surrounded by the literati of her era and with a father who violated the boundaries of good fatherhood. From the Women’s Movement in the ‘60s to the #MeToo era, she tells the story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.

Angela Alioto is a legal and political lioness who has taken her family’s political legacy and made it her own. Fighting for health, opportunity, justice, and the environment, she has served both in the political arena and the courtroom. Her memoir, Straight to the Heart, covers her eight years in San Francisco politics and is appropriately based on Dante’s Inferno.

Carmen Martines, having survived sexual abuse traumas in childhood, re-storied her body using tattoos, transforming the pain and abuse into a narrative of power and reclamation, transformation, strength and joy. Carmen is also a psychotherapist, practicing in San Francisco and a lifelong writer, poet, and storyteller.

Dr. Adiel Uzabakiriho was in the U.S. in 1994 attending college when civil war and an ensuing genocide broke out in his home country of Rwanda. He would eventually learn that many in his own family and many more in his community had been murdered and his dreams of returning home were dashed. His dreams of becoming a doctor were also thwarted because, despite seven surgeries, he lost his sight. Refusing to succumb to hopelessness, Adiel has made seeking joy, community, and optimism a practice, providing inspiration to those around him.

Nina G grew up thinking she was dumb because of both her stutter and learning disabilities. But she claimed her experience and turned it into stand-up comedy and becoming—perhaps ironically—a much in-demand conference and keynote speaker, a TEDx talker, and Huffington Post contributor. Her memoir, Stutterer Interrupted The Comedian Who Almost Didn’t Happen tells of her determined journey to find, and share, her voice.

Be brave. Be Kind. Fight fires. That’s the motto of firefighters like Hersch Wilson who spend their lives walking toward, rather than away from danger and suffering. In his new memoir, Firefighter Zen, Hersch shares the Zen-like techniques that allow people like him to stay grounded while navigating danger, comforting others, and coping with their personal responses to whatever unexpected, unwelcomed crises they’re called upon to face. His belief is that it is how we cope with those inevitable events—more than the events themselves—that defines the quality of our lives.

Magalí Morales is a mother, writer, spiritual counselor and bridge builder. She brings her Mexican and Guatemalan history, heritage, and experience to bear in her eco-activism. She believes that there is nothing more important than restoring health to our planet and that this healing will require ancient knowledge, modern technologies, and spiritual healing. Listen in for this dynamic, no-holds-barred perspective on love, spirit, and saving the planet.