Members

ELENA HARAP, co-founder of The Streetfeet Women with Mary McCullough in 1982, is a descendant of English Protestant and East European Jewish immigrants. She grew up in Nashville, TN and lives in Putney, VT. She studied acting with Josephine Lane and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Elena's interest in multicultural theatre and the life of cities led to founding Streetfeet children’s workshops in Roxbury, MA with Angela Cook,1975. Her poems and essays have appeared in Bayou, Jewish Currents, Roxbury Literary Annual, Anthropology & Humanism, Mount Hope, and on NPR. From 1991 to 2014 she toured nationally in "Meet Eleanor Roosevelt," a one-woman show written and produced with Josephine Lane. Elena is a contributor to the anthology, What Does it Mean to be White in America? 2Leaf Press, 2016. She initiated a Women’s Writing Workshop in Roxbury, 2014, which has since become an independent collective, the Mission Hill Women’s Writing Group.

See Elena Harap speaking about The Bones We Carry in this video.

MARY MILLNER MCCULLOUGH, co-founder of The Streetfeet Women, was born in Southwestern Virginia. She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Theater from Goddard College, and a Master of Arts in Writing from Northeastern University. Her plays have been featured in Jacqui Parker’s African American Theater Festivals, Slam-Boston, ACT-Roxbury Dramatic Shoutouts, TC Squared New Works Festival, the former Theater Co-op of Somerville, MA. She was a 2016 participant in Company One’s Boston PlayLab Unit and is currently developing new work with TC Squared Theater PlayLab in Cambridge, MA. TC Squared Theater produced her play, Smoked Oysters, in 2020 and featured an excerpt of Dust, a play in development on Volume Up. A podcast recording of an excerpt from her play, Ballahoo in the Hair Kitchen, can be heard on the Boston Podcast Players’ website, Season I. A Fine and Dangerous Country was a semifinalist in the 2020 Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Theater Conference. She speaks about it in this video. Her short stories have been published in literary journals, and by the International Center for Women Playwrights’ and The Streetfeet Women. She is the 2021 playwright-in-residence at Hibernian Hall, Roxbury, MA, and a member of the Dramatist Guild and the International Center for Women Playwrights.

LYMYN O’SING (formerly Li Min Mo) was born in China and has lived and worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for over four decades. She holds an M.A. degree in Education and Theatre from Goddard College and an MFA from Emerson College. Li Min has worked extensively as a storyteller, receiving awards and grants from the Boston Arts Lottery, the Cambridge Arts Council, and Channel 4's "You Gotta Have Art." In 1997 she received a grant for her first poetry collection from the Barbara Deming "Money for Women" Fund. In recent years she has been writing stories from her own Chinese cultural background and her experience as an immigrant in America. Women's voices -- silenced, enslaved, courageous, enlightened, and persevering -- all find their way into Li Min's poetry, fiction, and storytelling. Her 2009 memoir, Spirit Bridges, won the 2020 First Prize in Creative Nonfiction from PRWeb. During Covid19, Lymyn has teamed up with her daughter, son and granddaughter and created a cooking show on Facebook and on YouTube---Mother Zen Chef.

CHRISTINA LIU - A member of The Streefeet Women since 2014, Christina holds a BA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing and an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She is the Senior Academic Advisor and Liberal Studies Faculty for Boston Architectural College. Since 2003, she taught classes including Critical Reading and Research and Independent Study Seminar, and has sat on various Thesis Reviews. She also teaches at Emerson College and with the Frequency Writers in Rhode Island, where her most recent workshop, "From Madeleines to Umami," featured non-fiction and poetry about culture and food.

Christina's work is published in Dream International Quarterly, Phantasm, and featured on the CD, Spoken Live! (Arula Records). Recent pieces, "Only" and "I Am," will be published in the forthcoming Frequency Writers anthology, Word in World. "A Lunar Poem" celebrates AAPI Heritage Month in MassBay Community College's LibGuide. Since 2019, Christina has been a featured poet at The Boston Poetry Salon, Jamaica Plain Poets' Chapter and Verse, The Lizard Lounge's Poetry Jam, and Brockton Public Library's "Voices of Diversity" program. Her most recent publication is "Snapshot," in the October 2020 issue of Pangyrus.

She dreams, in spare moments, of green places, rushing waters, and dumplings.

MARY BIRNBAUM grew up in the South Bronx and was educated at the Cooper Union Art School and the New School for Social Research. She has lived in Boston for 35 years. Formerly a professional chef, Mary B. now studies herbalism, grows medicinal and gourmet mushrooms on logs in her back yard, sells her jewelry on Etsy, and teaches chair yoga. Mary has studied poetry with Fred Marchant at the Joiner Institute at UMass Boston.

FATMATA JAH grew up in Sierra Leone where most Fulani girls are denied higher education and forced into polygamous marriages. When her ex-husband took a second wife, she immigrated to the US and worked to support families displaced by the Sierra Leone Civil War. Pursuing her dreams, she earned a BA and an MA from UMass Boston where she was an academic advisor until Spring 2020. She is committed to eradicating illiteracy and promoting the creation of libraries, schools, and scholarships for girls back home. She writes their stories to encourage them to reach for education like she did.

Fatmata is currently on leave from The Streetfeet Women.

ANDREA L. HUMPHREY was born and raised in Ithaca, NY. She moved to Boston in 1970 where she did graphic art and costumed area theater and opera productions. In 1999, she earned a BA in English at Regis College, then an MA and a PhD in English literature at Tufts University by 2011. After twelve years of college teaching, she now writes full time. After joining The Streetfeet Women in 2016, she read chapters of her forthcoming novel, The Curve of the Stone, during several Streetfeet events.

MOLLY LYNN WATT. Born in Connecticut, Molly is Appalachian Scotch-Irish. Her BS and Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study from Lesley University and her MA from The Putney Graduate School. Molly taught at Headstart in Roxbury, The Harrisville Children's Center, the Antioch New England Graduate School, Roxbury Workcamps (AFSC), and Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School.

Molly attended UMass Boston’s Joiner Institute Writers Workshop and wrote for The Occasional Moose, The Boston Globe, The Keene Sentinel, and the “Ask Molly” column in Teaching with Computers. Molly’s poem “Jazz Riff” is embedded in a Cambridge sidewalk, and her poem “Civil Rights Update” was paired with Dr. King's “I Have A Dream” in the Dallas public school curriculum. She curated Fireside Readings and edited volumes 1-4 of The Bagel Bard Anthology. George & Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War, a play co-written with husband Dan Watt, and her books of poetry, Shadow People and On Wings of Song: A Journey into the Civil Rights Era, are available on Amazon. Consider This, forthcoming, addresses incest and gratitude.

A lifelong folkie, Molly plays in a ukulele band, lives in a cohousing community, is a citizen scientist and great-grandmother.