Alex Gronke

Except for a two-year stint in Berkeley, NovoMetro co-founder Alex Gronke has lived the last 14 years in Oakland. Before entering journalism in 2000, he was a teacher in the Oakland public schools. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, the Stockton Record, the San Francisco Chronicle, Red Herring, and the Oakland Tribune. His dream is to see local news win back its rightful audience of thoughtful, curious, and passionate readers. Reach Alex at alex@novometro.com

Priyanka Sharma-Sindhar

Priyanka Sharma-Sindhar co-founded NovoMetro after years as a Silicon Valley journalist. Most recently she was the Internet reporter for Red Herring. Priyanka discovered Oakand's charm when a professor asked her to write about the Grand Lake Theater for a class assignment in 2000. A graduate of UC Berkeley's journalism school, her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, Bloomberg News, and the Sacramento Bee. Before coming to this country, she was a television producer at one of India's largest television companies. She is passionate about women's issues and the tango, and of course, NovoMetro. Reach Priyanka at priyanka@novometro.com

Contributors


Alison Peters

Alison Peters is an Oakland ex-pat and long time Bay Area resident. She completed undergraduate work at UC Berkeley and obtained her MFA at Mills College. A freelance writer moonlighting as an HR coordinator, her free time is spent with friends, family, felines and Sebastian, the chocolate lab love of her life. You can find her most recent work in Curve magazine.

Daniel McGlynn

Daniel McGlynn is an East Bay carpenter and writer. He is frequently seen on the water in his kayak. Read more at danielmcglynn.com.

D. Scot Miller

D. Scot Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist , teacher, and curator. A founder of The BlackBard Writing Collective, and on the board of directors of noctunes review, a regular contributor to The East Bay Express, SF Weekly, YRB NYC, Popmatters, and Showcase Magazine. He has published the Afro-surreal Knot Frum Hear (an excerpt is in Bronx Biannual Two ISBN: 1-933354-09-7 l $13.95 ), and Slicker, a book of poems.

Ellen Mulholland

Ellen Mulholland grew up in southern California and graduated from the USC School of Journalism. After a brief residence in London, she moved to northern California. She has been teaching writing to adolescents for more than 15 years. Ellen lives in Oakland with her two kids. You can read more of her writing at www.gameprofamily.com where she writes blogs and reviews video games.

Joseph Amster

Joseph S. Amster has been a journalist and editor for 18 years, editing the publications IN Los Angeles the Orange County and Long Beach Blade. He began his culinary career in high school, working his way up from flipping hamburgers to soup chef at the Bay Area’s Salmagundi restaurants. Fulfilling a lifelong dream of combining his interest in the culinary arts and writing, Amster has been a food writer for the last 10 years. He maintains a culinary Web site and blog at www.gonzofoodism.com. Among his other interests are choral music, photography, local history, and collecting. A resident of downtown Oakland, Amster has previously lived in San Francisco and Laguna Beach.

Karen Booth

Photo to come

Karen Booth is a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, and has been living in the Bay Area for most of the last 20 years, although she still considers herself a southerner. She got her start as an editor at a weekly newspaper right out of college, then fled the mosquitoes and hurricanes for the cool fog of San Francisco two years later. After freelancing for the San Jose Metro and San Francisco Bay Guardian, Karen became a political communications specialist and spent the next nine years working for candidate and initiative campaigns, and public image campaigns both in California and Washington, D.C. She also served as managing editor at Campaigns & Elections Magazine in D.C., before returning to the Bay Area in 1996. She lives in the East Bay and, when not throwing huge crawfish boils in her backyard, explores Oakland's restaurants and neighborhoods with her husband and two sons.

Kathy Hrastar

Kathy Hrastar is a perpetual student who appreciates the process of learning. She jumped into journalism at Laney College in 2006. So far, she likes the aspect of running around meeting people, which is also why she enjoys her job as a server in a diner. After growing up on the east coast, suffering the San Francisco fog, and attempting a stint in conservative Colorado, she chooses to live in Oakland. Write to Kathy at kathy@novometro.com

Kevin Cook

Photo to come

Kevin Cook has lived in Oakland for 14 of the last 15 years. He teaches English in the West Bay part-time, and he also has a business card that reads "Staff Scientist." Kevin spends an inordinate amount of time riding his bike around the East Bay in search of the perfect ingredients for overly elaborate meals. If you are willing to take him fishing on your boat, he will cook dinner for you.

Kwan Booth

Journalist, writer, and arts activist Kwan Booth hangs his hat in the wilds of West Oakland which, surprisingly, is one of the only places he's found in the Bay where people regularly say "Good morning", thereby feeding his need for good ol' fashioned southern hospitality. Kwan is the Communications Director for Black Futurist Arts and Media, a staff writer for the Oakland Post and has written for whatchusay.com, the San Francisco Bayview, and Indymedia.org. He's been a creative writing fellow at the Hurston/Wright Foundation, is featured in Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century and in a past life, was the poetry slam champion for the down home red state of Virginia. He's always on the look out for juicy stories, so dish the dirt over to Kwan@novometro.com. Good Karma will surely follow.

Ly Nguyen

Ly Nguyen is a writer who was raised in San Francisco and now is a proud resident of North Oakland. Her short stories were published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Chocolate for a Woman's Soul Anthology, and Nha Magazine. Ly was granted residencies at Hedgebrook,Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Ly is also a creative writing instructor at the Art Studio at UC Berkeley. In 2005, Ly was awarded grants from the Puffin Foundation and City of Oakland Cultural Funding Program to be the Managing Editor for the the book As Is: a collection of Vietnamese-American visual and literary works. She is the co-founder and board member of Oasis for Girls, an art and education center for young women (www.sfoasis.org) in San Francisco.  Ly is also a founding member of the Vietnamese Artist Collective ( www.vacollective.org). In between writing, Ly is the new owner of Entice Boutique--an online boutique specializing in vintage clothes (www.enticeboutique.com)

Madeleine Bair

A radio-journalist by training, Madeleine Bair has been carrying a microphone in her backpack since she was a child reporter with the Oakland bureau of Children's Express. After chasing Hillary Clinton down for an interview in China and being yelled at by Alan Keyes at the Republican National Convention, the little girl with pigtails and a yellow notepad realized that poking her freckled face where it wasn't expected was her calling. Since then, she has upgraded from cassette to digital, and has worked as a producer on a daily radio magazine at Chicago Public Radio. Though the Bay Area's unparalleled energy is a quality she constantly longs for, Madeleine is on a perpetual journey with her notepad and microphone around the world. Thus far, the trip has included radio dispatches from the Caribbean and Nicaragua, and articles for a Central American newspaper. She is always eager to share the craft with other intrepid kids, and has taught radio journalism to Chicago youth at RadioArte. You can drop her a line at madbair@gmail.com

Mike Spencer

Mike Spencer, a licensed private investigator, formed Spencer Investigations, www.spencerpi.com, in 1996.  He does criminal defense, civil and domestic investigations. He earned a master's degree in journalism from UC-Berkeley. He reported for a daily in Staunton, Va., the Contra Costa Times, and the Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune covering police and news, including the Loma Prieta earthquake, Hurricane Andrew, and the East Bay Hills fire. He lives in the Oakmore district with a wife and Labrador Retriever.

Dr. Preeti Sharma

Once upon a time, Preeti Sharma was a professor and published interesting -- but alas, only read by academics -- papers in American and international journals and conferences. So, she turned into a writer and a consultant. She writes for The Hindustan Times, a leading newspaper in India. She has also written for The Hartford Courant. For Novometro, Preeti brings in her expertise on e-commerce and marketing, the stuff she used to teach MBA students at Rensselaer. She is also involved in setting up gaming sites and is working on a project that caters to a business audience in India.

Theo Konrad Auer

Not many writers have the odd honor of being been published in two different publications whose titles have something to with fecal matter. Having my art coverage featured on FecalFace.com and my poetry published by the sadly defunct local poetry magazine ASSPANTS, I am one few humans on this planet that can. I am a born and raised Oaklander and the child of immigrant parents from Colombia and Germany. I have been involved in the local arts community in one way or another, mostly writing about it, since I was in high school. In college, I ran an acclaimed live poetry series with poet and black panther Lee Williams at a space which is now occupied by Dwayne Wiggins' Java House. Nowadays, I write poetry and cover our local art community on the web and in magazines. My work has been seen in Juxtapoz, Hi Fructose Magazine and SWEETART Magazine.

Intern

Sana Bakshi

Sana Bakshi is in her teens and is very excited to intern for NovoMetro. She is excited about this great opportunity, and cannot wait to become one of the most amazing journalists that the Bay Area has ever seen. In her free time, she enjoys shopping, painting, and swimming. She aspires to go to a good journalism school. Even though she lacks in experience, she makes up for it in enthusiasm for the field of journalism.