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A popular media guest, Bobbi is an award-winning speaker, author, and TV guest as well as a communications and media consultant. She has been interviewed on The Today Show on women's issues and over fifty other national and local media outlets, including the BBC in England, ABC, CBS, and NBC. TV & Speaking Videos
Bobbi is a member of the Women's Leadership Board at Harvard University, a Founding Member of the Donor's Circle of the Women's Foundation of California, a Founding Member of the Legacy Society of the National Association of Women Business Owners, Co-Chair of the NAWBO-LA Legacy Society's Award Luncheon, Boardroom Bound Los Angeles Launch Leader, member of The Denver Woman's Press Club, The Denver Press Club, The Los Angeles Press Club, The National Press Club, The Society of Professional Journalists, and USA TODAY's Entrepreneur Panel.
A nationally recognized trainer, coach, consultant, and public speaker, Bobbi has addressed the National Press Club and has received numerous speaking awards. She teaches at venues across the country, including the Smithsonian Institution, and has created the Story Party® designed to teach financial literacy and principles of life success through pride of authorship. As a book coach, Bobbi has helped over forty people become published authors.
Recently, she helped launch "From Executive To Yogi in Sixty Seconds," the first book in "The Executive Yogi Series," by Neeti Dewan.
Bobbi is the author of “Telling Your Story: Why It’s Important and How To Do It The Easy Way,” Founder and President of The Write Your Own Book Club, and co-author of “The Million Dollar Woman.”
Bobbi’s career includes stints as a Chinese Area Specialist working for the United States Government, positions in the U.S. Department of Education, the Office of the Mayor of New York City, as well as Congressional and Senatorial offices.
In the non-profit field, she was the Director of Management and Communications for the Alban Institute at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. She also wrote “The Report on Vietnam Veteran’s Memorials Nationwide” for the Project for the Study of the Vietnam Generation.
Bobbi is a graduate of Chatham College in Pittsburgh. She was also George Washington University Fellow with concurrent doctoral teaching fellowships in History and International Relations. She has lived in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Korea, Kansas, New York City, Colorado, and California.
In her spare time, Bobbi is a professional singer and has performed with Leonard Bernstein and Robert Shaw at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall.
She and her husband Robert have homes in Colorado and Southern California, and she is the mother of three sons and a daughter, who is adopted from Korea.
TELLING YOUR STORY
Why It’s Important and How To Do It The Easy Way
By Bobbi McKenna
Each of our lives forms a powerful and compelling story whether we are conscious of it or not. How we came to be, who came before us, what gives us joy and fills us with passion.
In “Telling Your Story™,” Bobbi McKenna gives you a clear, simple process to tell your own story in a way that not only forms a personal history, a legacy, and an identity, but also increases your understanding of the power of stories in your life and the lives of people you love.
If you’ve always wanted to write a book, have an idea for a book, or always dreamed about being an author, Bobbi McKenna, author, founder and president of The Write Your Own Book Club, has developed a quick and easy system that can help you find your voice and help you tell your own story in your own words.
A lot of people think that their story isn’t important enough to write — as though there were some kind of “Special Commission” that must rate the merits of your story before you can write it.
You don’t need anyone else’s permission to write a book, or to tell your story. It’s your story, and it’s your right to tell it. It is, after all, the most important story you will ever write!
Newsprint Coverage:
Lexington Herald-Leader:
"EASY WRITER"
Author helps children have fun with words
WORKSHOP ALSO HELD FOR BREAST CANCER SURVIVORS
By Cassondra Kirby
HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER
Bobbi McKenna paced back and forth on a pastel tile floor just outside of a classroom at The Academy at Lexington, occasionally peering through a door window at a group of restless fourth-graders.
The word "dazzling" has been used to describe McKenna, who has appeared on radio and television news programs around the world to promote her book and the writing clubs.
This class of 16 was one of the reasons McKenna had flown to Lexington from Denver, Colo. The other is a small group of breast cancer survivors at Lexington's Carnegie Center.
McKenna, the nationally known author of Telling Your Story -- Why It's Important and How to Do It the Easy Way, thinks everyone has a story to tell. She tries to capture those stories by traveling around to different cities each year volunteering to conduct what she calls "Story Parties" in a school and with a community organization.
"Everyone's story has the power to change the world," she said. "I know it does because I see it everyday. But if it isn't written down it's lost."
"What makes me excited is I have the chance to really inspire these children," she said. "There could be children here who go on to be best-selling authors."
After working with the children, McKenna switched gears and met with a group of breast cancer survivors studying arts expression at the Carnegie Center. The session turned into a powerful, emotional one for some who had always wanted to tell their story but needed help.
Juanita Peterson said she had always wanted to write a book about the death of her daughter and the traumatic experience that followed. "I just can't write it," she told the group and McKenna. "I'm so angry and upset with the physician who told me she was dead and the way she told me."
Peterson said she had written the doctor a seven-page letter after her experience telling her she needed sensitivity training and suggesting ways to deal with grieving parents. The doctor returned the letter without comment. Through a Write Your Own Book Club, McKenna will help Peterson tell her story.
Other members of the group said they were inspired by McKenna and might join the club as well. McKenna will conduct a writing session for the public tonight at the Carnegie Center.
"I think most people are aching to tell their story, they just need encouragement and a way to tell their story that's simple and fun, and I have developed a way to do this," she said.
DAILY POST, Liverpool, UK,"Publish and be praised"
By David Charters
AMERICA'S Million Dollar Woman swept into Liverpool, in that supercharged way of the Stars and Stripes, to teach us how to write.
DAZZLE is the word that vaults across your mind and stings your eyes when the blonde American lady, who is selling her big idea.
Wow is her first word of choice - and you can almost hear the exclamation mark sprinting into place behind the second w.
The thinking behind The Write Your Own Book Club is simple.
Traditionally, writers have submitted their books to a publisher, usually with the guidance of an agent. The publisher then decides whether or not to accept the book. If it is published, the writer is entitled to a slice of the sales, often 10%.
Established authors, expected to sell well, might be commissioned to write books for which they will receive an advance payment in addition to their share of the profits.
Overwhelmingly, however, it is a frustrating business for the writer. The vast majority of manuscripts are rejected. Most of today's famous authors had to try publisher after publisher to have their work accepted.
This is not good business. But supposing you did the writing yourself and then got trusted friends to help with the rest - the proof-reading, the editing, the legal checking, the cover design, the glowing testimonials. That done, you could send it to a printer.
At this point we come to a crucial difference between art and commerce. Writers tend to be diffident, hoping (praying) that recognition will come from the appreciative readers. If you had to choose between one or the other, giving pleasure to others counts for more than money.
Bobbi, in England on a speaking tour, sees no reason why the two should not be married. That is why she started her club after her first four books, all thrillers, failed to be published.
Rather than become that most tragic figure, the unpublished author suffering for her art, Bobbi decided to take matters into her own hands.
"In 1994, I started writing books," she said. "I had top agents and top publishers. They loved them. They said, 'great characters, great story, fabulous writing, but it is so hard for a new author to break out of the pack.'
"They would rather publish a mediocre book by an established author than a great book by a new author because the public might not find you."
Her book, Telling Your Story, is really a teach-yourself-to-write manual with advice, guidance and pages left blank for the hopeful ones to begin writing their stories.
Even so, you have to admire her zip. Listen to her go, as the gold buttons glisten on her jacket of yacht-club blue.
"People in America always say, 'what do you do?' It is the first thing they say. They didn't want to know your name just, what do you do? (asked with emphasis). I would tell them I'm an author. Then they would say that people had told them that their lives would make a number one best-selling book or an award-winning movie or that they had a great idea for a book. That happened over and over again. But they had a lot of negative assumptions about actually writing it.
"So one day I had a brainstorm. In American people love book clubs, where they meet and read. On the other hand people like to write books as well. So I thought why not put them together - The Write Your Own Book Club!"
By then, Bobbi had established her own publishing company, which she called Total Success Solutions Publishing. She found a printer who would produce the books at $1.30 each. Bobbi rises a gear.
"You can write a book to promote your business. The book becomes a glorified business card. In America being an author gives you an enormous credibility. To go on radio and TV in America, you must have a book. After my book came out, I got 50 hours of radio interviews from coast to coast. That's pretty good, right?”
"What makes your book special is your personality, your unique heart, your voice. I tell people - find your voice and write in that voice."
In her Book Club, you are guided through a curriculum, given message training, how to communicate, how to design your book cover, how to get "powerful" testimonials, how to pick a title that will sell and other tricks of the trade.
***
Seattle Post Intelligencer, Tuesday, May 24, 2005, A moment with ... Rufina Keaton, poet and entrepreneur.
Rufina Keaton, 58, has a story to tell.
She grew up in a family of nine, with a Mexican mother and a black father in Westmoreland, Calif. The twists and turns of her life brought her to Dress for Success, a non-profit that helps in-need women suit up for the professional world. And that's where her path crossed writing-coach Bobbi McKenna's.
McKenna got a group of strong Seattle women, like Keaton, to write about themselves and their lives for "Our Hearts, Our Stories" (Dress for Success, $15.95, 115 pages; call 206-325-3453 to order). Keaton herself has gone from hoping to get a job at a fabric store to planning to open her own shop once she completes her business administration degree.
What was going on in your life before you connected with the Dress for Success folks?
I was a student. I have learning disabilities, so school is a struggle, but I've committed myself to getting at least a master's degree. But because of my disability, I haven't had much opportunity. I had a janitorial business because I had no skills and I've been in psychoanalysis for five years ... and I'd never done anything besides janitorial work.
I had 10 employees and I didn't realize they needed constant care and attention and constant supervision ... and I was trying to be a student at the same time. And because I closed my business, I was evicted.
How did you come to contribute to "Our Hearts, Our Stories?"
I went to the Y(WCA) because I needed help with a job interview at a fabric store and ... they sent me to Dress for Success. Bobbi called there, looking for women who wanted to write and ... for two days I was at the Sheraton (for the Story Party), writing.
Did the experience of writing about your life change or clarify your view of it?
Bobbi was fabulous in that respect. I wrote a negative story from the assignment, you know, I was very traumatized as a child ... but then she said, "Write something positive," and I wrote about my father, and the things he told us and how he wanted to create beautiful children ... he was a very, very intelligent man, but because of the racism in our small town, he wasn't allowed to become a businessman. I didn't notice the theme in the story until I read it in the book, and the theme is of a strong woman who wants to get an education, about her love for her father, and how she wanted to help her family.
Has your situation improved over the past few months?
Yes. I'm a lot more confident. When we did the book signing, I asked if I could read my poem ("Unravel My Knots," also published in the book), and I've never read one of my poems ... at the book signing, I knew I had to feel it ... and it was like I was on a stage at the theater. ... I've always wanted to be up in public, it was like a dream. I don't feel so overwhelmed by things anymore. It's like a light inside of me has turned on. I don't only see my problems, but I see how beautiful life is. I'm feeling more connected and I'm not feeling the anger like I did before.
Do you have any advice for women who find themselves in tough situations?
The one thing that's gone in my mind is not to set limits for myself. Not let the limits of my past story confine me. That was just one facet of my life. I've learned to welcome the unknown. This has allowed me to relax and experience things, to face my fears and to realize that once I face them, they're gone.
-- P-I reporter D. Parvaz
Copyright 2003-2007 Bobbi McKenna All Rights Reserved
