Bill Broder

Bill Broder was born and brought up in Detroit. He graduated from Columbia College, served in the Navy, and wrote and taught writing as a Teaching Assistant under Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcroft at Stanford. Broder has published The Sacred Hoop, Sierra Club Books (1979 and paperback 1992); Remember This Time, written with his wife, Gloria Kurian Broder, Newmarket Press, 1983. His novel, Taking Care of Cleo, appeared in 2006, published by Handsel Books/Other Press. It was chosen as one of six fiction finalists in the Great Lakes Book Awards and was one of twenty books from all categories chosen as a Notable Book of 2007 by the Michigan Library Foundation. In 2011 Broder launched The Ainslie Street Project in order to publish further works. The following Ainslie Street Project books are available on-line, in libraries, and in selected bookstores: A Prayer for the Departed, A Memoir; The Thanksgiving Trilogy, three novels--Crimes of Innocence, Esau's Mountain, and What Rough Beast?; Two Russian Bicycles, consisting of two novellas--Tolstoy's Wife and The Sphinx of Kiev; and four novels: Belief, A Novel; Six Hands Clapping; The Teeth of God, and Yet in Arcadia. Four more literary works have recently been published: What Do We Do With Our Dead, A Meditation; A Man of No Rank The Memoir of a Storyteller; Neglected Works, Volume One, prose poems, essays, short stories and a novella; and Neglected Works, Volumes Two and Three: plays.

Broder has also acted as member, Executive Director and Artistic Director of a playwright's workshop, California On Stage, and has completed a number of full-length plays. Abalone! was produced in Carmel, California. Two of his plays, Silence, Wittgenstein! and Abalone!, were stage-read to a full audience at The Tides Theater in San Francisco at a San Francisco Bay Area Footlights event sponsred by The Dramatists Guild of America. His other plays have received staged readings in the Bay Area by Equity actors at the Upstart Stage, The Plays in Progress Series at A.C.T., The Western Stage Theater Company, the New Playwrights Festival, and New Visions Festival. Two of his plays were presented as staged readings at The Second and Third Annual California Studies Conference in Sacramento, California.

Professionally, Broder has worked extensively as a free-lance writer, specializing in the writing, design, and production of educational materials for museums, schools, exhibitions, and publishing companies. He formed a partnership with James Robertson, The Amazing Life Games Company, to design and produce early-learning materials for teachers and later, mathematics materials for early grades. These materials were published and marketed by Houghton Mifflin and Holt, Rinehart, Winston. Broder worked with Gordon Ashby Associates on the Coyote Point Museum of Environmental Education, The St. Supery Winery, and the Oakland Museum. He wrote the tour for the 150th Anniversary Exhibit of the Gold Rush at the Oakland Museum. He worked with Jane Glickman Design on the Calaveras Historical Museum and Archive, the Oakland California SPCA Adoption Center, and other projects. He also wrote, edited, and helped design four annual publications of the Sierra Club Almanac for Young People (poetry, images, natural facts, and experiments) (Scribner’s).

COMMENTS AND NOTE

Review of TAKING CARE OF CLEO - Donna Seaman, Chicago Tribune

"Broder combines a storyteller's delight in complicated predicaments with a painter's eye for landscape and body language, and a poet's sense of place. . . . Ultimately Broder's sparkling, suspenseful and compassionate comedy of errors deftly reveals the complex symbiotic relationship between caregivers and the cared for, categories that are not always as clearly delineated as we might think."

Praise for THE SACRED HOOP

"Bill Broder's THE SACRED HOOP is a special book in which the moral qualities of the human spirit, linked to a metaphysical presence moving through history and pervading life, are persuasive and affecting. It's a fine piece of writing. A book as good as this . . . is something to inspire the courage and faith we all need to keep going."

Robert Stone

"THE SACRED HOOP is a wise and eloquent book, outlining through story the tragedy and triumph of human evolution."

Edward Abbey

"What a magnificent surprise, then, to discover something as profoundly original as THE SACRED HOOP. . . . It is fiction, but Bill Broder's vision is so rooted in historical and pre-historical fact that it must be taken as a kind of literary documentary. . . . He is a master story teller, whose graceful prose is so engrossing that readers will find themselves instantly absorbed in what is sure to become a classic.

Pat Holt, The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle