In this panel discussion, authors Chad Oldfather, Benjamin Gilmer, Amelia Zachry, and Jane Olmsted discuss how writing their books helped them to better understand how to comprehend, learn, and employ compassion during challenging times.
Thanks to our Writer’s Room sponsors, the McClure Family Fund and the Spalding University Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing!
Author + Speaker Lineup
Jane Olmsted is a retired professor of English at Western Kentucky University. Her collection of poetry, Seeking the Other Side, was published in 2015 (Fleur-de-Lis Press) and a chapbook, Tree Forms (Finishing Line Press), was published in 2011. Her poems and stories have appeared in Nimrod, Poetry Northwest, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Adirondack, and Briar Cliff Review, among others.
Amelia Zachry was born and raised in Malaysia. She obtained a bachelor of commerce, majoring in marketing from Curtin University of Technology, Australia. When she met her husband, she moved to live with him in Japan, then Canada. During her time in Canada she obtained a bachelor’s in human ecology with a concentration in family studies from the University of Western Ontario.
Dr. Benjamin Gilmer is a family medicine physician in Fletcher, North Carolina. He is an Albert Schweitzer Fellow for Life and associate professor in the department of family medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill and at the Mountain Area Health Education Center.
Chad Oldfather has ridden horses just enough times to appreciate how difficult it is to do well. He has also mucked stalls, cleaned tack, stacked hay, helped fix fences, and logged hundreds of hours ringside as his daughters have taken lessons and ridden in shows.
