Chris Baty, Program Director
A resident of Oakland, California, Chris has been heading up NaNoWriMo since founding the escapade in 1999. With his startlingly mediocre prose style and complete inability to write credible dialogue, Chris has set a reassuringly low bar for budding novelists everywhere. Chris is an anthropologist by training and a freelance writer by trade; his work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Believer, and Lonely Planet guidebooks. When not bossing strangers around, Chris spends debilitating amounts of time in coffee shops. His mercilessly pants-kicking book, No Plot? No Problem!, is available at your favorite bookstore.
Tavia Stewart-Streit, Young Writers Program Director and Operations Manager
In 2003, Tavia graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Creative Writing. Shortly after college, having had enough of the traffic in Los Angeles, she packed up and moved to San Francisco in search of a new life in the Bay Area's literary scene. For the first couple years, she waited tables, volunteered at 826 Valencia's creative writing center, and interned for McSweeney's Publishing and ZYZZYVA, a local literary magazine. Never in a million years did she imagine that all her hard work would one day pay off and land her such an amazing job at such an inspiring organization. But it did, and here she is! When she isn't listening to Pandora while working away at her desk at OLL, she practices yoga, writes short fiction and poetry, and enjoys all the delicious meals her chef husband cooks for her.
Lindsey Grant, Community Liaison
After Lindsey finished her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Mills College, she stumbled upon the magical place that is the Office of Letters and Light. She could hardly believe that there were so many people in the world who love words as much as she does! She enjoys writing about food and travel, but not quite as much as she enjoys eating food while traveling. She is fighting against inertia and excoriating self-edits in order to finish a novel based on her years as a dog-walker.
Dan Duvall, Tech Manager
Suburban-born, Dan was raised on video games, Slurpees, the best-of-the-worst action flicks, and juvenile mischief. It's taken nearly a decade for him to "get out of the house" and the shock of it all has him entertaining delusions of subsistence farming and off-the-grid living from time to time. His notable strengths include sandwich composition, scat singing, spinning pile-drivers and techniques for bailing from a mountain bike.
Bradford Earle, Shipping Captain
Bradford is a newly minted [adjective] person. He was previously an idea on the East Coast in the wasteland commonly known as [proper noun]. He spends most of his time composing mediocre [noun] and painting marginal works of [noun] in a valiant (albeit ineffective) attempt to impress the woman he [verb]s. His history is a [noun], as ideas are [adverb] difficult to examine. In his new [adjective] form he is likely to be found [verb]ing small bears or imitating [noun] in his free time. He wants to help [pronoun] with any and all insurmountable difficulties (as long as they relate to shipping).
Tupelo Hassman, Assistant to the Shipping Captain
tu•pe•lo \too-puh-low\ noun, pl. tupelos 1: any of a genus (Nyssa of the family Nyssaceae) of the sour-gum family of tall North American deciduous trees that have simple alternate leaves, especially: black gum 2: any of a daughter (Hassman of the family Hassmanceae) of North American parents that had a good time in the 1970s, listening to Van Morrison, especially: Tupelo Honey 3: an assistant to the Shipping Captain who twirls her mustache and wonders why everyone doesn’t go to The Night of Writing Dangerously and get their awesome author photo taken 4: the pale soft wood of a tupelo, used for mallets, pulp, etc.
Cybele May, Site Wrangler
One of NaNoWriMo's far-flung staff members, Cybele lives in Los Angeles where she has ample access to internet at all hours of the day and night. This year marks Cybele's fourth year on staff and possibly the year of her eighth novel. Fear not, she'll have plenty to do in November in addition to noveling and working on fine-tuning the site; she also holds down a full-time job and is getting her re-certification as a whale watching naturalist. When not obsessively noveling, she's obsessively writing plays, blogging for candyblog.net.
Emily Bristow, ML Captain of Capital Ideas
Born to a wealthy Houston family, Emily (or lazym, as she is widely known) was stolen by gypsies from her unattended pram. Her promising career as a pickpocket was cut short one Halloween by an unfortunate incident involving the Chief of Police. Trained to write by a kindly reformatory matron, she was then indentured to an evil software titan in Washington State. During a daring midnight escape, Emily absconded with a stack of company stock. She is now a mixed-media artist and writer of six unfinished NaNo novels. Emily has been the Austin, Texas Municipal Liaison since 2004 and wants YOU to donate to NaNoWriMo today.
Heather Dudley, Forums Moderator
Married with two small children, Heather is the East Coast representive for OLL. After spending more hours than she really likes to think about volunteering on the forums, Heather was invited to take over Forums Moderation from Cybele May. She spends entirely too much time at the computer, not getting sleep, moderating the forums and writing the Perfect Novel (tm). She has discovered (the hard way) that it is physically impossible to have babies and write novels at the same time... it gets on the doctors' nerves. One day, she's gonna make it to the West Coast, and you'll never get rid of her.
Sarah Mackey, Wearer of Many Hats
Being Canadian, Sarah has a great deal of experience wearing hats. The metaphorical hats she wears for the Office of Letters and Light include Library Outreach Coordinator, Cruise Director for the Night of Writing Dangerously, ML Mentor Program co-coordinator, ML Forum Thread Herder, and co-ML for the Edmowrimo Literary Ninjas in Edmonton, Alberta. Sarah is perhaps overly enthusiastic about knitting, napping, and the lesser-appreciated punctuation marks. She hides her totally sentimental interior behind a very sarcastic exterior and is really very nice if you get to know her.
Drew Patty, Email Ambassador
Drew was raised in the architecturally rich town of Columbus, Indiana. He moved to the Bay Area to pursue his dreams of becoming a Creative Editor for a publishing company. Drew believes that passwords will be the downfall of us all, but he prefers that over some sort of crazy flu. He is very honored to be tapped as NaNoWriMo E-mail Ambassador for a second year in a row. He promises not to abuse his power.
Julia Burdette, Intern
Julia currently lives one block from her public library and within walking distance of NaNoWriMo headquarters, making her recent escape from Los Angeles only that much sweeter. Over the summer, she learned exactly how to wield an electric saw with both grace and power, the result of building a yurt in the middle of nowhere. (And whittle, also. She whittled.) Julia has built her virtual home at tothesound.com, and she recently cancelled cable in the hopes of turning herself into someone capable of writing a 50,000 word novel.
Amy Hakanson, Intern
While admiring the brave souls who try their hand at NaNoWriMo from afar, Amy is delighted to be interning for the people who make it happen at the Office of Letters and Light and hopes to soak up all the knowledge she can possibly cram in her brain. She misses the creative environment that San Francisco State provided her before she graduated with her BA in English – Creative Writing and is happy to enter a positive writing environment once more! She is entirely too addicted to traveling across America and documenting all the curiosities it has to offer with her trusty camera, and hopes that some of her adventures will inspire her first NaNo-novel this November.
Grace Kao, Intern
Grace is a junior at UC Berkeley hoping to double major in English and Chinese (and every other discipline humanly possible). She spends far too much time looking for beautiful things, and delights in hot tea, good books, film cameras, watercolors, and the kindness of strangers. She hopes that one day, she will have the courage to actually finish a whole novel – which will then promptly occupy the bottommost corner of her desk. Or not.
Elaine Tai, Intern
While trying to figure out her life, Elaine happily found herself at the Office of Letters and Light. She received a Business degree from UC Berkeley in May and soon decided to apply it to the book world. Elaine can often be sighted wandering around bookstores throughout the Bay Area, trying to resist the urge to buy some children's or YA fantasy novel. Her other loves include coffee, tech blogs, and a ridiculous amount of television. She has no idea what her first NaNo-novel will be about, but she is told this is not a problem and takes it as a fun way to procrastinate on grad school applications.
Natalie Tsang, Intern
Originally from Orange County, Natalie is now a proud resident of the Bay Area. She believes that A. A. Milne's House at Pooh Corner is the repository of all earthly knowledge. She continues to have a healthy fascination with stuffed animals and things that resemble stuffed animals, such as cats. She is easily bribed with gifts of books and food, and delighted to embark on her first novel writing adventure in such good company!
Carolyn Beaty, Intern
Though her primary expertise is with scholarly essays (being a college student) and 4th grade book reports (due to some work with 826 Valencia), she is ready to work on something a little more lengthy. Something like a novel. "Between being a full-time student and a part-time person, how could she possibly have time to write a novel," one might ask. The answer is that she is a hair away from being certifiably insane and has taken up residence in a coffee shop near her house. Other interests include cultivating a cactus garden on her desk, cycling, and taking BART.
Tim Kim, Intern
Tim is a graduate of UCSD’s literature department, but don’t hold that against them. They’re pretty nice people. Timothy is also an extremely serious, driven, Type-A personality. Raised to believe that there is nothing he can’t achieve, he is currently hard at work forestalling the robot revolution, building a moon shuttle in his backyard, and brainstorming ideas for his 50,000 word magnum opus. He would ask you not to bother him, he's busy, but the last time he did that to someone, his mom smacked him in the back of the head and it still stings.
