Thursday, December 19th
12 – 1pm PST
A FREE Virtual Event
WNBA-SF Writers’ Gratitude & Glitz Holiday Mixer
- Share: Express your gratitude
- Tell: Highlight your 2024 achievements and what you plan to celebrate at the end of 2025
About Debra: Debra Eckerling is the award-winning author of Your Goal Guide: A Roadmap for Setting, Planning, and Achieving Your Goals and 52 Secrets for Goal-Setting & Goal-Getting. A goal strategist and the creator of the D*E*B METHOD® for Goal-Setting Simplified, Debra offers personal and professional planning, content development (such as books and book proposals), and team-building for executives, entrepreneurs, consultants, and companies. The networking ambassador for WNBA – San Francisco, Debra has spoken on stages for TEDx, Innovation Women, SCORE LA, and more. She is the founder of the Write On Online community, as well as host of the GoalChat live show/podcast and Taste Buds with Deb.
To register, please fill out the form below:
Karen Wang Diggs is a chef and nutritionist by day and a history hound and writer by night. She is passionate about sharing the injustices faced by women throughout history, with the aim of empowering girls and women today to change the future by striving for absolute gender equality. Her work is dedicated to sharing those lesser-told stories to show the world that strong females always have been and always will be crucial to humanity’s progress.
Sheila Smith McKoy, PHD is an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and filmmaker. She is the recipient of the 2020 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Prize in poetry. Her poetry collections include The Bones Beneath (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) One Window’s Light: A Haiku Collection, a collaboration of five Black poets; the collection won the 2017 Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award for best haiku anthology. In addition to her poetry and fiction, Smith McKoy has authored and edited numerous scholarly works. She focuses on vital conversations about equity, inclusion and the Black speculative. A native of Raleigh, NC, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Social Justice Poetry Event
Zoë Flowers is a versatile artist, advocate, poet, and healing practitioner with a body of
Joan Gelfand is the author of three collections of poetry, a chapbook of short fiction and a novel set in a Silicon Valley startup, Joan has taught for California Poets in the Schools, The Writing Salon and the San Francisco Writer’s Conference. In January, 2024 Outside Voices: A Memoir of the Berkeley
Cooking & Food Writing Panel
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Ellen McBarnette is a lifelong writer whose nonfiction work has been published as testimony, fact sheets, and opinion pieces for organizations that include the Sierra Club and the American Bar Association. A professional storyteller, she is a recent transplant from Washington, DC where she ran the Arlington Creative Nonfiction Writers Group. She now runs the Beta Readers and Writers Group and is an active participant in critique groups in the Bay. She lives in Hayward with her partner Ben and their cat Java.
Mary Mackey is the New York Times bestselling author of fourteen novels, including The Earthsong Series—four novels which describe how the peaceful Goddess-worshiping people of Prehistoric Europe fought off patriarchal nomad invaders (The Village of Bones, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses at the Gate, and The Fires of Spring). They have made The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller Lists, been translated into twelve foreign languages, and sold over a million and a half copies. She has published several collections of poetry, including Sugar Zone and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams. You can get the latest news about Mary’s books, public appearances, newsletter, and writing advice at marymackey.com.
Vanessa MacLaren-Wray writes science fiction and fantasy about people—human and otherwise—connecting in our complex universe. She’s the author of the Patchwork Universe series: All That Was Asked, Shadows of Insurrection, and Flames of Attrition. She also writes for the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy shared-world series and guest-hosts for the podcast Small Publishing in a Big Universe. She’s an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, the California Writers Club, and (of course) the WNBA. When not arguing with her cats, she works on new stories, her email journal, Messages from the Oort Cloud, and her website, Cometary Tales.
Celebrity chef Katie Chin, Wok Star Catering, is an award-winning 
Faith Kramer is the author of the award-winning “52 Shabbats: Friday Night Dinners Inspired by a Global Jewish Kitchen.”