Meet the Red Room Team

Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief Ivory Madison founded Red Room. Madison is a writer, editor, and entrepreneur living in her hometown of San Francisco. A former management consultant to startups and Fortune 500 companies, Madison combines her business acumen with her dedication to supporting writers. Red Room began as the Red Room Writers Society in 2002, where she personally helped hundreds of aspiring and professional writers complete their books. As a result, Madison was named “Best Writing Coach" by San Francisco magazine. A frequent keynote speaker and panelist on writing, entrepreneurship, and social media, she has been a guest lecturer to the faculty and writing coaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford Publishing Course. Trained as an attorney, Madison was Editor in Chief of her Law Review, interned at the California Supreme Court, and served as a Law Fellow at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Her adventures have also included episodes as a New Orleans restaurateur, radical feminist politico, and torch singer at the Plush Room. Her feminist-mafia-noir graphic novel, Huntress: Year One, was published by DC Comics in February 2009 and is now in its second printing. It tells the origin story of a strong female superhero. Madison is twenty-nine.

Vice President and General Counsel Abraham Mertens is an attorney who has represented businesses as corporate counsel and in litigation, and has represented consumers in class-action suits, including against Enron. Mertens graduated from University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where he helped found and was an editor for the Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal. He also served as an extern at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mertens graduated from Rutgers University with honors, majoring in political science. While at Rutgers he received numerous academic awards including the Scholar-Athlete Award. Mertens worked at the Harvard Civil Rights Program where he was able to meet a few of his favorite writers, including Howard Zinn and Cornell West. In addition, he is a medal-winning rower and in 2008 was one of the top twenty single scullers in the country. He attended Berkeley High School, where he wrote for the school newspaper and always ended his articles—on topics like arts funding—with a call for others to get involved. He has written a first draft of a book about the year he spent training to qualify for the Olympics. He speaks three languages and is so fluent in Dutch that a group of Dutch publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair didn’t believe he was an American. Mertens is twenty-nine.

Executive Editor Gina Misiroglu has written a dozen books, many of them best-selling and award-winning, and has edited or project-managed literally hundreds of books, on a diverse set of topics including American history, feminism, African-American cemeteries, Latino History and Culture, alternative medicine, super-villains, celebrity, and American presidents. Raised by counterculture parents in the Hollywood film industry, she is an English Literature graduate from UCLA. Misiroglu has worked in various editorial capacities for publishers as wide-ranging as Price Stern Sloan, New World Library, Visible Ink Press, M.E. Sharpe, Facts on File, and Macmillan. Her most notable works include the three-volume American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History—winner of the 2010 RUSA Award for Outstanding Reference Source—The Superhero Book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes (2004), a Scoop "Top 10" Pick in 2005, the trade anthology Girls Like Us: 40 Extraordinary Women Celebrate Girlhood in Story, Poetry, and Song (1999)—winner of the New York Public Library's “Best Book for Teens" Award—and Imagine: The Spirit of Twentieth-Century Heroes (2000). She speaks French and Armenian. And English. Misiroglu is twenty-nine.

Senior Editor Huntington Sharp has a dogged commitment to le mot juste. He loves his work at Red Room “because it’s like being a fly on the wall of the most brilliant salons in the world, all at the same time." Prior to his current position, he worked in an obviously calculated series of fields including government law, cabaret, and contemporary lighting. Then, in 2002, at Ivory Madison’s invitation, he became one of the original four members of the Red Room Writers Society, which eventually grew into Red Room. He studied linguistics and English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and earned his juris doctorate at New College of California Law School, where he served as an editor for the Law Review. He published a well-received commentary in the Law Review called Justicia ex Machina: The Myth of the Machine/Progressive Binary in San Francisco Politics. In his youth, for fun, he read books like the Oxford History of England, 1870-1914, was the high school correspondent for his hometown newspaper, and became an Eagle Scout. Sharp was not originally going to mention that he came in second at the Sonoma Masonic Lodge 5th Grade Spelling Bee, but there it is. This picture was taken on his birthday over lunch with the rest of the Red Room team; he turned twenty-nine.

Director of Publishing Terence Clarke co-founded Red Room Press with Red Room’s CEO Ivory Madison and Vice President Abraham Mertens. Clarke is a noted editor who has helped many authors develop their projects for publication, and a writer of fiction and journalism. Mercury House and Ballantine Books published three of Clarke's novels to high critical acclaim, and he’s had a relationship of many years with The Squaw Valley Community of Writers. His latest novel, A Kiss For Señor Guevara, was published in 2011. A book of stories, Little Bridget And The Flames Of Hell, was published this year. His novel The Notorious Dream of Jesús Lázaro will come out in 2013. Clarke is currently at work on a collection of stories, titled Autumn In New York, each of which takes place in New York City. He writes regularly on the arts for Huffington Post, and his journalism has also appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle and Salon. Clarke is an accomplished dancer of Argentine tango. In 2006, with Red Room author (and superb dancer) Beatrice Bowles, he founded TangoCalifia, a non-profit organization devoted to tango dance education in the United States. Terry will be 29 next year…almost.

Creative Director Rose Daniels meant be a writer. She even has a degree in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. But after graduating, while being a writer by day, she began collaborating with independent theater companies to design their posters, winning an Austin Circle of Theater Award. She became very active in the American Institute of Graphic Arts, serving on the board of the Austin chapter for three years and editing its quarterly newsletter. In 2004, she opened her own full-time graphic design studio in Brooklyn, New York—Rose Daniels Design—where she and her team developed multimedia campaigns and interactive websites for some of America’s biggest brands, including Microsoft. Still keeping roots in the creative community, her favorite projects involved helping individual authors find their voice and personal brand, eventually making Rose Daniels Design the niche leader in author websites. Eventually, Daniels found herself wanting to help more authors find their readers on a larger scale. That’s when Rose Daniels Design teamed up with Red Room. She also somehow squeezes in hobbies, like being a swing dancer and vintage clothing dealer. Daniels and her husband now live in Minneapolis. Which is in Minnesota. Daniels is definitely twenty-nine by Minnesota standards.

Site Architect and Front-End Developer Jonathan Hebel spent five years working in book design, production, and printing for the publishing industry, in the U.S. and abroad, for publishing houses including HarperCollins and Random House. Then in 2005, his attraction to interactive technology led him into the field of web design and development using open source technologies. The next five years were spent working full-time helping organizations, entrepreneurs, government agencies, and companies like Sony and Warner Bros. Records launch successful websites and ecommerce projects employing cutting-edge technologies. Hebel helped build the Red Room web development team and enjoys stepping back to focus on the vision and really understand what will most benefit authors and readers. He lives with his wife and daughter, loves traveling the world, and currently resides in the Riviera Nayarit on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, where he can indulge his passion for surfing. He also loves Ayurveda and classical Indian music and wanted to get that in here. He doesn’t have any pictures of himself with a shirt on. Hebel is twenty-nine.

Known to the other agents in his covert cell as “Vaish," Jovanovic is an international man of mystery. He is a genius. It is impossible to get reliable information about his personal history, other than that he denies the recurring rumors of his connection to MI6. It is known that he has a Serbian passport that identifies him as being twenty-nine.

Website developer Arun Rayasa graduated from India’s National Institute of Engineering, Mysore, with a BE degree in Computer Science, after which he was a software engineer for Motorola for three years. Rayasa has a serious interest in Vedic philosophy and is affiliated with the Sri Narasingha Chaitanya Ashram, where he regularly volunteers. He also compiled a small book of the Philosophy of Sri Chaitanya, contributes articles for its online publication, and writes poetry. He also studies Sanskrit and Bengali hymns, and was part of a team that won a bronze medal at the national level, for singing. He loves fictional and real life adventures, especially reading Sherlock Holmes and being on the Red Room team. He lives close to a village called Ganjam, near Mysore, on the banks of the River Kaveri, in India. Rayasa looks forward to turning twenty-nine.

Content Coordinator Jennifer Gibbons graduated from Mills College with a degree in English and a concentration in Young Adult Literature. At Mills, Gibbons won the Marion Haworth prize for Young Adult/Children's Literature. She has written for a variety of publications, from the San Francisco Chronicle to The Jonestown Report. Her love of books (and the Dewey decimal system) led her to work for the Contra Costa Library system for ten years. When she found Red Room, she loved it so much she spent most of her waking hours on the site, blogging, commenting, and winning everything, like the Red Room Summer Reading Experience Essay Contest. After winning the Red Room Housewarming Contest—the prize being a fancy dinner with Red Room luminaries Terry McMillan and Phil Bronstein—Red Room finally realized they should just go ahead and hire her. Jennifer loves being part of the community because “on Red Room, we help writers make their dreams come true." She is working on a novel and a book of essays, which would both be farther along if her cats, Ida B. and Opal Louise, weren’t such a drama queens. Gibbons is twenty-nine in person years.