Welcome, New Steering Committee Member and New Chair

OUR 2024-2026 STEERING COMMITTEE

Janice Brodman (see below) joined us in 2024 as our eighth committee member. Barbara Mende continues as our steadfast financial secretary (also as webmaster and Update editor). All will serve two-year terms.

Shannon O’Connor, our present chapter Chair, has been hosting, in all weather, our monthly Writers’ Night Out get-togethers in Cambridge. She’s also been the organizer of our Book Party volunteers. She’s a fiction writer, poet, and blogger, who is happy to share her knowledge of the business of writing that she’s gained from being an NWU member since 2016. She’s former President of Toastmasters General at Massachusetts General Hospital.

We deeply appreciate Willie Wideman-Pleasants’s leadership as chapter Chair over the past two years: in the face of COVID, Zoom challenges, and occasional discord, she has been a stabilizing force. Willie has stayed focused on our mission and insured our work is leavened by laughter. She continues as a Steering Committee member.

Janice Zarro Brodman, author of Sex Rules — Astonishing Sexual Practices and Gender Roles Around the World, has joined the SC, having always believed that it’s essential for people to work together to improve their conditions and wanting to strengthen the union to adhere to that ideal.

Also on the 2024-2026 SC: Barbara Beckwith, Charles Coe, John Hodge, Jim Kates. John McDaid has resigned.