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 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.

  • Suellen began her finance career at the US Treasury Department as a Presidential Management Intern before spending 25 years at the World Bank Group, where she served as adviser to the US Executive Director, investment officer for East Asia and the Pacific, senior adviser to the Executive Vice President, and director of the Syndications Department. She played a key role in developing the Equator Principles, the groundbreaking risk management framework for assessing environmental and social impacts in project finance.

    After retiring, she represented ABN AMRO and RBS in Washington and consulted for banks on environmental and social standards. She holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

    Suellen has served on the boards of several nonprofits, including Suited for Change and PAI, which advocates for international reproductive rights. A longtime board member of the Chilmark Community Center, she founded the Martha's Vineyard Book Festival in 2005. She divides her time between Washington, DC and Chilmark.

  • Valerie brings strategic expertise and a lifelong commitment to the arts to the MVBF board. Her career began on Wall Street on the trading floor of Smith Barney in corporate bonds. After earning an MBA, she worked in financial services consulting at Price Waterhouse.

    As a management consultant, she helped create one of the nation’s largest energy conservation programs in Southern California.  She then returned to NY as Director of Marketing and Strategy at a boutique firm specializing in hedge fund development.

    While raising a family in New Canaan, CT,  Valerie spent four years traveling internationally while homeschooling her three children. She became involved with Planned Parenthood Connecticut and led major fundraising events. She also studied at NYU’s Fine Arts Program and served as a volunteer EMT in a hospital emergency room.

    She currently also serves on the board of the Boston Book Festival. Valerie and her husband live in Aquinnah and Brookline, MA.

  • Patricia Sullivan is an historian who studies the history of Black-White relations in the United States and the struggle for racial justice and civil rights. She is a professor of American history at the University of South Carolina.

    Her book, 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. 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 co-directed a series of summer institutes for teachers at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute from 1997-2017, and is co-editor of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

    Pat has also taught at the University of Virginia and Harvard University. She lives in Vineyard Haven.

  • 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.