About Us
The FreeBird Writing Workshop began when I first started to get serious about my own writing and needed the constant attention and direction needed for publication, but couldn’t afford to pay the fees of local workshops on my non-profit salary. So I started asking around…It turned out that many of my writer friends also had a need for this environment and embraced the idea of meeting once a week to be focused and literary. With the support of FreeBird Books and Goods owner, Peter Miller, who so generously allowed us to meet in the bookstore during off-hours, the workshop began to take shape:
We read plays. We got to the meaning of poems. We wrote and revised. And then suddenly, one of my stories got published!
It is my hope to encourage writers who can't seem to find the time to write; to guide anyone who doesn’t know how to finish what they’ve started; to ensure that our group is full of productive, proactive writers. There are thousands of writers recognized for their skills, why shouldn’t you be one of them?
-Rachel Ephraim
Rachel Ephraim, founder and director of FreeBird Workshops, is also a professional writing teacher for Writopia Lab, a Manhattan based non-profit organization that teaches creative writing to young adults 8-18. She has earned an undergraduate degree in creative writing, screenwriting, and film production at Boston University and is currently pursuing her M.F.A in creative writing at Columbia University. Previously, Rachel was the managing editor of the Park Slope Reader, a Brooklyn based magazine, in which she now runs a fiction column that highlights local talent. She learned the mechanics of editing at Peter Lang Publishing as a production editor and now regularly contributes articles to online and in print publications on food, music, movies, and nightlife. Rachel's latest fiction, Please Send a Published Copy to 101 Harris Road, was published in the Fall 2008 edition of the Apple Valley Review and is being taught at UCLA. She is currently working on her first novel.
Holly Virginia Clark manages the FreeBird Writing Workshop San Francisco. After earning her MFA in creative writin
g with a concentration in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, Holly pursued continuing education courses in pedagogical theory and adolescent literacy in order to teach writing workshops to young adults in the NYC public schools. Such venues as Cornelia Street Café and the Ear Inn have invited Holly to participate in their reading series, and she has garnered the University of Cincinnati’s Academy of American Poet’s Prize and Elliston Prize in Poetry. Holly’s work was most recently anthologized in Poem, Revised, a publication of Marion Street Press.
Justin Bryant graduated with a B.A. in English from Elon University in 2001 and recently completed his M.F.A. in creative writing at New York University, where he did his thesis with E.L. Doctorow. His first short story was published in The Iconoclast in 1991. Since then, he’s had subsequent stories in The Chiron Review, Thin Air, and The Rockhurst Review. Two other shorts were anthologized in collections from Gorksy Press and Key Porter Books. In 2004, ENC published his first novel, Season Of Ash. Justin has recently completed a short story collection and is currently at work on his second novel.
