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. (Chicago Tribune)
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.
All of Bill Broder's works can be purchased at his Amazon Author's Page: https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Broder/e/B001JP0ZIC/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1543961772&sr=8-1-fkmr0
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).
GLORIA KURIAN BRODER (1927-2013)
Gloria Kurian Broder was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan with four sisters, who remained close for her lifetime. She received a BA from the University of Michigan, and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Stanford, University under Richard Scowcroft and Wallace Stegner. She lived in Sausalito for fifty-one years and, with her loving husband, brought up a daughter and a son there. She published stories in Harper's, Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Literary Imagination, and other literary magazines. Her story, "Elena, Unfaithful," was anthologized in "Great American Love Stories" (Little, Brown). She and her husband, Bill Broder, co-authored a novel, "Remember This Time" (Newmarket Press), based upon the experiences of her mother and aunts as teenagers in Russia during WWI and the Russian Revolution. Her book of short stories, Their Magician and and Other Stories, was published by Handsel Books/Other Press, NY, in 2005.
Gloria wrote fiction, because she loved to read fiction and believed in it as a form of truth. In her stories she attempted to reveal the humor, love, and tragedy of ordinary lives. Her favorite short story writers were Anton Chekhov, Isaac Babel, John Cheever, William Trevor, and Alice Munro.
With a combination of comic lightness and gravitas that may remind the reader of Chagall as of Chekhov and Cheever, Gloria Kurian Broder shows us what it is like to live in America's cities and suburbs, creating characters who, in the face of loss, self-doubt and others' skepticism and hostility, strive to keep alive the spirit within them.
Their Magician and other Stories by Gloria Kurian Broder is available on Amazon in hard cover, paperback, and Kindle.