Core Team
Johanna Halbeisen (Associate Editor) has worked side by side with us for well over two years. She is a retired librarian and founder & curator of the New Song Library.
Johanna has carried out a myriad of different tasks including helping to organize our data into spreadsheets in Google drive, contacting artists around soliciting song submissions and checking their songs, formatting lyrics, coordinating volunteers, networking with Children's Music Network and People's Music Network, backing up the work that a scattered team of people are working on, and many other things too numerous to mention. New Song Library has been used in lots of the work Johanna done with us.
Joe Offer (Associate Editor) has been one of the main contributors to the Mudcat Cafe over the past 30 years. He also has been heavily involved in the Sacramento Labor Chorus and the Sacramento Family Song Circle.
Joe has used his prodigious familiarity with a wide variety of songs, songwriters, and folklorists to help us track down hard to locate songwriters, choose the best vesion of traditional songs to include, proof lyrics in different langauges, and think about the overall organization of the songbook.
Joanna Katzen is a summa cum laude graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston. She does songwriting & private lessons. Joanna has created all of the music transcriptions of the rounds in Rise Again. This process often has required many revisions to get files just "right" for the format in this book! One of her own powerful songs "And We Shall Want No More" appears in the lullabies chapter of Rise Again.
Mark Heiman is a folk music book publisher and long-time song leader. Mark was our chief proofreader & also played an invaluable role in text formatting issues.
Jack Cole has been our key team member "north of the border". Beginning back in 1998 he helped us identify a terrific range of songs written by Canadian singer-songwriters that we were unfamiliar with. He has played a key role as liaison with the folk music community in Canada in song selection, in obtaining permissions, and in creating chord lines for the many fine songs in Rise Again written by Canadian songwriters. He is also helping us think about distribution of the new book in Canada given the high cost of shipping from the U.S. Jack is an organizer of the Kitchener Song Circle and Folk Night at the Registry concert series.
Eric Lerner has created macros that have helped us to efficiently format style lyrics in the style that we use in Rise Again. He has also created a macro to help us transfer copyright information from Hal Leonard into individual song files and played a key role in data management of the book's indices.
