People

**Anita P. Sharma, Esq.,** is the Executive Director of the PAIR Project. She serves as co-chair of the Liaison Committee on Asylum for the New England Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and is a steering committee member of the Boston Bar Association's (BBA) Delivery of Legal Services Section. She co-chaired the BBA's Immigration Section and is currently a steering committee member. Anita received the Unsung Heroine of Massachusetts Award from the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women, and BBA's John G. Brooks Public Service Award for outstanding representation of asylum-seekers and mentorship to hundreds of pro bono attorneys. PAIR, the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project (PAIR) is a nationally recognized pro bono model that works to secure safety and freedom for asylum-seekers who have fled from persecution throughout the world and to promote the rights of immigrants unjustly detained. PAIR provides hope and a new beginning to asylum-seekers, torture survivors and immigration detainees.

Born in Boston, MA, Anita grew up in upstate New York, where she spent her childhood playing on the suburban lawns of an apartment complex. In 1977, Anita graduated from Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Ecology/Conservation, an area of study that had just been added to the college's curriculum in the wake of the first Earth Day in 1970. A teenage summer job at a nature center was the beginning of a thirty-year career in environmental education. She has been employed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation ever since, working at three different nature centers in upstate New York. Since 1984, she has been the Senior Environmental Educator at the Five Rivers Environmental Education Center in Albany. She lives in Amsterdam, NY, with her husband, George Steele, and their two sons, Alex and Timothy.

Anita Shreve grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts, the eldest of three daughters. Early literary influences include having read *Ethan Frome* by Edith Wharton when she was a junior in high school and everything Eugene O'Neill ever wrote while she was a senior. After graduating from Tufts University, she taught high school for a number of years in and around Boston. Returning to the United States, Shreve was a writer and editor for a number of magazines in New York. Later, when she began her family, she turned to freelancing, publishing in *the New York Times Magazine*, *New York* magazine and dozens of others. In 1989, she published her first novel, *Eden Close*. Since then she has written 12 other novels, among them *The Weight of Water*, *The Pilot's Wife*, *The Last Time They Met*, *A Wedding in December*, and *Body Surfing*. In 1998, Shreve received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction.

Anjali Waikar works with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts in Boston. The civil liberties work of the ACLU of Massachusetts ranges from traditional issues of free speech and association, to broader topics of the death penalty, juvenile justice, immigrant rights, racial justice and opposition to profiling, religious freedom, privacy and a woman's right to choose. Anjali's project addresses the effect and patterns of racial profiling used by local and federal law enforcement. Working with the ACLU of Massachusetts, her project places post-9/11 profiling within a human rights framework. Anjali will integrate four components human rights documentation, community organizing and education, policy initiatives and litigation strategies in an effort to help secure the civil rights and liberties of Massachusetts residents. After graduating from Wesleyan University, Anjali served as a legal advocate for low-income, HIV-infected individuals at South Brooklyn Legal Services. She also worked with a community development organization in Guatemala to set up HIV testing for indigenous communities located in the eastern rainforest of the country. After graduating law school, Anjali joined the ACLU of Massachusetts as a Racial Justice Fellow, focusing on the disproportionate impact that certain policies and practices in the juvenile justice system have on youth and youth of color.

Ann Beattie has published seven novels and seven collections of stories. She has been included in John Updike's *Best American Short Stories* of the Century and has received the PEN/Bernard Malamud Award for lifetime achievement in the short story form. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine and Key West, Florida.

Ann Bocock began her broadcasting career in Richmond, Virginia in the news department. She left radio to become the Statehouse wire service reporter for United Press International. She missed broadcasting and returned to work in several markets on the East Coast - - working as news reporter, anchor and talk show host. In addition, Bocock has owned and operated radio stations in Rhode Island and South Carolina. She lives in Boca Raton.

Ann Bookman, is an internationally recognized expert on many of the hot-button issues that have made headlines this year: political participation, community engagement, and work-family balance. Bookman joined CWPPP in September from Brandeis University, where she was a senior research scientist in social policy and an associate at the Center for Youth and Communities. She has built a long and distinguished career in academia and government, with previous posts at MIT and Harvard. She also spent three years at the U.S. Department of Labor as an appointee of President Bill Clinton. In Washington, Bookman was executive director of a bipartisan commission that studied the impact of the Family and Medical Leave Act on workers and employers.

Ann Curry is an award-winning journalist. A former NBC Network news anchor and national and international correspondent, she has reported from conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Darfur, Congo, the Central African Republic, Kosovo, Serbia, Lebanon, and Israel; on nuclear tensions from North Korea and Iran and from numerous humanitarian disasters, including the tsunamis in Southeast Asia and Japan, floods in Pakistan, and the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Ann Dumas, an independent scholar and curator based in London, is co-curator (with Timothy Standring) of Inspiring Impressionism. Her field of interest is 19th and early 20th century French painting. She is affiliated with the Royal Academy of Arts with whom she has curated a number of exhibitions, including Matisse: His Art and His Textiles, and 1900: Art at the Crossroads, and Paris: Capital of the Arts for which she was co-curator. For the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Dumas curated The Private Collection of Edgar Degas and From Czanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde. Also a consulting curator for the Columbus Museum of Art, Dumas recently curated Renoirs Women and The Last Landscapes of Degas for that institution. She began her career as a research assistant at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and worked as an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Dumas studied the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, England.

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her liminal environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Born in Lima, Ohio in 1956, Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 1985. Among her many honors, she has been a recipient of the Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship and United States Artists Fellowship and was chosen to represent the United States at the 48th Venice Biennale. Most recently, she has participated in The Third Mind exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York with human carriage, a site-specific commission installed along the spiral ramp of the museum. Presently, she is working on several public art projects and is preparing for a 2010 project installation at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis.

Ann Hood is the author of ten books, including the bestselling novel, *The Knitting Circle*, and the memoir, *Comfort: A Journey Through Grief*, which was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by *Entertainment Weekly*, and was a New York Times Editor's Choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in *Good Housekeeping*, *The New York Times*, *Ladies Home Journal*, *More*, *Tin House*, *Ploughshares*, and *The Paris Review*. For her short fiction, she has won a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and two Pushcart Prizes. Based on her experience adopting a child, Annabelle, from China following the death of her daughter Grace, Hood's newest novel, *The Red Thread *follows six couples on their journeys to adopt babies from China. Dennis Lehane has called *The Red Thread*, "a work of aching beauty and indelible grace. A novel that elicits nothing less than wonder," a sentiment echoed by bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult: "Is there anyone who can write about the connections between ordinary people as well as Ann Hood does? Her latest, *The Red Thread*, is a beautifully rendered piece of art - a tapestry of the complicated ties between mothers and children; an invitation to journey through the grief and wonder and joy of adoption. Believe me, it's a trip you won't want to miss."