Claudia O'Keefe ~ Writer & Anthologist
Claudia O’Keefe was born in Pasadena, California and grew up in neighboring La Cañada-Flintridge. She is the granddaughter of Walter O’Keefe, a Broadway lyricist and radio personality of the 1940s and 1950s. Her mother, Diana Gregory-Emerich, a popular children's writer during the 1970s, is known for her “problem” novels, similar to those of bestselling author Judy Blume.
O'Keefe's Writing Career...
began at age 19, when she became a regular correspondent for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, covering environmental subjects and local politics. In her twenties, her focus turned to memoir and essay writing, as well as anthology editing. Her three family-themed anthologies, Mother, Forever Sisters, and Father, have gathered original memoirs, essays, and short stories from writers such as Marilyn French, Jonathan Kellerman, Winston Groom, Fay Weldon, Joyce Carol Oates, Whitney Otto, Ally Sheedy, Ann Hood, Olivia Goldsmith, and Anna Veciana-Suarez, to name a few.
O’Keefe competed with nearly 3,000 writers world wide in 2004 to win the Shell Economist Prize for an essay describing the impact on workers from off-shoring jobs to other nations. Part memoir, part market analysis, “The Traveling Bra Salesman’s Lesson,” also tells the story of her stepfather, who sold lingerie to small, independent department stores along Route 66, during that mythic road’s heyday. The essay appeared in The Economist’s The World in 2005.
In 2007, her memoir “50 Houses” won the Lena M. Todd Memorial Award for Nonfiction. Her work has been published by Salon, Writers on the Range, American Libraries, New Mexico Magazine, and Writer’s Digest.
Fiction readers know O’Keefe for her novel Black Snow Days, as well as novelettes and short stories appearing in original anthologies, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and several year’s best collections. Latin American magic realism and the darker side of the natural world inspire and inform her work.
In addition to her writing and editing work, she has served as marketing director for two nationally known arts and education non-profits, and administrative chair of a prominent international space technology conference. Most personally rewarding, however, are the four years she spent teaching creative writing workshops for at-risk middle and high school students in rural Appalachia and New Mexico, funded in part by Challenge America Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This winter, she presented a paper at the annual Aphra Behn Society Conference “The ‘Comedy’ of Rape: Aphra Behn’s The Rover.”
News & Updates...
O'Keefe served as a judge for the 2008 West Virginia Writers Annual Writing Competition. She would like to congratulate and commend the writers in the category she judged, Nonfiction, for their hard work and creativity. Determining the awards and honorable mentions among the many excellent essays, memoirs, and articles entered was a difficult task requiring up to three reads of each entry. O'Keefe would like to encourage all the writers who entered to continue to strive toward their goals.
"Passion is the key to the work," she says, "but dogged persistence is an absolute necessity."
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Before you enter a writing competition, check out Claudia O'Keefe's pros and cons articles, When to Enter a Writing Competition: 9 Ways You Win, and When Not to Enter a Writing Competition: 9 Red Flags.
Are You, Or Is Someone You Know, the Victim of a Stalker?
Stalking is a crime of power and control, of "psychological terrorism" which can scar its victims for life.
This author supports initiatives and programs designed to help victims find the assistance they require and deserve.
1.5 million Americans become victims of stalkers each year; 4 out of 5 of those victims are women. Though laws exist making stalking a crime in every state, victims can face considerable challenges when seeking protection from this frequently "trivialized" crime (Office on Violence Against Women).
The National Center for Victims of Crime, stalkingvictims.com, haltabuse.org, and many other sites serve victims by offering crucial information about personal safety, as well as referrals, but aren't usually equipped to provide lawyers, counselors, or other types of services victims may require.
Too often victims get caught in an endless runaround, referred from one agency to another in the search for services that don't exist, aren't geared toward them, or aren't accessible to stalking victims.
With Internet stalking and cyber-harassment, finding help is even more challenging. The ready anonymity of the online world makes it ridiculously easy to stalk or harass a victim without fear of consequences. The fact that a predator need not live in the same legal and/or law enforcement jurisdiction as his or her target also presents a significant roadblock for victims seeking relief from abuse.
Stalking involves a pattern of threatening and harassing behavior which may include, but is not limited to:
- Repeated, unwanted, intrusive, and frightening communications from the perpetrator by phone, mail, and/or email
- Making direct or indirect threats to harm the victim, the victim's children, relatives, friends, or pets.
- Harassing the victim through the Internet
- Posting information or circulating false rumors about the victim on the Internet, in a public place, or by word of mouth, with the goal of damaging the victim's reputation, thus emotionally separating and isolating the victim from family, friends, and coworkers, or causing the victim to loose employment.
- Obtaining personal information about the victim by accessing public records, using Internet search services, hiring private investigators, going through the victim's garbage, following the victim, contacting victim's friends, family, work, or neighbors, etc.
- Repeatedly filing spurious lawsuits
- Damaging or threatening to damage the victim's property
- Repeatedly leaving or sending victim unwanted items, presents, or flowers
- Following or laying in wait for the victim at places such as home, school, work, or recreation place
Please spread the word that more help is needed. Support the victims of stalking and cyber-stalking.
