Who We Are

Candida Lawrence, Founding Editor
Candida Lawrence lives in Mill Valley and San Francisco with her dog Milo. She has published in Missouri Review, Chattahoochee Review, American Short Fiction, Ohio Journal, Sonora Review, Passages North, Soundings East, and various anthologies. Perhaps her most notorious accomplishment was to create new identities for herself and her two young children and escape detection for twenty years. The details of this story are found in her memoirs, Reeling and Writhing, Change of Circumstance, …Fear Itself, and Vanishing.

Claudia Sternbach, Chair, Editorial Board
Claudia Sternbach has been a columnist and feature writer for the Santa Cruz Sentinel for more than fifteen years and is a feature writer for Santa Cruz Magazine. She has written often for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner. She has also been published in Redbook Magazine as well as several anthologies. Her memoir, Now Breathe was published by Whiteaker Press in 1999.

Above all, however, she has known Candida Lawrence for almost two decades. She was fortunate enough to be a member of Candida’s writing group when Candida lived in Santa Cruz and still misses her thoughtful input. 

Joan E. Chapman, Managing Editor
Joan E. Chapman worked as a feature film picture and sound editor on many films including Witness, Weekend at Bernie’s, and Serial Mom, and trained as a clinical psychology intern at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. Her essay “Fields of Awareness” was Editors’ Pick in the Fall 2006 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Larry Connolly, Prose Editor
Larry Connolly writes, edits and lives in San Francisco. 

Karen Benke, Poetry Editor
Karen Benke has been published in Ploughshares, Hawaii Pacific Review, Poetry East, Rockhurst Review, Tiferet, online at Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. The author of Sister (Conflu:X Press, 2004), she’s also a teacher and writing guide who, for the past 15 years, has indulged her love of learning from the Masters by leading poetry workshops for children through the California Poets in the Schools Program. She lives in Mill Valley, California, with her family and a cat named Clive.

Sarah Schafer, Office Manager
Sarah grew up in Southern California and attended UC Santa Barbara, where she majored in Art History. Prior to joining Memoir Journal, she worked as an administrator for various Bay Area arts and education organizations. She lives in Oakland with a cat and a chef. 

Ted Stokley, Webmaster and Photo Editor
Little is known of Ted Stokley’s life prior to his joining the staff of Memoir Journal in June 2008. Some say he was a wombat trainer for a traveling circus in Norway, while others contend he spent many fruitless years as a theme park designer in the Outback of Australia.

Leaving him alone with small children and fire extinguishers is ill-advised.