Mary Sands, Webmaster

Mary Sands was born in Louisville, Kentucky, raised in the Midwest, and currently lives near Laguna Beach, California. She is a graduate of Purdue University, with degrees in English and anthropology. She is a technical writer and editor, and was also an editor for years at Macmillan Publishing, in Indianapolis, Indiana, before moving to California. She has also freelance edited and written for Macmillan since her move to the West Coast.

Her creative mainline includes designing, maintaining, researching for, and writing for Beat Generation News. She has written reviews of Off the Road (by Carolyn Cassady), Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings (by Paul Marion, which will be published in the next issue of The Kerouac Rag), Punk Rockwell (by Michael Rothenberg), and the article "Strange Prophecies Anew: Rethinking the Politics of Matter and Spirit in Ginsberg's Kaddish" (by Tony Trigilio). Her article "Back at the Whiskey" (McClure/Manzarek) will be published in the summer issue of Kerouac Connection. Her short story "The Storyteller" was published as a narrative on a CD-ROM about electronic publishing, 1995. Her Beat News site offers bios of the beat generation women and men and articles about rucksacking, philosophy, beat art, and jazz. She also maintains a literary news calendar of beat events happening around the world.

Mary's newest project, JACK Magazine, premieres June 21, 2000 and is a creative effort that goes beyond the label of beat generation to showcase artists with a similar consciousness in today's world. Michael Rothenberg is the co-editor of JACK.

Her interests include the great outdoors, ecology, cultural anthropology, beat literature, and Renaissance movements. She is involved in the Dana Point Coast Guard Auxiliary, where her volunteer work is focused on environmental safety for boaters. She likes to hike in the mountains and does a tiny bit of surfing when the coastal waters get warm enough--and when they're clean enough. She is most inspired by the life-long works of Gary Snyder and lists The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac, as her favorite novel. You may reach Mary at beatnews AT earthlink DOT net.