At-large Communication Contest 1st place winners
Congratulations to our members who won first place and, in some cases, other awards, in the 2022 “at-large” division of the NFPW Communications Contest. The at-large division is for states that do not have their own contest. This year there were entries from 20 states and Spain. APW members did very well!
Connie Cockrell
- FIRST PLACE: Advertising Poster, Billboard or Banner: “Arizona Professional Writers Conference 2022”
HONORABLE MENTION: Print-based newspaper: “Celebrating International Women’s Day”
Nancy Marshall
- FIRST PLACE: Children’s Book, Fiction: A Rattler’s Tale
Jodi Decker
- FIRST PLACE: Social Media Presence – Nonprofit, government or educational: “Seven Years Insane”
Jody Sharpe
- FIRST PLACE: Novellas (40,000 words or fewer):
“20 Moon Rd. An Angel’s Tale”
Marie Fasano
- FIRST PLACE: News Story Print-based newspaper: “Complications of pregnancy and changes in the law”
- THIRD PLACE: Photographer-writer: “New student aviation club gives teens a chance to fly”
- Connie Cockrell
- Nancy Marshall
- Jodi Decker
- Jody Sharpe
- Marie Fasano
APW Book Club – 4/27/23 with RuthAnn Hogue
Date: May 27, 2023
Zoom Meeting link has been sent to members. If you’d like to attend, contact Karen Lateiner kslateiner@gmail.com for the link. Guests are welcome.
New book by member Marion Gold
MARION E. GOLD, a 28-year member of the National Association of Press Women—and long-time dual member of the Illinois Woman’s Press Association and Arizona Professional Writers—has launched her first novel, co-authored with acclaimed novelist Jerry Marcus. “Escape from Heaven” is a provocative and insightful in which Moses and Jesus meet in Heaven and decide to work together for the sake on all humanity. Gold and Marcus used a unique technique of vignettes as Moses and Jesus painstakingly discuss faith, tolerance, religion, and bigotry—and the evil committed throughout history in the name of religion. It is a novel where readers meet ordinary people who struggle with good versus evil, politics, friendships, religion, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. It is about the every-day challenges of life and death, our relationships with God—and all facets of humanity that impact upon the human condition—including a debate about free will, how each individual has the potential to live a life of honest reflection, faith and good works.
Marion is the author of the award-winning “Top Cops: Profiles of Women in Command,” which was endorsed by former Governors George Ryan (Illinois), George Pataki (New York), and Janet Napolitano, former US Secretary of Homeland Secretary, and Governor of Arizona. She also wrote the “Personal Publicity Planner—A Guide to Marketing You,” and co-authored (wrote two chapters) published in “Skirting Traditions: ArizonaWomen Writers & Journalists 1912-2012”. Marion’s essay on “The Heart and Soul of Communications” was also published in the “Centennial Anthology” of the Illinois Women’s Press Association.
JERRY MARCUS is an award-winning author and is internationally acclaimed for his ability to create compelling fiction about thought-provoking issues such as anti-Semitism, political intrigue, and religious hypocrisy. Reviewers have called Marcus prophetic, provocative, masterful, compelling, original and creative – and even a heretic. Morton Teicher, Book Editor for The Jewish Floridian, compared Marcus to Chaim Potok, writing “Marcus caused us to care about the characters he created…” His first novel, published in 1982, was recommended by the American Jewish Congress—and is part of a special collection in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Escape from Heaven” was his seventh and final novel. Sadly, Marcus passed away before the book was published.
The book is available on amazon.com and at Brittany Publications, Ltd.
APW Virtual Meeting 4/19/23 – How to do audiobooks
Connie Cockrell is inviting you to Rim Country Chapter’s Virtual Meeting on April 12. The topic will be “How to do audiobooks” with author Karen Randau. The Zoom link is posted below.
Topic: How to do Audiobooks with Karen Randau
Date: Wednesday, April 19, 2023
Time: 1 pm Arizona Time
Zoom link: Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us j/82494669743?pwd=YWFpNU9BNTVRNFpraWQ4dWN0cFd3UT09
Meeting ID: 824 9466 9743
Passcode: 965559
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kdBJdsj0a
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Karen Randau is a lifelong writer—for as long as she can remember, she’s processed all of her major life events by writing about them. She earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas, but one semester on the school newspaper convinced her she didn’t want to be a journalist. Instead, she worked in marketing communications, first in the high-tech industry and then for 27 years for an international non-profit that helps people in developing countries pull themselves from poverty.
She began writing novels after she confessed a particularly strange thought to a co-worker and asked if the co-worker thought Karen was going crazy. The co-worker said, “No, I think you have a novel in you that is screaming to get out.”
Her first five books were published by Short On Time Books in Karen’s Rim Country Mystery series. She decided to go indie for the next three series and now has 13 published books. The most recent is From Chaos, book 2 in the Peach Blossom Romantic Suspense series, which reached an overall rating on Amazon of just under 2,800 and was in the top 10 in several categories. She worked with a producer through ACX to develop an audiobook for book 1 in that series, Into the Fog. That book is a current finalist for a Selah award.
For audiobooks, she’s tried everything from letting her publisher handle the whole process, to trying to narrate and produce it herself, to working with a professional narrator. She learned a lot along the way about production, distribution, and marketing audiobooks, which she’ll share with us on April 19.
- Karen Randau
- Kayla Walsh Mystery Suspense Trilogy
APW Book Club – 4/22/23 with Elizabeth Graham
Karen Lateiner is inviting you to the April Book Club Meeting
Topic: Homeless Initiative project and book-in-progress with Elizabeth Graham
Date: Saturday, April 22, 2023
Time: 10 a.m. Arizona
Zoom: To be sent to book club members the week before and on request to others.
In a break from our traditional format, we will be discussing a book that had not yet been published. Instead, this is an opportunity for us to hear about the book Elizabeth is working on and provide feedback. Surely this will be a meeting you won’t want to miss. Karen
BRIEF HISTORY OF THIS PROJECT AND BOOK: THE HOMELESS INITIATIVE – A 501©3 Nonprofit Organization
On a foggy, wintery night in 1999, I was smuggled across the Amu Darya River from Turkmenistan into Afghanistan. At this time, I was the Chief of Party in Central Asia for Mercy Corps International – a $30+ million dollar operation overseeing projects in five countries. The U.S. Government wanted an American’s assessment of Afghan women barely surviving under the Taliban regime. I wore a blue burqa and was provided local footwear, but I was still assaulted – a Taliban male hit me on the back of my head with his rifle butt because I looked up (to gather information) instead of looking down at the ground. This consulting task concluded that the West could do little to change Afghanistan at that time.
Two years later, the 9/11 attack on American soil propelled President Bush to declare “War on Terrorism” targeting Afghanistan in his quest to find Osama bin Laden. This war cost $2.313 trillion dollars and 243,000 lives were lost. (www.watson.brown.edu/costsofwar.) For 20 years (2001 to 2021) American soldiers bombarded cities and futilely searched almost every cave in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was not found in a cave nor in Afghanistan, but in a large home in Pakistan – an entirely different country. He was killed in 2011, but American soldiers continue to wage war in Afghanistan for another ten years!
In January 2023, I launched a Resettlement Program in Arizona called The Homeless Initiative. This project has several rationales. First, we intend to provide transitional solutions to a minimum of 1,000 refugees (or more) desiring new lives in the United States. Second, we are creating a social marketing publication – a “coffee table” book – that will reflect their lives in their home countries and illuminating their reasons for fleeing – (1) Afghani’s under Russian, American, and Taliban occupation, and (2) Ukrainian refugees due to war. This social marketing book is intended to persuade American citizens to accept and empathize with refugee integration into U.S. society – a country whose history and political structure are based entirely on the intellect of former immigrants and refugees.
The plight of refugees or immigrants equates to the story of “how to build a ship in a bottle.” The ship embodies this current wave of desperate human beings, and the bottle denotes the borders of the United States. What happens to these immigrants/refugees in their early years in the U.S. will affect how productive they are as citizens in our democracy. Each of them will pay taxes and many of them will work in the fields to support our country’s food chain. Each of us across the U.S. must ask ourselves how much this new community of immigrants will enrich our country – and the rational response is just as much as our own ancestors did decades or centuries ago.
BIO:
Elizabeth Graham is the author of Democrazy Version 2020: A Warning to All U.S. Citizens. She has spoken to the Book Club previously about her book and experiences.
“I had a TOP SECRET Security Clearance by my sixteenth birthday, and was working in my father’s office at the age of seventeen. He was the head of a CIA undercover U.S. West Coast operation. I continued CIA employment for many years. By my mid-thirties, I worked with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in Denver, Colorado – also with a TOP SECRET clearance. As the Data Base Manager for the largest Russian-language military, technical, and intelligence library in the United States, we did C3 analysis and played the “red” team on the White House War Games. I was taught to read, write, and speak Russian. I began traveling to the Soviet Union and over time became one of the few Americans living and working in Russia for decades. I became bicultural and this unique perspective on Russia and their relationship with the United States is the essential ingredient and the warning inferred in this book [Democrazy].”
APW State Board Meeting 3/18/23
APW State Board Meeting

APW Book Club 2/25/23 – Robert Hershberger
Karen Lateiner is inviting you to a Zoom Book Club Meeting
SAVE THE DATE!
Topic: Diary of an Alzheimer”s Caregiver by Robert Hershberger
Date: Saturday, February 25, 2023
Time: 10 a.m. AZ time
Zoom: The Zoom invitation will be sent out to book club members the week before the meeting.
SUMMARY
This book is based on a diary about Deanna (Dee) Hershberger’s journey through Alzheimer’s disease from September of 2010 until her death on March 1, 2015 kept by Robert Hershberger, her husband and primary caregiver. It begins with a short introduction about Dee’s life before she contracted Alzheimer’s disease. It covers how she gradually lost her short-term memory while maintaining most of her physical and social abilities during the first two years of the journey. It then shows how she lost long-term memory, experienced psychotic episodes, had uncontrollable violent behavior, lost physical abilities, became incontinent and suffered from undetected illnesses through the last two years. It ends with the last two months of Deanna’s life when treated inappropriately in a psychiatric ward of a Phoenix hospital and caring treatment in an excellent memory care facility also in Phoenix. The book concludes with a brief summary of Dee’s life and a short note on ethics.
The diary also offers yearly reflections and advice that might help caregivers, family members, medical personnel, psychologists, church members, ministers, deacons and persons in families with a history of Alzheimer’s disease understand what to do and what not to do about extremely difficult behavior when caring for a person with Alzheimer’s disease.
The author hopes that readers will gain a compassionate understanding about people who contract the disease and those loved ones who become their primary caregivers. It can be a tough slog regardless of one’s best hopes and intentions.
APW Book Club 1/28/23 – Mark Walker
Saturday, January 28 we will review Mark Walker’s book, My Saddest Pleasures: 50 Years on the Road
Date: Saturday, January 28, 2023
Time: 10 a.m. Arizona time
Zoom: The Zoom link will be sent out to book club members before the meeting. APW members or guests who would like to attend and did not receive the link should contact Karen Lateiner at kslateiner@gmail.com for the link.
ABOUT MARK WALKER
Award winning author, Mark D. Walker has been recognized twice by the Solas Literary Awards for Best Travel Writing. His new book is part of his Yin & Yang of Travel Series. My Saddest Pleasures: 50 Years on the Road, borrows its title from one of iconic writer, Moritz Thomsen’s works. It shines a sometimes-lovely, sometimes-piercing light on the countries he visits. In this captivating book, Walker reflects on his fifty years of travel miscalculations and disasters and how and why his travels changed over the years, as has who he traveled with.
Walker has received rave reviews from readers and reviewers such as Midwest Review. “My Saddest Pleasures” differs from most both in its size and in its succinct considerations of how travel changes not just self, but the environments that the traveler encounters. The combined flavor of wonder, new experiences, ecological and social reflection, and adventure brings with it a newfound opportunity to understand the traveler’s impact on a deeper level than most. Domestic and foreign experiences alike are outlined with these lessons in mind.
Please watch: Also, Mark would like participants to see an interview on the making of his book which just came out in Global Connections TV. This is his second interview and they’re seen on UN TV and in universities around the world. The 30-minute interview touches on why/how he wrote the book as well as important trends in the global publishing industry. Please watch this on YouTube before the meeting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IfdQ4D7DJs
January APW virtual meeting: 1-14-23 Dr. Kixx Goldman
Let’s start the year 2023 right. We invite all APW members to come to our January meeting!
Susan Claire Anderson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Arizona Professional Writers Meeting- Creating Character from My Heart with Dr. Kixx Goldman
Date: January 14, 2023
Time: 10:00 AM Arizona
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88985850285?pwd=VHh3Z3lKclFjbDBjRml4NEs1QmhHZz09
Creating Character from my Heart: Blessings and Therapeutic Outcomes
I’m excited and delighted to be speaking with you at your January meeting. I’d love to share thoughts about my writing process. I want to tell you how I create characters and some unexpected therapeutic outcomes, like healing from a traumatic memory. Let’s leave a little time for questions and chat.
Bio
Dr. Kixx Goldman, author, therapist, and storyteller, has a passion for writing fiction. Her recently published debut collection, Speak from Your Heart and Be Heard: Stories of Courage and Healing, is a tribute to human resilience. The characters in the stories show us how we can follow our intuition and find the courage to speak our truth, overcome challenges, heal and grow.
Please download and print the 4 handouts before the meeting.
- Handout 1 -Emotions, Telling the Story your Plot Doesn’t – fr. Donald Maass
- Handout 2 – Dimensions of Character
- Handout 3 – Aspects of Character handout
- Handout 4 – Windy on Character handout
Guests are welcome. Use the above Zoom link to join.