About the Staff
Learn more about the researchers who help make The Writer’s Almanac possible.
Margaret Boehme
Margaret Boehme went off to college as a gregarious 17 year old and spent the next couple years largely alone and in silence, buried in the underground main stacks of the undergraduate library, reading Chaucer and Milton and Nabokov and Walt Whitman.
After graduating, she worked as a legal assistant in a criminal defense office, as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a country club, and as a substitute teacher in southern California public schools. She moved to Central America for a few months to learn Spanish, and then attended law school for a brief while — which inspired her to pursue a full-time career as an English major. And so she is delighted to work for The Writer’s Almanac. She especially likes learning the life stories of immigrant and exiled writers, and enjoys finding out about epiphanic moments that various authors have had. Margaret’s favorite writers are Joyce and Nabokov. She’s also become interested lately in the poetry of Carolyn Forché and Nizar Qabbani.
She studies Arabic and recently returned from a six-week journey to the Middle East. She likes to ride her bicycle around San Francisco.
Betsy Allister
Betsy Allister grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, listening to Garrison Keillor make fun of English majors on the radio every weekend. But she became an English major anyway, at Macalester College in St. Paul. These days she is a writer, farm apprentice, and beekeeper across the river in western Wisconsin. In her down time you will find her baking muffins, biking, writing poems, doing yoga, and, of course, reading. Some of her favorite writers are Anthony Doerr, Louise Erdrich, Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf, Michael Ondaatje, and William Faulkner. She is also a fan of children’s books, Buddhist teachings, and vegetarian cookbooks.
One of the things she enjoys most about writing for The Writer’s Almanac is learning how writers approach the day-to-day business of writing — who writes in pajamas in a darkened room (Zadie Smith), who sticks to a perfect schedule that depends on physical training (Haruki Murakami), or who writes in the bedroom while throwing wild parties in the living room (Zora Neale Hurston). She also likes uncovering unexpected, funny, or moving stories of how writers find their way to publishing their first books.
