Notes On Contributors

Pokey Anderson, who grew up in the Midwest and went to college in Florida, moved to Houston in 1972. She co-founded the Houston Gay/Lesbian Political Caucus in 1975, co-chaired the board of the National Gay Task Force in 1977, and was a Texas delegate to the International Women’s Year conference in Houston that same year. In 1981–92 she co-hosted a popular lesbian/feminist radio show, then ran a gay/lesbian/feminist bookstore in the 1990s. In 1987 she received the “We’re Changing Women’s Lives” Award from the Houston Area Women’s Center. She now runs an independent financial planning practice and learns life lessons from her golden retriever.

Andrea Chin is sixteen, a second-generation Houstonian, and currently in her junior year at Hasting High School. She has moved around quite a bit, attending Bellaire High School and Kempner High School in the past year. She maintains a web site for a local radio show called “Rad Rich’s Rock and Roll Revue” and spends her free time going to punk rock shows all around Houston. Even juggling four parents and her varied music interests, she “manages to maintain a decent grade point average somehow.”

Mel Chin was born in Houston, graduated from Peabody College in Nashville, and now lives in New York and North Carolina. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1989); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1990), later reconfigured for The Menil Collection, Houston (1991); and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York (1991), among others. He has received many awards, including grants from the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Englehard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His large-scale projects include Seven Wonders (1996–97) for Houston’s Sesquicentennial Park; Revival Field (1991 ongoing), a collaborative installation with scientists to reclaim hazardous waste sites at different locations here and abroad; and Knowmad (1999–2000), an interactive video installation. He has held numerous visiting artist/lecturer positions. He is one of sixteen artists featured on a four-hour PBS special, “Art of the 21st Century,” to be aired in 2001.

Bao Long Chu came to the United States from Vietnam in 1975. He earned an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Houston, and his poems have been published in various literary journals including Western Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, and A. Magazine, and in anthologies including From Both Sides: Poetry of the Vietnam War (Scribner) and Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose (AAWW Press). He is currently program director for Writers In The Schools. He has taught creative writing at all grade levels and works with teachers to develop innovative approaches to writing. He has served on DiverseWorks’ artist board and on the grant review panel for the Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County.

Sarah Cortez, a native Houstonian and graduate of Rice University, has been published in numerous literary journals as well as in international policing publications. She won the 1999 PEN Texas Literary Award for Poetry and was a semifinalist in the 2000 Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry. Her debut volume of poetry, How to Undress a Cop, was published by Arte Público Press (Houston) in September 2000. A police officer for more than six years, she was recently awarded the position of visiting scholar at the University of Houston’s Center for Mexican American Studies for an unprecedented second consecutive year.

Patsy Cravens, born in Houston, is a Smith College graduate. She is the writer, director, and producer of the award-winning oral history documentary “Coming Through Hard Times,” which was shown on PBS, and the researcher, writer, and associate producer for “Reina De La Selva, Gertrude Blom: A Portrait,” an award-winning film shown internationally. A photographer, she produced a traveling exhibition “Colorado County Memories: Everyone Has a Story to Tell,” featuring photographs and stories of rural Texans. Her work has appeared in a number of solo and group exhibitions, including several FotoFests. She has received two grants from the Texas Committee for the Humanities and a grant from the Brown Foundation. Her most recent project was a short video using images and newspaper accounts of lynchings, and a book is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press. She has four sons and eight grandchildren.

Bob Eury grew up in Kentucky, moving to Houston to attend Rice University where he earned a Master in Architecture in Urban Design. Beginning in 1974, he served in various positions at Rice Center, including vice president and director of research development in 1980–83. Hs research concentrated on land use and transportation joint development, urban services delivery, development regulation, and environment design. In 1983 he became the founding president of Central Houston, Inc., a private, nonprofit corporation formed to lead the planning and implementation of the redevelopment of Houston’s central city area. He is also executive director of the Houston Downtown Management District, a special assessment district within downtown. In addition, he serves on the boards of a number of Houston civic organizations.

Stephen Fox grew up in Brownsville, Texas, and is a graduate of Rice University. He is a Fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas and an architectural historian. He is the author of the Houston Architectural Guide and co-author with Ellen Beasley of the Galveston Architecture Guidebook. He teaches classes on the architectural history of Houston at the University of Houston and Rice University.

James Harithas came to Houston to be director of the Contemporary Arts Museum (1974–78). He is the former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York. He is currently director of The Ineri Foundation and Artcar Museum in Houston.

Walter Hopps was born in Los Angeles, where in 1957 he co-founded Ferus Gallery with Edward Kienholz. In 1962–66, he served as curator, then director of the Pasadena Art Museum, now the Norton Simon Museum, organizing the first museum exhibition of Pop Art as well as the first retrospectives of the work of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. He was Commissioner for the American Pavilion at the 1965 São Paulo Biennale and at the 1972 Venice Biennale. In 1967–72, he was director of the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. In 1972–79, while curator of twentieth-century art at the National Collection of Fine Art, now the National Museum of American Art, he organized the 1976 Rauschenberg retrospective. He oversaw a second Rauschenberg retrospective in 1997, as well as a major Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz retrospective in 1996. He became founding director of The Menil Collection in 1980. Serving in that position until 1989, he is now consulting curator with the museum.

Carlos Jiménez, a native of Costa Rica, moved to the United States in 1974, graduated from the University of Houston School of Architecture in 1981, and established his own office in 1982. He has taught widely and held a number of endowed chair positions, including the first Favrot Chair in Architecture at Tulane University, Harvard University’s Eliot Noyes Visiting Design Professor, and the Friedman Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He is now a tenured professor at Rice University. He has won awards for excellence in design from Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, and the Architectural League of New York, and has exhibited his work in museums and galleries across the country. His principal built works include the Houston Fine Art Press, the Administration/Junior School Building for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Spencer Studio Art Building at Williams College, the Cummins Engine Child Development Center in Columbus, Indiana, and the New Art Center at DePauw University. His work is widely published, including two books and four monographic issues. He is a jury member for the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000).

Susie Kalil, born in Burbank, California, came to Houston in 1973 to complete a B.F.A. at Rice University. She is an art critic, curator, and lecturer. She has published criticism in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Artforum, Artweek, Art in America, ARTnews, Cite, Sculpture, The Houston Post, and The Houston Press. For the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, she co-curated with Barbara Rose the landmark exhibition “Fresh Paint: The Houston School” (1984) and curated “The Texas Landscape: 1900–1986” (1986). In 1995–96 she was visual arts director for DiverseWorks, Houston, where she later curated “Perry House: Paintings and Works on Paper.” A Core Fellow in Critical Studies at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, she has written numerous catalogue essays, including “Bill Viola” for the 1995 Venice Biennale, “Barry McGee: Hoss” for the Rice University exhibition, and “James Surls: Walking with Diamonds” for an exhibition at the El Paso Museum of Art. She has recently been named managing editor of Artlies.

Stephen L. Klineberg received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. He joined Rice University’s Sociology Department in 1972 after teaching at Princeton. In 1982 he initiated the annual Houston Area Survey, exploring public responses to changing trends, and he has conducted extensive additional research in Harris County ethnic communities. Since 1990, he has also directed the biennial statewide Texas Environmental Survey. The recipient of eight major teaching awards at Rice, he has written numerous journal articles and appears frequently on radio and television discussing the sociological dimensions of social change. He is completing a book, Making Sense of Our Times: A Study of Changing Attitudes in the Houston Area, that builds on two decades of survey research.

Melanie Lawson is co-anchor for the KTRK–Channel 13 News Team. A native Houstonian, she graduated from Princeton University, then earned a joint degree in law and journalism from Columbia University. She was admitted to the State Bar in Texas and New York. Hired by 13 Eyewitness News in 1982 as a general assignments reporter, she was named co-anchor of Live at 5 in 1988. During her news career, she traveled to many countries and interviewed hundreds of notables, ranging from Spike Lee to Henry Kissinger and four presidents. She won a 1998 Emmy Award for her reports from Africa on President Clinton’s trip to that country. Her favorite stories are those involving Houston’s rich, multiethnic community, especially stories about children and those who are quietly working to make a difference in their lives. She has served on the boards of numerous charitable and educational organizations.

Diana Dávila Martínez is a native Houstonian with a degree in social anthropology from Harvard and Radcliffe. In 1992 at age twenty-six, she was elected to the Texas House of Representatives, representing District 145. She served three terms, making education and children’s needs her priority. She now serves on the boards of Associated Catholic Charities, Children at Risk, Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Houston, and Buffalo Bayou Partnership. She is also a consultant for Arte Público Press at the University of Houston. She was inducted into the Hispanic Women in Leadership 2000 Hall of Fame, and has received honors from Radcliffe College (1998), the Houston Advocates for Mental Health in Children (1998), the Federation of Houston Professional Women (1995), and the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans (1995). She is married to former state representative Román Martínez and has one son, Diego.

Sehba Sarwar, born in Pakistan, is a fiction writer, poet, journalist, and essayist. She came to Houston in 1991 after completing coursework for her Master of Public Affairs degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She received awards from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County in 1996 for her novel Black Wings and in 2000 for Voices Breaking Boundaries, the reading series she helped found and run. Also in 2000, she earned an Inprint grant for an after-school girls’ writing workshop. She has given readings in Houston and has been a guest on a local Pakistani call-in radio show and on Pacifica Radio’s “The Progressive Forum.” Through Writers In The Schools, she taught writing workshops around Houston; at present she is a lead writer with Rice University’s School Writing Project and teaches writing workshops at Jones High School. She serves on the artist board at DiverseWorks and publishes regular travel articles in a Pakistani newspaper, The News on Sunday.

Gwendolyn Scott was born on a cotton farm in East Texas that has been in her family more than a hundred years. After graduating from Prairie View A&M in 1971, she moved to Houston. In 1996 she earned an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from the University of Houston. She won the 1996 Hurston/Wright Award for fiction and two consecutive fellowships for creative nonfiction in 1998 and 1999 from the Texas Commission on the Arts. Her essay “Used to be Places” was published in Southwestern American Literature, and a second essay is under consideration at Texas Monthly. She is currently teaching English to high school seniors. She and her husband of twenty-nine years have a son and a daughter, and her goals are to find time for writing and to move back to the family farm, now devoted to cattle ranching.

Kevin Shanley was born and reared in northern California, studied physics and philosophy at the University of Santa Clara (1969–71), and attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design (1977–78), moving to Houston in 1979. He is the design and managing principal for the Houston office of SWA Group, a planning and landscape architecture firm that has worked on Allen Center, Cullen Center, The Wortham Theater Plaza, Transco Park, Post Oak Lakes, First Colony, as well as the Downtown Houston Development Master Plan. He is currently working on watershed projects with the Harris County Flood Control District and on urban planning projects in China that use rivers, lakes, and waterways to enhance environmental and community values. His recommendations for Sims Bayou led to the elimination of the steep concrete-lined banks, substituting grass-lined flood benches and tree plantings in the channel. He is involved in community efforts to create a long-range vision for Houston’s watersheds and bayous.

Susanne Theis, who was born in Canton, Ohio, and is a graduate of the University of Houston, is executive director of The Orange Show Foundation. She came to The Orange Show as its first director in 1983. She has been instrumental in the development of The Orange Show’s education and outreach program, including the Eyeopener tours, Houston folk art archive, Art Car Parade, and structured volunteer involvement. In 1996 she curated the second exhibition of the American Museum of Visionary Art in Baltimore, “Wind in My Hair,” which included over 400 works of art from 114 artists from all over the United States. She has written on folk art environments for regional, national, and international publications, and has lectured at museums in Houston, Austin, Dallas, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Charleston, and The Hague. In 1998 she co-chaired the Folk Art Society of America’s annual conference in Houston. She is married to the writer David Theis and has one son.

Lorenzo Thomas, born in the Republic of Panama, grew up in New York City, graduating from Queens College (City University of New York). He is a professor of English at the University of Houston–Downtown. He is also a widely published poet and critic whose work has appeared in many journals, including African American Review, Arrowsmith, Blues Unlimited (England), Living Blues, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, and Popular Music and Society. A regular book review for the Houston Chronicle, he has contributed scholarly articles to the African American Encyclopedia, American Literary Scholarship, Gulliver (Germany), and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. His books of poetry include Chances Are Few, The Bathers, and Es Gibt Zeugen; he also published Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature and most recently Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th Century American Poetry. He currently serves as director of the Cultural Enrichment Center at the university.