As a writer she probes women’s lives across the decades and her own evolution as a daughter, sister, writer, wife, mother, friend, classmate, midlife woman and now parent of two twenty-something sons.
She is the author of four books, Sisters, The Men In Our Lives, I Swore I’d Never Do That, and Reunion: The Girls We Used To Be, The Women We Became and co-editor with Terri Hinte of Wednesday Writers and Something That Matters.
She has also written widely for magazines including Vogue, Oprah’s O, Redbook, Parents, Family Circle, Hallmark, and More (click here to read Second Acts: Independent Women and Second Acts: The Queen-of-Cupcakes). She has written book reviews for The NY Times Book Review and The SF Chronicle (click here to read reviews of The Center of the Universe by Nancy Bachrach, June, 2009 and Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin, January 10, 2010). She was a Contributing Editor at Child for many years.
Two of her essays appear in recent anthologies. “Writing for the Cure” about the Wednesday Writers’ fundraising efforts for Bay Area breast care centers is included in The Social Cause Diet: Stories of Satisfying Acts of Service, edited by Gail Perry Johnston. For more information, http://www.cupolapress.com. “Refeathering” about life after her sons left for college is part of Writin’ On Empty: Parents Reveal the Upside, Downside, and Everything In Between When Children Leave the Nest, edited by Joan Cehn, Risa Nye, and Julie Renalds. For more information, http://www.writinonempty.com.
She lives in Oakland with her husband, Robert Houghteling, and they have two sons, Nate and Will. She is a board member of the UCSF Medical Center Auxiliary at Mount Zion Hospital and dedicated to working on behalf of a cure for breast cancer, the disease that took her mother’s life. She loves swimming her daily laps, puttering in her garden, hiking in the Berkeley-Oakland hills with her husband and sons, and of course, reading.
————————————
Terri Hinte, the co-editor of Wednesday Writers and Something That Matters, is a Bay Area-based music publicist who was the Publicity Director at Berkeley's Fantasy Records for nearly 30 years. During that time she promoted the music and professional endeavors of a wide array of artists including Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Hank Crawford, Art Pepper, and Sylvester, to name a few. She took a special interest in Brazilian music, learning Portuguese and traveling extensively in Brazil. She was the principal contributor to the Brazilian music section of the original All Music Guide (1993). In 2006 the Jazz Journalists Association presented her with one of its A Team Awards, "for Advocates, Activists, Altruists, Aiders and Abettors of Jazz."
As a freelancer, she has continued to represent Sonny Rollins (and his new label Doxy) as well as Berkeley's Jazzschool, guitarist Bobby Broom, the Quartet San Francisco, Laurie Pepper's Widow's Taste Records, singers Ed Reed and Andy Bey, and saxophonists Mel Martin and Bennie Wallace.
She is a travel writer and essayist as well whose work has appeared in the East Bay Monthly, Passionfruit magazine, and Travelers’ Tales Brazil which includes her essay, “Argentino,” the winner of the 1994 Book Passage Travel Writing Conference writing contest.
A longtime student of metaphysics, she is an Arts and Culture Commissioner for the city of Richmond, where she lives (with her pug and two Siamese cats), works, and gardens.
