Bios

RENÉ SYLER Host & Emcee–NYC After two decades as a television news anchor, including four years on CBS’ The Early Show, Rene decided it was time for a change. Tired of reading from a teleprompter, René was determined to find her own voice and inspire women like herself – juggling busy lives, raising children and trying to live up to impossible parenting ideals. The result is René’s missive on modern motherhood, Good Enough Mother: The Perfectly Imperfect Book of Parenting and its subsequent website www.goodenoughmother.com

As the daughter of two, breast cancer survivors René underwent a highly-publicized, preventive mastectomy in 2007. She now works tirelessly to promote early detection and travels the country speaking to groups of women (and men) about health issues, modern parenting and the importance of putting yourself first.

Rene lives in Westchester New York with her children Casey and Cole whom she loves madly and her husband Buff, whom she loves occasionally. Just kidding. Not really. You can read more of Rene’s rantings, er, pearls of wisdom at goodenoughmother.com

Abby Sher Cast–NYC is a writer and performer living in Brooklyn. She wrote, toured and performed with The Second City for five years. Her memoir, Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl Who Couldn’t Stop Praying got a nod from Oprah and won ELLE Readers’ Prize, Chicago Tribune’s Best of 2009, and Moment Magazine’s Emerging Writers Award. She’s written for The New York Times, The L.A. Times, Self, Jane, Elle, and HeeB and performs throughout New York. She’s currently working on a novel and planting seeds.

Abby is most grateful to be mom to two phenomenal children – Sunny and Zev. They teach her every day the importance of noodles and nonsense.

Alysia Reiner Cast–NYC is an award winning actress, producer, humanitarian, outspoken environmentalist, and mother of one – unless you count her often helpless husband, then let’s be honest: it’s mother of two. As an actress, Alysia has appeared on stages across the country and all over the world, and her prolific career also includes many TV shows (30 Rock, all the Law & Orders, White Collar, etc) and films (Vicious Kind, Arranged, Kissing Jessica Stein, One Last Thing, etc). Alysia won a SAG Award for the film “Sideways” and recently completed the film “Backwards,” so apparently she’s destined to do “Forwards” or “Underneath” some time soon.

As a mother she’s been featured on Celebrity Baby Scoop, Stroller Traffic, People.com, Healthy Child Healthy World, Family Focus Blog, Your Green Baby, among others. She’s a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and Maria Shriver’s website, and is a celebrity spokesperson for “Best For Babes.”  As a champion of all things eco-friendly, her family’s NYC brownstone renovation was featured on television’s “World’s Greenest Homes” and “Renovation Nation” and in various magazines like Dwell, Gotham, and The Nest.

Alysia is involved with many charities including The Cancer Support Community, Habitat for Humanity, Our Time Theatre Company, Actors for Autism, and the Joyful Heart Foundation, but she is still destined to feel guilty she is not doing enough all the time.

Cynthia Bastidas  Cast–NYC was born in the Imperial Valley desert in California. After graduating from UC Davis with a degree in Community Development she moved to San Francisco where she wrote countless business and marketing plans for immigrant entrepreneurs in need of start up capital. That was the extent of her writing career.

Seven years ago her pursuit for acting training brought her to New York where she studied at HB Studio and recently received her MFA Acting degree from Brooklyn College, CUNY. She has performed on stage off Broadway and has done extensive commercial and voiceover work in both English and Spanish.

Theater and acting has exposed her to other creative outlets and is now venturing into writing.  Cynthia is grateful to the organizers of Listen to Your Mother for allowing her to share her story and feels humbled to be working alongside so many talented and prolific writers.

Deborah Goldstein Cast–NYC is the author of the humor blog Peaches & Coconuts. The name of her blog refers to a lesson Deborah learned prior to relocating to the UK with her partner and living there long enough to pledge allegiance to the queen. She was told that people from the U.S. are like peaches and the British are like coconuts. Peaches are friendly over-sharers, but the pit in the middle represents their private, true selves reserved for only those closest to them. The British, on the other hand, are much more difficult to get to know. Once past the hard exterior of the coconut shell, however, you know Brits as well as they know themselves–which does not say that much considering their aversion to therapy.

Deborah didn’t have to cross the pond to recognize that regardless of our nationalities, we’re all peaches or coconuts. She is a self-identified peach married to a coconut, and together they parent an 8 year-old coconut and a 5 year-old peach.

Prior to parenting and blogging, she earned an income in sales at media companies such as MTV, Disney and Virgin Media. You can see more of Deborah’s work in The New York Times’s The Local and on her Patch.com column, Over the Rainbow.

Estelle Sobel Erasmus Cast–NYC is a journalist, former magazine editor, author, and columnist whose life and lifestyle has completely changed since the birth of her daughter in April 2009.  She is an active member of seven meetup.com mommy groups; an advocate and supporter of local women-owned businesses, sits on the Board of Directors for the national non-profit Mothers & More, and writes a blog called Musings on Motherhood, Mid-life and other Forms of Madness where she covers many topics relating to motherhood and parenting.

One of her goals is to get society to value the unpaid work that mothers and caretakers do, by separating the role of “mother” from the “work” (childcare, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, making appointments and chauffeuring) of mothering.  Besides her blog, Estelle can also be found on Twitter as @mommymusings011 and on her Facebook Fan Page.

Eve Lederman Cast–NYC is the author of Letters From My Sister: On Love, Life and Hair Removal, a collection of correspondence with her sister which lovingly ridicules everyone in their path and was endorsed by The New York Times city section editor as “a warm slice of life on the edge, with an edge.”  Her other books include Shag’s Zodiac: Adventures in Astrology and Shag’s Little Book of Love: Dating, Mating and Mischief Making. She has discussed her work on Good Day NY and WCBS radio and has spoken at bookstores and universities.

Eve is also a spoken word artist and just released a CD of her live performances — Going Public (available through Amazon.com). She has appeared with the storytelling group The Moth, at the Players Club, the Bryant Park Reading Room and the JCC Lit Café, and was named one of “New York’s best emerging Jewish artists” by the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Eve also co-produced and co-directed A Good Uplift, a short documentary about a bra shop on New York’s Lower East Side. The film screened on PBS and has appeared in more than 50 film festivals around the world including Lincoln Center’s New York Jewish Film Festival.

Howard Margulies Cast–NYC has been typing for most of his life. In addition to developing repetitive stress injuries, for the past 100 years he has created advertising campaigns for some of America’s best loved brands. In his spare time, Howard worked as a Hollywood-type comedy writer for numerous hilarious TV shows. He did, in fact, listen to his mother, and thirty years later is still trying to understand what it all meant.

Howard now resides in Westchester, NY with his wondrous wife and daughter. If you were so inclined, you could follow his admittedly pointless 140-character observations on twitter at @hmargulies.

Ilana Wiles Cast–NYC is a freelance creative director in advertising as well as the blogger behind Mommy Shorts, a humor blog that blends her wit with her love of design. She has created commercials for everything from Oreo to Diet Coke to the Jamaican Tourism Board and now uses her film experience to create Mommy Shorts: The Show, a YouTube series which she writes, films, edits and hosts. You can also find her as a regular contributor to Babble’s Toddler Times.

Ilana could not be more excited about her return to the stage. Previous performances include THE FIVE OF DIAMONDS in her third grade production of Alice in Wonderland and TOWNSPERSON in her high school production of Our Town. She also starred as CREON in a comically ambitious camp production of Antigone, after which she swore never to try out for a play again.

Ilana lives with her husband and their two-year-old daughter in lower Manhattan where they swear to remain until someone (or lack of closet space) drags them kicking and screaming to the ‘burbs.

Jonny Schremmer Cast–NYC is a mom, actor, writer and neighborhood/church/public school volunteer who lives in Washington Heights with her husband Troy and their seven year old son.  An MFA graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, Jonny studied with Uta Hagen at HB Studio here in New York and has acted with Theatre for a New Audience, Mabou Mines, Columbia University, Mill Mountain Theatre, Six Figures Theatre Company and New Georges.

She costars as Coach Webb in Mike Akel’s Independent Spirit nominated film CHALK,  and most recently in Akel’s AN ORDINARY FAMILY, which debuted at the LA Film Festival and is now playing in film festivals throughout the country. Her play (co-written with Troy), THE BALLAD OF RUSTY AND ROY, was produced last summer at the New York International Fringe Festival and will be developed this spring at TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas and at Arkansas Rep in Little Rock.

Jonny began writing in earnest around the time she had a baby attached to her 24 hours a day, and you can read more about her adventures in motherhood at her Open Salon blog: http://open.salon.com/blog/jschremmer.

Kate Mayer Cast–NYC is nose-ring wearing, potty-mouthed, condom pushing mom of 4, wife of one, and writer of many.

Often confusing inside thoughts with outside thoughts in her blog, Diary of a Return-to-Work Mom, she is honored and humbled to be sharing the LTYM stage with such strong, smart, funny, talented, and rather attractive writers celebrating this crazy little thing she calls momming.

Kathy Curto Cast–NYC lives in Cold Spring with her husband and their four children. Her work has been published in Italian Americana, VIA-Voices in Italian Americana, Lumina, The Mom Egg, Splash of Red and several newspapers covering the Hudson Valley.

Kathy’s essays have been featured on NPR, as well as in live performances of The Art Garden, Letters to Our Ancestors, and Mamapalooza.  In 2006 she was awarded the Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship of Sarah Lawrence College, which helped to jump-start the engine that drives her desire to write.  She is currently working on a collection of stories about coming of age in the 70s and 80s with her family’s New Jersey gas station as a backdrop.

Kathy has taught writing at Empire State College and is an Adjunct Professor of Sociology at St. Thomas Aquinas College.

Kirsten Piccini Cast–NYC started blogging back in 2005 because it was cheaper than therapy. The Kir Corner started as a place for Kirsten to write about the heartache and heartbreak of her struggle through infertility and over the years grew into a blog about in-vitro, a multiple pregnancy and the trials and tribulations of being a mom of Advanced Maternal Age  with twin boys.

Before her children finally came to be, Kirsten received her AA from Keystone College and her BA from Shippensburg University. She has a full time job, a handsome husband who loves Hockey, children in daycare and she watches too much TV. If you asked her, she’d tell you that she is finally  …”a wife after decades of dating, a mom after years of infertility and a writer after filling a mountain of notebooks with stories, quotes and poems.”

Today, she is a contributor with JUST.BE.ENOUGH, a website devoted to the empowerment of women, children and parents, and a writer of fiction and everyday life on her own blog: The Kir Corner.

Patty Chang Anker Cast–NYC was always groomed for success, which in her Chinese immigrant family meant rocking spelling bees and sitting out PE with cramps.  No risk of failure sitting on the bench!  But after her own daughters started calling her “Mommy Doesn’t Do That” she realized a major attitude adjustment was in order.  She started saying yes to the things that scared her, and her blog Facing Forty Upside Down was born.

Patty is a Good Housekeeping Magazine “Blogger We Love,” a Circle of Moms “Top 25 Funny Mom,” and was voted into the Top 40 Nominated Mom Blogs at Babble.com. She was a contributor at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference (2011). Her writing has also been featured in The Huffington Post, iVillage, and Audrey Magazine.

Patty is currently researching and writing her first book, SOME NERVE: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave (Riverhead Books, 2013), about how ordinary people face their fears. You can find her on Twitter as @UpsideDownPatty.

Una LaMarche Cast–NYC is a writer, editor, and amateur Melrose Place historian who lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, her infant son, and her hoard of vintage Sassy magazines. By the time she was five, Una had developed a truly spectacular unibrow, which was unfortunate given her name but which formed the basis for her self-deprecating sense of humor as well as her Peter Gallagher obsession (did you know he released a country album in 2005?)

As a child growing up in New York City, Una dreamed of becoming a bus driver. But then she went to a small liberal arts college, smoked pot while watching The Labyrinth, and decided to major in film. After a few years of working on the types of historical public television documentaries that cast Brian Dennehy as LBJ and feature slow-motion horseback riding, she defected and became a writer instead.

Today Una is a columnist forTheNewYorkObserver and the content editor for AimingLow. She also writes for TheHuffingtonPost and NickMom, and overshares as much as her reality TV-watching schedule allows on her personal blog,TheSassyCurmudgeon, which she started in 2006 as a way to bring shame to her family. You can find her on Twitter under the handle @sassycurmudgeon. If she’s not there, she’s probably trolling the internet for celebrity blind items or discounted bulk candy.

Share