Rose Alexandre-Leach is our senior editor and sometimes writer from Vermont. Her work is at the junctures of science and stories. Previously, she was the editor of a history magazine, an educator, a gardener, and a baker. Rose graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in biology. Rose also leads Green Sprouts (Green Writers Press), where she acquires and edits picture books, middle-grade novels, and young adult fiction that reflect GWP’s environmental mission. Rose is trained as a biologist; her work with words is informed and inspired by her time in the outdoors and as a teacher, and particularly by the magic of the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine. Previously, Rose served as a nonfiction editor at Mud Season Review and worked to develop a creative elementary science curriculum. Among many favorites, GWP has proudly published Yuan Pan’s The Last Goodbye, a finalist of the Bologna Book Fair’s Silent Book Contest, and three books honored by the Green Earth Book Awards: Katy Farber’s The Order of the Trees and Salamander Sky, and the Josie Goes Green series. Rose’s adult literature work at GWP is (legendary!) and includes many of our award-winning authors, such as M Jackson, Jonathan Howland, and Barbara Newman. Born and raised on the river in Vermont, Rose now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Kate Baldwin (Poetry Editor) comes to GWP with a love of poetry, fiction, and beautiful handheld books. In addition to editing at GWP, Kate works one-on-one with authors and leads creative writing workshops in her hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Her own poems and essays have appeared in The Maine Review, Hunger Mountain, Soundings East, and The Larcom Review. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MEd from Lesley University, and is an alum of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, but her deepest education comes from a lifetime of reading wonderful books.
Reid Bartholomew (Editorial Assistant/GWP Fellowship) works in marketing in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his MA in Asian Studies with a specialization in Translation studies from the University of Oregon, where he primarily studied contemporary Japanese literature and culture. He’s drawn to stories that take liberties with reality in illuminating ways and is particularly fascinated with explorations of space and place. He spends much of his spare time in the outdoors: hiking, gardening, running and climbing.
Frances Cannon (Editor) is a writer, editor, educator, and artist. She recently served as the Managing Director of the Sundog Poetry Center in Vermont. She has taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Champlain College, the Vermont Commons School, the University of Iowa, and as a visiting lecturer at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA in poetry and printmaking from the University of Vermont. Her published books include Walter Benjamin: Reimagined, MIT Press, The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank, Gold Wake Press, Tropicalia, Vagabond Press, Predator/Play, Ethel Press, Uranian Fruit, Honeybee Press, Sagittaria, Bottlecap Press, and Image Burn, a self-published art book. She has worked for The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Believer, and The Lucky Peach. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Poetry Northwest, The Iowa Review, The Green Mountain Review, Vice, Lithub, The Moscow Times, The Examined Life Journal, Gastronomica, Electric Lit, Edible magazine, Mount Island, Fourth Genre, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Website: frankyfrancescannon.com
Dede Cummings is a writer, book designer, and publisher; founder of GWP. In 2013, she attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and in 2014, she taught a class at the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. In 2016, she was awarded a partial fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center where she spent a month working on her own poetry. Dede attended Middlebury College, where she discovered cross-country skiing, majored in English and was a recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award for Poetry. In 1978, she was a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Undergraduate Fellow (where she was a waiter for the authors’ table that included delivering tea daily to Toni Morrison!). In 1991, she received an award to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. Dede has had her poetry published in Mademoiselle magazine, The Lake (along with an essay about Maxine Kumin), Connotation Press, Green Mountains Review, and other magazines and journals. Dede’s first poetry collection, To Look Out From, was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize (April 2017). Her second poetry collection, The Meeting Place, was published in the spring of 2020 by Salmon Poetry. Throughout the 1980s, Dede worked at Little, Brown & Company, rising to senior book designer. When the company was bought by Time/Warner and moved to New York, Dede headed north to return to Vermont and start freelancing as a designer. She has designed many award-winning books by such authors as Thomas Pynchon, Mary Oliver, William Shirer, and Andre Dubus, and she is a five-time winner of the New England Book Award, including two additional “Best in Show” awards for Sorochintzy Fair by Nikolai Gogol and World Alone/Mundo a Solas by Nobel Prize Winner Vincente Alexandro. Dede was a public radio commentator for Vermont Public Radio and frequently lectures and teaches at writers’ conferences. She lives next to an apple orchard on a dirt road in Brattleboro, Vermont, with her family, where the home office also looks out onto a solar array, installed in 2014, that powers the press from the sun.
Cassie Fancher (Editor) is a writer, reader, editor, and former teacher and tutor from New Haven, Vermont. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Florida. She first became involved with Green Writers Press when her short story collection, Street of Widows, was awarded GWP’s Howard Frank Mosher Book Prize in 2019. More recently, her short story, “By the Way, This Isn’t What I Look Like” was published in the Nashville Review. Cassie currently lives in Central Florida, where she enjoys long walks in the swamp.
Michael Fleming (Copyeditor) is a creative editor, essayist, novelist, and poet. Born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, Michael Fleming set out on a thirty-year odyssey: undergraduate work at Princeton, teaching English in refugee camps in Thailand, a graduate degree from Oxford, teaching high-school mathematics in Swaziland, work as a carpenter, hospice volunteer, and college composition teacher in California, living as a writer and editor in New York, New Hampshire, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. He has been awarded fellowships by the Ragdale Foundation, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ucross Foundation. He has twice had stories featured on the public radio program “Fiction in Shorts.” Michael’s works of fiction include numerous short stories and poems, and The Del Ray Method (novel in progress). Nonfiction works include My Commute: Living in the American West (book in progress), essays about writing and the teaching of writing, and essays and speeches about death and dying. Since 2003 he has worked as a writer/editor for W.W. Norton.
Asha Hossain (Illustrator/Cover Designer). With more than 25 years in design and marketing, Asha infuses a vast array of knowledge and experience in her design work, which includes book cover design and corporate branding and design. Since launching Asha Hossain Design 20 years ago, she has worked with clients ranging from New York Times bestselling authors and self-published authors to Fortune 500 companies, small independent businesses, and nonprofits. She thanks her stars every day that she has the opportunity to immerse herself in and with such fun and engaging work and people. Beyond design, Asha is an avid traveler, lover of the outdoors, and busy mom to a seven-year-old.
Ferne Johansson (Editor) is an artist, avid reader, and aspiring mechanic from the back roads of southern VT. She studied biology and printmaking at Bennington College, where she graduated with a B.A. in 2018. In 2016 she started as an intern at Green Writers Press and emerged as a fully-fledged editor a couple years later. Her work with GWP has traveled with her to and fro across the southern US, and continues to be a connection to her beloved home state wherever she may be.
Bahman Mahdavi has been building websites and web applications for businesses, communities, and nonprofits since 1998. Born in Iran and educated in France, Bahman moved to Southern Vermont in 1988, where he lives with his wife and 3 children. Bahman has worked as a web developer and programmer over the last 15 years. He is skilled in e-commerce and web marketing. Bahman will be responsible for setting up the website for GWP, getting the site in all the search engines, and tracking the hits and e-commerce implementation. He is fully versed in the business and already familiar with GWP’s mission. E-marketing and the new GWP newsletter will be a new and expanded part of his work with the press. Read more at www.webwerk.com.
Rachel Nolan (Poetry Editor) holds a BA in poetry from Hampshire College, edits poetry manuscripts for Green Writers Press, and acts as managing editor for Millennial Pulp Literary Magazine. Past accomplishments include being a finalist in jubilat’s Make a Chapbook Competition in 2017. Rachel’s work is recent or forthcoming in Juste Milieu, Duende, HOOT, Beyond Words, and Tilde.
Sharyn Skeeter (Editor) was fiction, poetry, book review editor at Essence magazine and editor in chief at Black Elegance magazine. She taught journalism, writing, and literature at colleges and universities. Her poetry and articles have been published in magazines, journals, and anthologies. Dancing with Langston, her debut novel received the 2019 Gold Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award (Multicultural Adult Fiction). She has given readings and participated in literary events in the United States, India, and Singapore. She’s on the boards of Hugo House and Earth Creative and is a former trustee at ACT Theatre in Seattle.
Maria Tane (Associate Fiction Editor) is a student at the University of Amsterdam where she is majoring in Literary and Cultural Analysis, with a focus on environmental humanities. She has a soft spot for fantasy and sci-fi stories because of their ability to nudge people to think beyond what seems possible, which she thinks is a skill we all need to practice more and more right now. When the sun decides to come out in her rainy city, she enjoys having picnics outside by the water. When it doesn’t, she pairs the smell of rain with lavender tea and with writing her stories of magic looming at the edges of the mundane.
Charlotte Williams (Associate Editor) is a writer and editor who grew up in the middle of densely populated New Jersey. At Champlain College, she studied professional writing and psychology and worked with the Center for Publishing where she discovered her love of publishing. Working as a writing tutor, literary magazine editor, and blog writer sparked her interest in editing and has led her down the editorial path at Green Writer’s Press. A lover of fiction and drama, she loves live entertainment, be it a play, musical, comedy set, or concert. When she isn’t watching feel-good TV shows or obsessing over capturing the perfect photo, Charlotte works on her own writing and expanding her reading list beyond YA novels.
Additional Support
Aleta Alcorn Coursen is a photographer and graphic designer. With a background in fine art and commercial photography, it was a natural transition to enter the world of graphic design. After studying with Dede Cummings in 2004, she joined DCdesign and GWP in a freelance capacity. Aleta specializes in book design, branding, marketing, and publications. She enjoys working late nights so she can spend her days homeschooling her three kids in rural Vermont.
Sierra Dickey is a teacher, writer, and editor native to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with auxiliary roots in the Northeast Kingdom. In 2015 she graduated from Whitman College, where her honors thesis on ecofeminist literature was the recipient of the Linda Meyer Award for Best Environmental Essay. She is passionate about both print and digital media, as well as long walks and good coffee. We love Sierra’s essay on the piping plovers in the Yale Forestry school’s environmental magazine, Sage. Sierra and Dede founded the literary magazine, The Hopper, in 2015, with the first print edition coming out in 2016. Read more about it here.