New Media Writer - Write and perform stories with music (usually guitar and original). Authored an interactive web-based multimedia bio of composer Amy Beach. Published hit podcast Light 1.0, episodic story with music, on iTunes for 15 years (currently revamping and will re-upload soon).  Currently researching and authoring a series of cnf books on subject of women and technology.

Born in Utah and raised in North Carolina, Esther Milanzi is half Black South African and half Caucasian American. Spending most of her life in America with her mom, dad, and 2 sisters. She was estranged from her biological father who was deported from the US when she was 3 years old. The only time Esther was able to visit South Africa was 23 years later at his grave site. The opportunity to visit the birthplace of humanity arrived after she finished graduate school from Florida State University with a degree in International Education Development.

She was then awarded a Fulbright grant to teach leadership and literacy skills at a FET college in Vereeniging, South Africa, an Afrikaans town 40 minutes south of Johannesburg. To share her teaching abroad experiences with family and friends back home in the states, she started a blog. Unintentionally, it became a journal of her healing journey as she documented her experiences understanding the post-apartheid racial climate, visiting her father’s grave, and meeting her paternal family including a younger brother and sister. It was there that she received, from her cousin, her South African name, Ubuntu, meaning humanity -”I am who I am because of who we all are.”

Inspired by her journey, she began to write magical realism, poetry, and daily morning pages, as a way to continue to heal, elevate, and to empower others. For the last 5 years, she has been traveling, teaching, writing, & radiating bread crumbs for other creatives.

She is the co-founder of the Surat Warrior Writers group in Surat Thani, Thailand. Weekly writing workshops were held and a community of creatives was cultivated in a time and place where people were looking for alternative ways to connect other than partying.  Eventually, Esther co-led 3 writing retreats in Thailand. The first one focused on unlocking creativity and getting rid of the inner critic, the second one focused on healing through love and letters, the third one focused on developing an individualized blueprint as a creative.

In Vietnam, Esther was a member of a writing society and eventually led the group with exercises. techniques, and insights she’d learned, discovered, and created in South Africa and Thailand.  For the last 3 years, Esther taught grade 6 literacy and a 6-week intensive novel-writing course at the Green School. Most recently, she has taken a sabbatical to focus on writing full-time and to start a writing coach business.
Esther manifests abundance and happiness with her life partner and husband, Lo. She is in the middle of writing the first draft of a novel: The Enchanted Elm, the sentence summary reads: A woodcarver’s life is changed forever when she discovers an enchanted tree and its connection to the oppression of one family.

Esther is excited to lead and empower you on a journey to uncover the true source of your own unlimited creativity.

I do not have very extensive experience writing.  I have been 'trying' to write a novel - any novel, for 30 years now, and had resigned myself to the idea that I would likely never write a book when the pandemic hit.  One day, became maybe never, and then why not right now?  I have dozens of excellent book ideas, and many unfinished projects and notes for projects, so, I just want to get as much support and information as I can and finally write a book - finish a first draft, and see what happens next. 

I am looking for support and encouragement, and (constructive) feedback (I was once in a writers workshop where one of the particpant read my story and annouced she just didn't like it - not at all helpful.  What the hell am I supposed to do with that...)

That's about it.  Excited to get started and see if having an accountability partner or partners, might help me get over the finishe line.  

I am a historian and teacher who writes personal and historical essays. I am also working on a novel right now very loosely based on some family history looking at the legacy of bound apprenticeship post-Civil War in the Midwest. I am hoping that it reads in the tradition of Kristin Hannah or Alice Hoffman - historically set but thoroughly fiction. 

I am looking to build a community with other writers. In this next phase of my career and life, I want to feed and grow my writer self and connect with other writers. 

My short stories have appeared in Descant, Bryant Literary Review, Central Park, Appearances, Talking River, Kerouac Review, Northern New England Review, Upstreet, Brink, Amarillo Bay, Perigee, Apple Valley Review, Drum, Brink, New Haven Review, Club Plum, Blue Mountain Review, Fleas on a Dog and others and have three times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. One of my stories was selected as one of five Best Stories on the Net Anthology and nominated for the Million Writers Award. I am the author of three historical novels Black Orchid (with Nicholas Meyer), and Biscayne (Simon and Shuster) both selections of the Literary Guild and That Wilder Woman (Bantam Books). With co-author Rosemarie Tichler, I have written and edited the interview books Actors at Work and The Playwright at Work.  I have an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop where I was research assistant to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I am currently working on a novel about the Jews who fled Germany in 1938 and found safety in Shanghai.

As a playwright I have won the Whitfield Cooke Best Play Award from New Dramatists and a grant from New York State Council on the Arts for my history play, Blood and Water. Landscape of Desire is published by Smith and Krause and was the American representative to the 25th Australian National Playwriting Conference. My musical biography of Rock Hudson, Rock and Roy (music by Stephen Weinstock), was developed at New Dramatists with grants from the Frederick Loewe Foundation and the Cameron Mackintosh Foundation and had workshop productions at New Dramatists in New York and at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, both directed by Simon Callow. The musical Step Aside had workshops at the York Theatre in New York, and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Like Love (music by Lewis Flinn) won a DramaLeague New Directors/New Works Project Prize and premiered at the New York Musical Theatre Festival

I am looking for a group interested in published writers interested in frank and honest discussion of writing work.

Hello there. I'm a late-blooming historical novelist and have also published short stories. My first two books were Etiquette for Runaways (Blackstone Publishing, August 2020, paperback coming August 2021) and the forthcoming In All Good Faith (Blackstone Publishing 2021). I'm currently working on a third novel manuscript set in the early 1950s in Virginia and Paris, and a children's picture book based on animal figures I design and knit. I also teach the odd seminar at my local writing center, where I serve on the board.

I got an MFA from VCFA in 2018, and since then, I haven't had a critique group. I've missed the input and sharing. I'd like to find a group of writers with similar experiences and goals. Preferably one that focuses on novels and includes authors who have MFAs or have traditionally published novels. 

'm a psychology professor turned novelist who specializes in historical fiction based on real people. I enjoy the challenge of starting with actual historical figures and dramatizing their lives–figuring out what motivated them to behave as they did and recreating some sense of their emotional world through dialogue and action. Doubleday published my debut novel, PARLOR GAMES, in January 2013. My second novel, EDEN WAITS, was published by Milford House Press in August 2019.

My fiction has won Willamette Writers, Oregon Writers Colony, and La Belle Lettre awards. I pride myself on crafting carefully researched and realistic fiction. I'm an avid opera fan and enjoy gardening, art films, and, of course, great fiction. I live in Portland, Oregon, that edgy green gem of the Pacific Northwest.