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Margo Perin is a writer of memoir, novels, short stories, personal essays, poetry, and performance works. She is the founder and director of Write & Rise, an innovative writing project that provides the means for self-exploration through writing for adults and youth affected by incarceration to facilitate the healing of individuals, their families, communities, and the wider society.
Margo is also co-founder of AND NOW WHAT, a collaboration of organizations providing services to individuals, families, and communities working towards freedom from incarceration.
You can read about Margo in the January 2008 issue of O Magazine (The Willpower Myth, pages 71-74) and the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine. Internationally, she was featured in the Dutch Psychologie Magazine, (Schrijvend naar de vrijheid, September 2009) and the Mexican literary magazine El Petit Journal (April 2006).
As a writing instructor and editor, she has been teaching at universities, colleges, schools, prisons, jails, and community centers for more than thirty years, and working one-on-one with writers around the world.
Serving as writer-in-residence at San Francisco County Jails from 2001 to 2007, Margo is currently situated with Five Keys Charter School, www.fivekeyscharter.org, where she continues to teach incarcerated men and women. With an emphasis on expressive arts, Margo teaches Seeking Safety for Women with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Creative Writing, Communication Skills I and II, World and American Literature, and Exploring the S/Hero’s Journey through Literature and Mythology.
Margo has taught writing at the University of San Francisco and New College in M.F.A. Creative Writing, the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz Extensions, and workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area, northern California, Spain, Italy, and Mexico.
Margo also directs an international manuscript consultation and editing business in which she helps writers of poetry, novels, memoirs, short stories, and personal essays develop, polish, and submit their work for publication.
Margo Perin’s latest book is THE BODY GEOGRAPHIC (currently seeking publication), a 2007 San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant-funded poetic memoir of interconnected stories exploring the relationship between health, personal history, socio-economics, and the environment.
CRIMINALS INTENT, funded by a 2005 San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant, interweaves her childhood on the run with a criminal father and her experiences teaching in jail.
In 2006, Margo published ONLY THE DEAD CAN KILL: Stories from Jail (Community Works 2006), a collection of autobiographical stories and poems by herself and men and women who are incarcerated at San Francisco County Jail in print and on CD. This project was funded by the Creative Work Fund to shed light on the humanity of people who live behind the walls.
Margo is contributing editor of HOW I LEARNED TO COOK and Other Writings on Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships (Tarcher/Penguin). The anthology was published to much critical acclaim in 2004, and includes celebrated writers Alice Walker, Paula Fox, Nawal El Saadawi, Vivian Gornick, Nahid Rachlin, and Kim Chernin.
In addition to being awarded two San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grants and a Creative Work Fund grant, Margo was a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and has won literary prizes for memoir, and long and short fiction. Published in the U.S. and Britain, including Treasure House, Painted Hills Review, youtalkintame?, Tenderloin Times, California Tomorrow, Issues, and World University News, her work has been theatrically produced in Chicago and California, filmed, and broadcasted. She has been featured on NPR Talk of the Nation, KRON4 TV, KPFA, KALW, and WAMC, and among other national and international publications, in The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News.