Board of Directors

WordSpace's board is comprised of working writers, critics, musicians and artists.

Sharon Bailey, Board President, is an amateur poet and serious reader. A longtime student of spiritual psychology, Sharon works as a nonprofit management professional. She holds a BA in literature from the University of Dallas, and an MA in humanities, with a concentration in literary studies, from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her scholarly interest has been in the work of Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, and Wolfram von Eschenbach. Her poetry pays attention to how words body forth both in sound and in meanings-nuanced-over-time, especially as those aspects rub against one another in the embrace of poetic compression, intimating images layered with sense and sound. She celebrates the pun as a source of divination as well as humor. In the context of a nonprofit career that spans more than 18 years, Sharon's current work involves leading teams of professional volunteers to collaborate in creating uniquely substantive and relevant adult learning experiences for nonprofit board and staff members. She is a seasoned facilitator with expertise in board governance practices and trends. For the last 8 years, she has worked as Director of Education for the Center for Nonprofit Management in Dallas, TX.

Ben Fountain, is the author of the story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Ecco, 2006), which was picked for the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award for best first book of fiction by an American author, the #1 Book Sense pick for August, 2006, and also selected for Barnes & Noble's "Discover" program and Borders's "Original Voices" program. His fiction has appeared in Harper's, Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story and other magazines, and has been awarded an O.Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. His novel The Texas Itch is forthcoming from Ecco in 2007. He is former fiction editor of the Southwest Review.

Bill Swart, Secretary, is an attorney with Hughes & Luce, LLP, practicing in the corporate and finance areas for over twenty-five years. He has written two unpublished novels and two full-length plays, one of which was performed as a staged reading at the Undermain Theater. Another short play was produced at a play festival sponsored by the Playwrights' Project. He has also written many short stories, one of which received an award in a regional short story competition judged by faculty of University of California. His legal nonfiction has been published in Texas Banker and Texas Bar Journal.

Jerry Kelley, Treasurer, holds a BA degree from Harvard University. He has published poetry in The Texas Observer as well as a number of little magazines in North Texas. His fiction has appeared in Southwest Review. He lives in old East Dallas with his wife, Patty Turner.

Dr. Martha Heimberg is assistant professor of English at Northwood University in Cedar Hill, Texas, creative writing instructor at Richland College and arts critic for Dallas Weekly. Five-time winner of Dallas Press Club's Katie Award for arts criticism, community affairs and business writing, she has also won the Texas Historic Commission Griffin Award and the Sierra Club Award for writing. She has written over 200 features and reviews on live theater, visual and literary arts, and community affairs for Texas publications, including D Magazine, Texas Monthly, Lone Star Book Review and others. She originated DART's Poetry in Motion program, a national project placing contemporary and classic poems on buses and trains, and is a founding member of the Dallas-Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum.

Rod Russell-Ides is a local artist and musician with a new album released in fall 2006.

David Searcy is the author of the novels Ordinary Horror (Viking 2001), which won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel, and Last Things (Viking 2002), and is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. In salon.com, Laura Miller praised Ordinary Horror as "an elegant literary debut . . . like a Stephen King novel written by Joseph Conrad." The New Yorker said of Ordinary Horror, "In controlled and lyrical prose, Searcy imbues the ordinary with the horrific . . . His skill is to keep us guessing," while The Los Angeles Times described Searcy's prose as "discomfortingly hyper-aware, a razor-like tool for dissecting the surreal mundanity of suburbia." Searcy's short fiction has appeared in Grand Street, Southwest Review, and many other magazines, and an excerpt from his new novel, A Water Telescope, appeared in Vol. 90, No. 1 (2005) of Southwest Review.

Adrienne Cox Trammell is a co-founder of WordSpace and a former board president. She has worked in nonprofit administration for 17 years in fund development, program coordinator, management consulting services, database administration and office management.

Maya White lives in East Dallas with her husband and two daughters. Her story Eating Earth is forthcoming in Southwest Review.

Heather Wood is a writer and teacher based in Dallas, Texas. She teaches English to college freshmen and is a second-year PhD student at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she studies contemporary ethnic and women's literature. Ms. Wood writes short stories, poems, and scripts that deal with individualism and authority in capitalist society. Formerly, she worked as a reporter for the publication Health News Daily, covering political affairs in Washington, D.C..