About Our Staff

About Our Staff

eNewsChannels has a highly experienced team of editors and working journalists who manage the content found in this online news magazine.

Meet our Team:

Aria C. Munro

Aria works in the book publishing industry and has been a content editor for the Neotrope News Network since 2004. Her black video iPod is most often shuffling Invader Zim episode vids and Thomas Dolby or Dead Can Dance tunez. She digs ninjas and similarly likes to be stealthy and dress in black. Apparently due to Aria being a big fan of spy gadgets, her photograph disintegrated before we could scan it for this mini-bio. She refuses to have a MySpace page because it might be the work of the devil. That’s all we know, really.

Christopher Simmons

Christopher Laird Simmons is the founder and President of Neotrope® which is involved in entertainment, marketing and PR; both online and in traditional venues. He is a current member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). As a public relations (PR) professional he works with companies of all sizes to help them “get ink” in the media and promote their brands and products. He has also served on the panel of judges for the PRSA Excellence in Tech Journalism Awards (2002, 2003, 2004 awards).

He has also been on the launch team of numerous successful companies including MacMall, FindWhat.com (now MIVA), and Send2Press® Newswire.

He has developed over 500 Web sites since March of 1995, including e-commerce projects for Oprah Winfrey and the No Fear clothing company, and an online 10-hour e-learning video course for DentalHygieneReview. He is also considered one of the first “experts” in search engine optimization (SEO), creating a proprietary technology called ContextEngine® in 1996 which has evolved over the past decade along with search engines to help Web sites rank higher and “be found.”

He has art directed numerous magazines, and was the Chief Creative at the PhotoVentures ad agency from 1982-1987. He has won two Harvey Measurement awards for most responsive magazine advertising, and an ARPL design award from Apple Computer in 1993.

His first personal computer was a Radio Shack TRS Model One, co-owned with his brother, David. This was followed by an Atari 800, Commodore 64, Atari 1040ST, Macintosh SE/30, and many more Macs from Quadra to PowerMac, before moving “mostly” to home-built Microsoft Windows-based PCs in 2004.

He wrote one of the first magazine articles on using MIDI sequencing with a Commodore 64, and Sequential Circuits interface in the June 1984 issue of Polyphony (now Electronic Musician). As one of the first proponents of e-book technology in the publishing and advertising worlds, he published an electronic magazine (“e-zine”) of fiction and pop-culture called Nu*Real in the Common Ground format in Dec. of 1994 that was available for download on AOL and Internet news groups.

He has written for a wide variety of national and regional print publications including Computer Player, CrossMedia, Digital Imaging, Print on Demand Business, Micro Publishing News, Polyphony, Search Engine Intelligence, and Spazz. His business articles on graphic design and Web development were also reprinted by the Graphic Artist Guild in several issues of their member newspaper. As the founder of a small publishing company (Mindset Press, now Neotrope Press), he developed over thirty small press publications and “fanzines” between 1987 and 1990, including one that was featured in the “potpourri” section of Playboy magazine.

He has been widely interviewed by publications like PC World on Linux Web hosting (he operated a Web hosting business from 1997 to 2005), TrendWatch on PDF technology, three times by Entrepreneur magazine on PR and marketing (2003, 2005, 2006), and been invited to speak at Seybold, and the annual meeting of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, among others. He has been interviewed numerous times for Internet radio and Podcast programs over the past six years related to public relations and Internet marketing topics.

As a photographer he has won numerous “best of show” awards for abstract, glamour, and portrait imagery. He has also created photographic and 3-D imagery for over three dozen national magazine covers. His abstract digital artwork was selected as the cover for the 1997 Science and Technology Course Catalog for the California State University Long Beach (CSULB) and has been featured in numerous major art installations including the 1997 Bytes of Art project in San Francisco. He created his first computer graphics for the Adventure International Atari 8-bit computer game Stone of Sisyphus in 1983.

He has composed music themes for two cable TV programs, including the award-winning VidKidCo, produced by the Long Beach Museum of Art’s Video Annex. As a musician he performed in several bands in the ’80s, including “Pets Gone Wild” ( www.petsgonewild.com ) that was featured in the L.A. Times Calendar section, and was an L.A. Weekly “band name of the week.” He released numerous independent self-produced albums of electronic music in the ’80s under the name “Bluetoy,” which were played widely on late-night alternative music radio shows, and reviewed favorably in music magazines like Electronic Musician. He re-mastered and re-released the albums on CD under his own name between 1996 and 2000 (his CD Beserker is available on iTunes, Napster, CDbaby, Amazon.com).

Learn more about Christopher Simmons at: http://ChristopherSimmons.com .

Scott G (aka “The G-Man”)

Communication Nation ColumnScott G owns G-Man Marketing, (www.gmanmarketing.com/) an advertising and communiations firm in Los Angeles. If you have opened a newspaper, flipped through a magazine, or listened to the radio in the past two decades, your purchasing decisions have been influenced by his work.

Mr. G has created advertising campaigns for hundreds of clients, and most recently has written/produced radio commercials and corporate broadcasts for such as Goodrich, General Dynamics NASSCO, Verizon Wireless, Yale Hospital, American Cancer Society, DIRECTV, Micron, Legoland, the Auto Club and many more.

He is also the recording artist known as The G-Man, with his albums distributed by Delvian Records and available on Rhapsody and iTunes. He’s a voting member of NARAS (the Grammy organization) and regularly writes about communications, marketing and advertising for many publications and Web sites.

Shirley Ryan

Author and Life Coach Shirley RyanShirley Ryan has a MS in Human Relations and is president of Working Together (www.aboutworkingtogether.com), a business specializing in spiritual and cultural shifts in communities and helping people to create abundant, enriched life styles through changes in mind, body, and spirit. Beginning with our self, every relationship we have is a stepping stone to World Peace. We move outward from our center to our spouses, children, parents, siblings, family members, coworkers, supervisors, church family, school family, and community.

She is a trained therapist and life coach, artist and author (www.searchingforthewatersofantiquity.com), making her home in Petaluma with her husband and partner, Robert Mitchell and dog Zoe.

John C. Garrison

John C. Garrison, authorJohn C. Garrison is a multitalented intellectual, a virtual ‘renaissance man’ whose varied interests and interdisciplinary studies span the fields of Christian theology, political science, history, psychology, philosophy and tax law. Garrison is also the author of two books, The Psychology of the Spirit: A Contemporary System of Biblical Psychology and The New Income Tax Scandal: How the Income Tax cheats workers out of MILLION$ each year and the corrupt reasons why this happens. A third manuscript in the works is Sigmund Freud: How An Atheist Jew Became an Antisemite Christian Heretic.

Connie Baxter Marlow

Connie Baxter Marlow Connie Baxter Marlow, filmmaker, photographer, writer and speaker is a futurist who feels she has discovered missing pieces to the prevailing paradigm. For 15 years she has been creating forums for dissemination of this missing information primarily through the voices of visionary indigenous elders. She has been speaking at colleges, universities, high schools and independent events around the country on a variety of inspirational topics. Her unique worldview gives her a positive, uplifting approach to history, current events and possible solutions that is inspiring.

Her life is a testament to the practical application of the principles she espouses. She is the mother of three grown children. She has recently teamed up with her partner Andrew Cameron Bailey to create The InnStitute @ Sedona – a Bed and Breakfast Inn and a place for higher learning and exploring evolutionary ideas in Sedona, Arizona.

For more information on Connie’s ideas go to www.TheAmericanEvolution.com; www.TheInnStitute.com; www.BaxterProject.org.

Susan Davis

Susan Blake DavisSusan Davis is a Certified Clinical Nutritionist who provides holistic pet health consultations to cat and dog owners throughout the United States. Susan teaches owners how to prepare raw and homemade diets custom-tailored to their pet’s health conditions. She works both with individual pet owners and veterinarians who refer their patients. Susan’s website, www.askariel.com is a complete library of common pet health illnesses with a guide on how to treat them naturally using diet, supplements and lifestyle changes.

Susan’s specialty is teaching clients how to develop homemade diets for their pet’s health condition. She is a strong advocate of using whole, natural foods to nourish and strengthen a pet’s overall health. She will develop a custom-tailored diet for each pet rather than giving a “canned” recipe as every pet’s condition is a little bit different.

The breadth of Susan’s knowledge is based upon her experience volunteering her time in animal rescue. She is the founder of Ariel Rescue, a 501(c) (3) public charity dedicated to saving the lives of shelter dogs in impoverished communities. Many of these animals were severely malnourished and sick but Susan saw their potential, and working with local veterinarians, restored them to good health. She saw the power of nutritious foods, holistic pet care and the benefit of natural supplements in their healing.

Susan Davis graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with highest honors from the University of California at Davis. She then went on to attain a Master’s Degree in Social Psychology and an MBA from UCLA. Her passion for holistic medicine led her to become a Pet Nutritionist. Susan’s accomplishments have been featured on CBS News, in the Orange County Register and Women’s World Magazine.

Currently, Susan is on staff at VCA Arroyo Animal Hospital and the Veterinary Cancer Group in Orange County, California, offering holistic pet nutrition consultations. She also teaches courses on pet nutrition for the Capistrano Valley Adult School Education Program. In addition, Susan continues to volunteer her time running Ariel Rescue, helping to save the lives of many homeless shelter dogs that would otherwise be euthanized.

Suzy Chaffee

Suzy ChaffeeSuzy “Chapstick” Chaffee got world headlines at the ’68 Grenoble Olympics, and went on to incorporate her fantasies as a child ballerina of dancing down mountains, to help invent ski ballet, become three time World Freestyle Champion, and star in Bogner’s world hit “Fire & Ice.” In the 70’s, Suzy was also the first woman on the USOC board, and led the reform of the double-standard Olympic rules with Jack Kelly, Bill Bradley, and Muhammad Ali, inspired by Jim Thorpe.

She also led the Title 1X March for Equality in sports and education and then set up the White House meeting with Secretary Mondale and WomenSports Foundation legends Billie Jean King and Donna de Varona to get it enforced. She inspired Senator Ted Kennedy to put it under his wing after convincing him that girls/moms are key to getting the whole family healthy, and then President George Bush Sr. while serving on his Fitness Councils. Impressed with her activism, President Ford’s ad advisor, Jim Jordan dreamed up with her the “Suzy Chapstick” Commercials, that help kick start America’s “Fun Fitness” Revolution.

Chaffee is also an author of the “I Love NY Fitness Book,” lecturer, producer of ski ballet films, like “Butch Chapstick and the Snowdance Kid” that Baryshnikov loved, and designer, tying Bogner to win the “World Ski Couture Award” for her Nature-inspired skiwear designs. She loves being ski teacher for World leaders, Corporations, folks that need a helping hand, and Native youth.

In 1995, a Lakota snow miracle that saved Telluride, motivated Chaffee to co-found Native Voices Foundation, which snowballed across America, inspiring ski areas to invite tribes back to their ancestral lands to ski, snowboard and share magnificent snowdances, praised by the President of the National Ski Areas Association, Michael Berry, for saving ski areas from droughts. It was renamed the Native American Olympic Team Foundation after evolving into needing to give some amazing underserved Indian talent a chance to be in the London 2012, and Russian 2012 Olympics, while helping restore their health and spirit of Indian Country. It also led to creating a bridge between the North American Elders and Stanford’s 2007 Nobel Laureate, Dr Stephen Schneider, to help mainstream live in more harmony with Nature. 2009 marks Chaffee’s induction into a third Halls of Fame as a Triple Sports Pioneer.

Liisa Sullivan

Liisa (yes, spelled correctly!) writes for several national and regional magazines; daily and weekly newspapers; and business-to-business newsletters. Before joining the Neotrope News Network, she worked as an editor for a national medical publishing company where she managed a team of writers and did market research for new launches. Liisa also worked in the catering business for several years, and as a result, specializes in writing about the food and beverage business and has two monthly columns that feature chefs and wine experts.

Liisa received her Masters in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in New York City and is currently a member of the Public Relations Association of Western North Carolina. She resides in the beautiful town of Asheville, NC in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains; she lives there with her husband, Bryan and Black lab, Annie.