Kathie Collins
Board President, Charlotte Lit Co-Founder & Creative Director
Poet & Mythologist
Charlotte Lit co-founder Kathie Collins is a writer, poet, and lifelong student of Jungian psychology. She thrives in the in-between space from which dreams, creativity, and stories emerge. Kathie is happiest when she’s sharing that space with others and delights in the process of helping students transform their lived experience to gold. Kathie co-leads and serves as a memoir coach in Charlotte Lit’s Authors Lab program. She earned her Ph.D. in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she also serves as adjunct faculty. Kathie’s poetry has appeared in Kakalak, BibleWorkbench, Immanence, and Between. Her chapbook Jubilee was published by Main Street Rag in 2011.
Chris Arvidson
Board Secretary
Chris Arvidson was born and grew up in Michigan. She has worked in national politics in Washington, D.C.; and as a nonprofit communications and development professional at Habitat for Humanity, in higher education, and with two land conservancies. She holds a B.A. from Olivet College, an M.A. from UNC Charlotte, and an M.F.A. from Goucher College. Chris has been an adjunct instructor at Robert Morris University and at UNC Charlotte. Currently she teaches creative writing at UNC Charlotte, and occasionally teaches courses related to her lifelong passion, baseball. She has co-edited three anthologies in which her own work appears: Mountain Memoirs: An Ashe County Anthology (Main Street Rag), Reflections on the New River: New Essays, Poems and Personal Stories (McFarland), and The Love of Baseball: Essays by Lifelong Fans (McFarland). She has published an essay and poetry in issues of “Nines: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture” as well as a poetry chapbook, The House Inside My Head (Finishing Line Press).
Deborah Bosley
Treasurer
Deborah S. Bosley, Ph.D., is the owner and principal of The Plain Language Group, LLC. She has worked primarily in the financial services sector to create written information that meets regulatory requirements while being easy for customers to understand.
Deborah has written for, or been interviewed by Kiplinger, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, Investment News, The Federal Reserve, The Wall Street Journal This Weekend radio broadcast, and other print and social media. Deborah consults most often with Fortune 500 companies and government entities including Google, eBay, JPMorgan Chase, Cigna, Abbott Labs, The Federal Reserve, the University of California Office of the President, and many others.
She also is a Professor Emerita of English after spending 20 years as a tenured professor of English at UNC Charlotte. Prior to her consulting and academic life, Deborah was the President of Illinois Writers, Inc., a committee member of the Illinois Arts Council, and a published poet. She holds a Certificate in Arts Management from the University of Illinois Springfield.
“As a published poet and a devoted reader of poetry, I’m always seeking community with other writers who believe in the power of the word. I’m glad to have found that community at Charlotte Lit! The organization provides space, support, and opportunities for writers to gather together, learn from others, and share their writing. I am honored to be a board member and to help the organization meet its goal of being one of the finest Literary Centers in the country.”
Marsha W. Rhee
Board Member
Marsha W. Rhee, a postcolonial performance scholar, is founding Co-Director of the Center for Languages, Rhetoric & Culture, and Associate Professor of English, at Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, where she teaches writing courses in African Rhetorical Traditions, Black Ethnographies, Academic Research, and Literature of Science. She also sponsors the award-winning Xi Lambda Chapter of Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society and the local chapter of Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society for First-Year Students. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Marsha has published articles and book reviews in NETWORK: A Journal Faculty Development, Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education, The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Encyclopedia of the Sixties: A Decade of Culture and Counterculture, and Multicultural Review.
An east central Mississippi native, Rhee is mostly content with her cookie cutter, conservative Southern life form on a swiftly decaying planet Earth, but does enjoy toying with notions of the sublime and the convergences of literature with scientific ideas to express multiple dimensions—ethical, material, spiritual, political—of human existence.
Ed Williams
Board Member
Ed Williams, a writer and editor, retired from The Charlotte Observer in 2008 after 25 years as editorial page editor. His columns and editorials were part of Observer projects that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1981 and 1988. In 2003 the Mecklenburg County Bar Association gave him its Liberty Bell Award for community leadership and “willingness to take tough stands on tough issues.” In 2011 he was inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame.
Ed earned a B.A. in history at the University of Mississippi, where he edited the student newspaper. He served two years in the Army and in 1967 joined Hodding Carter’s Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times as a reporter. In 1972 he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship for a year’s study at Harvard. He worked briefly for the Ford Foundation before joining The Observer as an editorial writer in 1973.
He is a trustee of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Library, a former chair of public radio station WFAE’s board of directors, and a deacon at Myers Park Baptist Church.
He lives in Charlotte’s Dilworth neighborhood with his wife, Marylyn. Their son, Jonathan, is a lawyer in Tallahassee, Fla.
Louanne Woznicki
Board Member
Louanne Woznicki is a lifelong reader, amateur artist, and avid traveler. When she is not nourishing her right brain, she is leveraging her left brain as a Senior Vice President at Bank of America, supporting controls development and process improvement for the Commercial Lending space.
Louanne was born and raised in Connecticut. She earned a B.S. in Financial Management and B.S. in Political Science from Clemson University, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder. Given her love of history and historical preservation, Louanne holds a leadership role with the Mecklenburg Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She is now looking forward to help support the literary arts, and the sharing of ideas and experiences, through Charlotte Lit.
Past Board Members
Andrea “Angie” Chandler
Board Member
Andrea “Angie” Chandler is an actor, speaker and cultural arts strategist. Angie was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York where she received both her love of the arts as well as her B.A in Education and History. A 1st generation American, she draws inspiration from her Jamaican and Panamanian heritage to inspire her work and her global perspective. She loves to nurture the next generation of artists. Her time in the classroom continues to fuel her work around socially engaged art, social justice work and women’s rights. Angie’s passion for community arts education led to her work as a teaching artist with an emphasis on theatre, storytelling and later led to curating and facilitating arts and civic programming. In her work as a museum administrator and curator she has crafted innovative programming, exhibitions, and performances. Angie takes great joy in creating opportunities to help artists connect with communities. Her mission is to cultivate culture to effect change. She is proud to be actively engaged with various arts organizations as well as initiatives related to arts and equity. Angie currently manages the Education Department at the San Diego Museum of Art.
“I’m grateful to have had multiple opportunities to work with Charlotte Center for Literary Arts prior to becoming a board member. As an actor I was in a reading of Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter which Charlotte Lit co-sponsored with Paperhouse Theatre. In addition I had the pleasure of booking the organization to lead a workshop for the Levine Center for the Arts “Long Live Art” Festival. It’s truly a pleasure to be an advocate and cheerleader for an organization and community that adds so much to the tapestry of the Charlotte community.”
Lisa Zerkle
Curator, 4X4CLT
Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared in The Collagist, Comstock Review, Southern Poetry Anthology, Broad River Review, Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, Sixfold, poemmemoirstory, Crucible, and Main Street Rag, among others. Author of the chapbook, Heart of the Light, she has served as President of the North Carolina Poetry Society, community columnist for The Charlotte Observer, and editor of Kakalak. She was the curator of 4X4CLT, a public art and poetry series of the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts that ran for six years. She is currently in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College.
