Faculty

Lois Silverstein, Ph.D.

Education

• Ph.D., McGill University, Montreal Quebec
• M.A., Hunter College, New York
• B.A., Barnard College, Columbia University, New York

Areas of Interest

• British and American Literature
• Women Writers: 12th century to Present
• Creativity and the Writing Process

Current Courses

• English 57: Women and Literature
• English 92, 94, 96: Intermediate English Composition and Reading
• English 1A: University Parallel Course/Composition & Reading
• Individual Consulting Practice in Writing & Creativity Development

Publications

• DAUGHTER, a novel (2002)
• BLOODLETTING: A Mind At Midlife (1992)
• WOMANTREES HOW YOU ARE BLOOMING (1989)
• MOTHER MY HOUSE IS MOVING PAST (1979)
• VOICES ROUND THE RIVER (1977)
• THROUGH GLASS (1973)
• VALIA: THE STORY OF A WOMAN OF COURAGE (1991) one-woman show on woman freedom fighter at beginning of WWII - wrote, produced, performed in San Francisco and Berkeley (1992; 2000)
• also reviews and articles in Barnard College Magazine, SF Review of Books, SF Weekly, et al

Biography

Lois Silverstein holds a Ph.D. in literature from McGill University, a B.A. from Barnard College, and an M.A. from Hunter College. She is a Registered Expressive Arts Therapist, Writing Consultant and Instructor at various universities, colleges and graduate schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has published five books of poems and prose, essays and reviews, and has written and performed the one-woman multi-media show VALIA, the story of a woman freedom fighter in Danzig, in WWII. She runs a writing development and consultation practice in Berkeley, California and teaches college writing and women’s literature in San Francisco.

She is a frequent reader in the area, on stage, radio, bookstores, colleges. BLOODLETTING: A MIND AT MIDLIFE, combining prose and poetry, was one of the first books in the spate of books about menopause. And frequently, she finds herself, however, unintentionally, in the avant-garde. "It is as if I was connected to the zeitgeist," she said, "but just did not express it through a continuous, formal, affiliation either in a teaching institution, or in publishing. Like many women of my generation, I had to invent a niche for myself and sustain it on my own. This was true of VALIA too, her one-woman, multi-charactered, multimedia show, which she not only wrote, and performed but produced, pulling together other artists to mount the work in San Francisco and on local Public Radio. In VALIA, the story of a woman freedom fighter at the fall of Danzig in WWII, one of the centuries great tragedies receives an intense, poignant, and lyric treatment, the human voice resounding beyond the violence.

Most recently, Silverstein has been writing novels and extended non-fiction. DAUGHTER is her first completed novel. WIFE is on the computer screen, as is PIECE WORK, another family tale. She continues her work on Holocaust-related material and is completing a new work on Roumanian Jews, based on testimony, called UNSEAL THESE LIPS.

"I believe in writing as an art and a spiritual practice," she says. "Nothing in my education prepared me for the depth and development it has offered me. I work with others to give back when I have only begun to fathom as I write and read, my daily fare. With Chaucer, I say, ‘Gladly will I lerne, and gladly teche.’