New Mexico Book Association
Biographies of Candidates
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Shirley Melis
Shirley Melis is a longtime business writer, travel writer, and newspaper columnist who traveled the world interviewing everyone from busboys to heads of international organizations before launching a career in public relations in Washington, D.C. With an award-winning memoir, Banged-Up Heart, Shirley took her writing in a new direction, delving deeply into her own personal story of finding love late, losing it early, and discovering the strength to choose to love again. A graduate of Vassar, Shirley moved from Northern Virginia to Santa Fe full-time in 2011 to marry Frank Hirsch. Now retired, she is a full-time writer and pre-Covid, traveled extensively. She is on the Steering Committee for the Northern Chapter of New Mexico Press Women and has given workshops on memoir writing sponsored by Southwest Writers and the New Mexico Book Association. Elected to the NMBA Board in 2021, Shirley became Co-President with Miguel De La Cruz in January, 2023. |
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Anna Sochocky
Anna Sochocky is a well-published writer in the genres of memoir, poetry, and equine-specific topics. Sochocky holds undergraduate degrees in history and political science, and a graduate degree in creative writing Sochocky has been awarded multiple creative nonfiction mentorships, including one from the nationally recognized Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she studied with celebrated poet and memoirist Mark Doty. In addition to her creative and nonfiction work and after a twenty-year career in legislative, political, and media communications, Sochocky launched her own professional writing business servicing the national equine magazine community focusing on horses, health, and history. |
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Miguel De La Cruz
Miguel de la Cruz manages the blog https://www.mikaildelacroix.com. In May 2019, he published the micro-fiction book The Dress of Queen Kitsch (Santa Fe: Brown Buffalo Press). In 2013, he published his first micro-fiction book Memories of a Chameleon (Las Cruces: White Sands). His work appears in different literary magazines such as: White Sands of the State University of New Mexico, Cargo Area of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in anthologies such as: East of the Rainbow (New Jersey, 2011). In 2012, he taught literary creation workshops to young people in the C.B.T.i.s. No. 114 of Ciudad Juárez. He has taken creative workshops with Lemon Andersen, Denise Chavez, Alberto Chimal among others. He obtained a master’s degree in Hispanic American Literature from the State University of New Mexico in 2013. He has a Bachelor of Computer Systems, Bachelor of Chicano Studies and another in Spanish at NMSU (2007). |
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Jordan Jones
Jordan Jones is a writer, publisher, and genealogist. He has published poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translations in dozens of journals, as well as in two books of poems, Sand & Coal (Ventura, California: Futharc Press, 1993) and The Wheel (San Jose, California: Leaping Dog Press, 2005). His fiction was anthologized in Anyone is Possible: Contemporary American Short Fiction (Palmdale, California: Red Hen Press, 1998) and his poetry in the American Book Award–winning What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1998). He co-edited The Northridge Review (Cal State U, Northridge) and was poetry editor of California Quarterly (UC Davis). He founded Bakunin (1990–1997), a literary magazine “for the dead Russian anarchist in all of us.” In 2003, he co-founded and co-edited the online multimedia collaborative art exhibit, The 365 Project (the365project.org). |
He has worked as a technical writer, software business architect, director of software product development and information technology, and has served on the boards of directors of the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) and of three genealogical societies, He served two terms as president of the National Genealogical Society. He has served on the
board of directors of NMBA since 2020, serving as President from 2020–2022.
He lives in Albuquerque, where he is the editor and co-publisher of Coyote Arts, and volunteers as the technology chair and a board member of the New Mexico Genealogical Society.
board of directors of NMBA since 2020, serving as President from 2020–2022.
He lives in Albuquerque, where he is the editor and co-publisher of Coyote Arts, and volunteers as the technology chair and a board member of the New Mexico Genealogical Society.
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Paula Lozar
I'm a native of San Jose, CA, long before it was Silicon Valley! I obtained a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley before making a lateral move into technical writing and editing. In my retirement, I'm working on a series of mystery novels, and I'm also a published poet. I joined the NMBA board as a member-at-large in 2008 and have been a board member (and sometimes an officer) ever since. |
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Donna Pedace
My business career included management positions in large and small businesses including as the government liaison for the Trident Submarine Program for General Dynamics Corp. I moved into the non-profit world and served as the Executive Director of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre and Museum in Connecticut, the Spanish Colonial Art Society and Museum in Santa Fe, and as the National Director of OASIS, a nation-wide educational program with over 300,000 members. I created a private museum for a NM businessman which featured exhibits telling the stories of individuals who had a significant impact on New Mexico's history. While doing research, I discovered many extraordinary but little-known women of that period. After researching over 150 such women, I wrote and published Scandalous Women of the Old West – Women Who Dared to be Different as a tribute to ten such women. I am currently writing a book about women who served as spies in WWII. |
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Karen Peterson
Writer KAREN PETERSEN has a diverse background in the publishing world. After graduating from Vassar and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she was the only woman nationally to be writing about jazz and salsa in the major metropolitan market of New York City. She then went on to a career in international journalism, first as a combat photojournalist–one of only five women in the world at that time–and later as a foreign correspondent. She is now focusing on a literary career which will stand as her final legacy, and her poems, short stories, and flash have appeared in a variety of national and international literary magazines and anthologies. Her poems have been translated into Persian and Spanish, and she has been nominated for ten Pushcart Prizes, the Best of the Net, the Forward Prize (UK), The Bridport Prize longlist (UK), The Peter Porter Prize longlist (AU). Two books of her poetry will be out later this year. More information can be found here: https://karenpetersenwriter.com |
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Daniel Fallon
Daniel Fallon is professor emeritus of psychology and public policy at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he also served as academic vice president and provost. He concluded his professional career directing grantmaking in education as chair of the Education Division at Carnegie Corporation of New York. Fallon has published widely on psychology, educational reform, and contemporary cultural issues. He is the author of The German University: A Heroic Ideal in Conflict with the Modern World, which was awarded the Eugene M. Kayden prize for excellence in humanities. Love’s Legacy: Viscount Chateaubriand and the Irish Girl, his latest book, includes an intimate biography of Chateaubriand, as well as a story of forbidden love, fraught with passion and tragedy. It is also a memoir, a detective story, a genealogical study, and a reflective meditation on the meaning of inheritance. |
