Potomac’s Mikel Blair, 46, has launched a new business in downtown Bethesda to help women find community. Modern Revival, located at 7809 Woodmont Ave. in an apartment-style space, brings women together in regular small groups or “circles” to support and learn from one another. Blair—known for her philanthropy with her husband, David, a businessman and former candidate for Montgomery County executive—is co-founder and CEO of the wellness startup. Customers pay a membership fee to participate in facilitated in-person meetings each month with eight to 12 women to promote connection, growth and empowerment. Classes and retreats are also available.
Olympic gymnastics legend Dominique Dawes had a bronze statue dedicated in her honor this summer in the lobby of the new Silver Spring Recreation and Aquatic Center. The three-time Olympian, who grew up in Silver Spring, competed on the U.S. women’s gymnastics team in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Dawes was on the famed team that took home gold at the Atlanta Games in 1996, where she also won an individual Olympic medal in the floor exercise. Now 47, Dawes lives in Montgomery County and owns Dominique Dawes Gymnastics & Ninja Academies with locations in Rockville and Clarksburg, with another in Columbia slated to open this year.
This fall, all eyes will be on Thomas Taylor, the new superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools. A product of MCPS, he attended Chevy Chase’s Somerset Elementary School, Bethesda’s Westland Middle School and graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in 1996. He and his wife, Sue, have five children. Taylor, 46, has worked in public education for more than 25 years, most recently serving as superintendent of Stafford County Public Schools in Virginia. He has a doctorate in education policy from the University of Virginia and a Master of Business Administration degree from William & Mary. Taylor, who will receive an annual salary of $360,000 to oversee the district’s 211 schools and more than 160,000 students, started on July 1.
Quince Orchard High School alum Chop Robinson, 21, makes his National Football League debut this season. The Gaithersburg linebacker was selected by the Miami Dolphins in the first round of April’s NFL draft. Robinson was on the QO team that won the Maryland 4A state championship in 2018 and graduated from the Gaithersburg high school in 2021. He went on to play at the University of Maryland, where he was named an ESPN Midseason True Freshman All-American. Robinson transferred to Penn State and played there for two seasons before being drafted by the NFL.
James Wood has been hitting it out of the park this season—Nationals Park, that is. Wood was called up from the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings and made his Major League Baseball debut with the Nationals on July 1. The 21-year-old, who was born in Rockville and grew up in Olney, attended St. John’s College High School in Washington, D.C., before transferring to IMG Academy in Florida. Wood, a left-handed hitting outfielder, is known for his size and power at 6 feet 7 inches and 234 pounds. He comes from a family of basketball players: His dad, Kenny, was a standout at the University of Richmond; his uncle, Howard, played a season in the NBA; and his sister, Sydney, was a team captain at Northwestern University.
After publishing Behind Every Good Man (Lake Union Publishing, August 2024), her fourth novel, Sara Goodman Confino is taking a year off from teaching journalism and English at Watkins Mill High School in Gaithersburg to see if she can make it as a full-time author.
“When I told my students I was not coming back next year, I was prepared for tears,” says the 44-year-old who lives in Rockville. “I was not prepared for a kid in every single class to say, ‘You taught us to follow our dreams, how could we be upset that you’re following yours?’ ”
Confino, a 1998 graduate of Rockville High School, earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature and master’s degree in education from the University of Maryland. She and her husband, Nick, an English teacher at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, have two sons, ages 4 and 7.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
When did you know you wanted to be a writer? My Uncle Jules [Goodman] lived in Indianapolis and never got married or had kids. When I was 8, I was writing letters to him. He mailed me a typewriter and told me when I grew up that I’d be an author. It was one of the most special gifts. He saw something in me.
How do you describe the genre of your books? Humorous historical fiction. Women’s fiction with a romance element is another way to describe [the genre].
What is your new book about? It’s set in 1962. It’s [about] a 27-year-old wife and mother [married] to a man who’s running a … campaign for a sitting senator. She catches him cheating with his secretary—the ultimate cliche. She kicks him out. … Her father is a retired congressman, and the one thing she knows is politics. So she goes to the opposition candidate and says, ‘If you want to win this thing, I’m your new campaign manager.’ It’s awesome. It’s got a lot of feminism in it.
As a product of Montgomery County Public Schools yourself, what’s the biggest change you see since you attended? Cellphones. That has definitely changed the quality of education. It has gotten significantly worse since COVID. Kids are constantly scrolling on their phones.
What’s something that would surprise people about you? I am a total introvert with social anxiety. I seem very extroverted. Anybody who meets me in person would have no idea. I need to be away from people to fully recharge. I would have no problem totally being a hermit and seeing nobody but my family a lot of times.
What apps on your phone do you use the most? Instagram and Canva. A lot of marketing falls on authors. If I wasn’t doing the writing part, I would cut down on social media.
What books are on your nightstand? I just finished Until Next Summer by Ali Brady. It’s a rom-com and it’s about a summer camp. It was absolutely delightful. Please Come to Boston by Gary Goldstein was a story set in 1975. … It was a really good coming-of-age story. One of my favorites was The Whisper Sister by Jennifer Brown. It’s set in the 1920s around Jewish immigrant families. I literally cried myself to sleep reading it. … That’s how real those characters were.
In Nadia Hashimi’s latest young adult novel, Spilled Ink (Quill Tree Books, June 2024), the main character, Yalda, is a young Afghan American girl growing up in a small Virginia town where there are mixed feelings about immigrants. When a new wave of refugees arrives, she becomes aware of the challenges they face and tries to find her voice as tensions rise. Hashimi, 46, a daughter of Afghan immigrants who lives in Potomac and has written adult and young adult novels, says her new book has a timely message with intolerance, antisemitism, hate crimes and Islamophobia increasing around the world. “I’m wanting to make sure that we leave room for conversations where people can understand someone else’s perspective, to connect with someone else’s experiences,” Hashimi says. “That only comes from knowing a bit more about what the journey might have looked like.”
It’s a Privilege Just to Be Here (Alcove Press, June 2024) is a debut novel from Emma Sasaki, which is a pen name for the author, who lives in Chevy Chase. She says it seemed fitting for her to use a pseudonym for the book about the reaction to a hate crime at an elite private school in Washington, D.C. “The book is sort of about this gossipy culture. It’s about putting up facades,” says the author, connecting the storyline to her decision to be anonymous. “I like the mystery around it. It makes it more fun.” Sasaki, who graduated from Sidwell Friends School in D.C. in the 1990s and is the mother of two teens who attend private schools, says that although she’s trying to shield her identity, there is chatter online and she acknowledges some people will figure out who she is. What’s the next chapter for Sasaki? If there’s another book in her future, the author says she will weigh whether to use her real name.
After four co-authored books with Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen is back to solo writing with the psychological thriller House of Glass (St. Martin’s Press, August 2024). Inspired by someone she met who was an attorney in high-conflict custody cases, Pekkanen, 56, who lives in Bethesda, says she got the idea to write about a battle between two parents in an ugly divorce—with a twist. “You get a bird’s-eye view into a family in a crisis. Then, of course, I wanted to layer in more creepy and eerie things,” Pekkanen says of the 10th novel she’s authored on her own. Set in a Washington, D.C., suburb that Pekkanen imagines as Potomac, the book revolves around the mysterious death of the family’s nanny and a lawyer’s quest to solve the murder. Stay tuned for news on some of Pekkanen’s previous novels that have been optioned for television and film.
Rockville author and illustrator Jonathan Roth is out with his first nonfiction picture book for children, Almost Underwear: How a Piece of Cloth Traveled from Kitty Hawk to the Moon and Mars (Christy Ottaviano Books, August 2024). It tells the story of flight through the eyes of a small piece of ordinary fabric that was used on the 1903 Wright Flyer and later taken aboard Apollo 11 and a recent NASA mission to Mars. “It weaves together all three milestones,” says Roth, 56, an art teacher at Ashburton Elementary School in Bethesda known for his Beep and Bob chapter books and Rover and Speck graphic novels. “Hopefully it will be enjoyed by kids, but also used by parents and educators as a way to teach about innovation, commemoration and history.”
Jay Schlossberg grew up in Rockville listening to Bethesda’s WHFS, a free-form progressive rock radio station. Now a film and video editor, the 69-year-old has turned the station he loved into the subject of his first feature-length documentary, Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM. The montage follows the station through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and includes interviews with musicians, fans and record executives exploring its influence. A filmmaker since 1988, Schlossberg founded the North Potomac production house Media Central in 1993. After winning the 2024 DC Independent Film Festival’s award for best documentary feature, Feast Your Ears is getting its debut on the small screen on WETA on Sept. 14 and will air several times before moving to PBS’s streaming platform.
—Buzz McClain
This story appears in the September/October 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
