Our Board

  • Steve Fischer has over 40 years of bookselling and publishing experience, and has been coming to the Vineyard for nearly that long. Out of college he was a bookstore manager in Vermont, and in the early 80’s began a 25-year career with HarperCollins Publishers with positions as the New England sales rep, Director of International Sales, and manager of the Barnes & Noble account.

    After a decade in New York, Steve relocated to Boston and became the Sales Director for Tuttle Publishing, enabling him to spend weekends and vacations on the Vineyard. From 2006 until 2017 he served as the Executive Director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, during which time he became involved with the Book Festival’s author selection and programming. He is also a volunteer with Island Grown Initiative, He now spends six months of the year with his partner, at their home in Chilmark.


  • Patricia Sullivan writes about the history of black-white relations in the United States and the struggle for racial justice and civil rights. She lives in Vineyard Haven.  

    Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, published in conjunction with the NAACP’s centennial,is the first comprehensive history of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. Henry Louis Gates Jr. described Lift Every Voice as “a major contribution to our understanding of the political and cultural history of African Americans—indeed, of America itself--in the twentieth century.”

    Her other books include Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White, Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years, a first-hand account of the civil rights movement in Alabama during the 1950s and 1960s, and Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era. She codirected a series of summer institutes for teachers at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute from 1997-2017, and is coeditor of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

    Sullivan has taught at the University of Virginia, Harvard University, and the University of South Carolina.

  • Wendee Wolfson is a Leadership Coach to both experienced and emerging leaders in corporations, non-profit organizations, family businesses, and startup enterprises.

    She has also worked with non-profit boards to develop strategic initiatives and implement leadership transitions as a consultant and as a board member.

    Wendee also works with social entrepreneurs as a coach to Fellows and Staff in the Halcyon Incubator for Social Entrepreneurs and as a lead advisor to the Next Wave Impact Fund. She was a co-founder of both Women’s Growth Capital Fund, a venture capital fund that invested exclusively in women entrepreneurs, and WomenAngels.net, a professionally managed fund of active women angel investors.

    Wendee began her career in the financial services industry and has an MBA from the Yale School of Management. Wendee has volunteered at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival since 2011, and managed island logistics for participating authors for many years.