Founders:
Debra Toppeta and Charlene Giannetti launched Woman Around Town to help other women — natives and recent arrivals — get the best out of two of the best cities in the world, New York and Washington, D.C. Debra, an attorney, and Charlene, a journalist, are combining their talents and resources, assisted by an impressive group of people who can’t wait to tell others what they love and sometimes loathe about their cities.
Debra Toppeta
Debra Toppeta is the Publisher of Woman Around Town. After graduating from Cornell University, Debra began her career in financial services where she ultimately became the lead technical and motivational speechwriter for the members of the Executive Suite, including the CEO and several board members. Debra left financial services to attend Law School and immediately joined a large white-shoe law firm in Manhattan where she spent eight long years working in mergers and acquisitions. Committed to public service, Debra has served on the board of a special education institution in Manhattan and, with her husband, has created several foundations and scholarships to help underprivileged teens afford college. She serves on the Board of Trustees of the American Classical Orchestra, a period instrument orchestra in NYC that makes its home in Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, and is 1st Vice President and member of the Board of Governors of the New York Press Club. While she enjoys writing, Debra is happy to leave that to the experts and prefers to work behind the scenes of Woman Around Town getting the word out about the website, supporting all of the talented writers and keeping things legal.
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Charlene Giannetti
Charlene Giannetti, editor of Woman Around Town, is the recipient of seven awards from the New York Press Club for articles that have appeared on the website. A graduate of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Charlene began her career working for a newspaper in Pennsylvania, then wrote for several publications in Washington covering environment and energy policy. In New York, she was an editor at Business Week magazine and her articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines. She is the author of 13 non-fiction books, eight for parents of young adolescents written with Margaret Sagarese, including “The Roller-Coaster Years,” “Cliques,” and “Boy Crazy.” She and Margaret have been keynote speakers at many events and have appeared on the Today Show, CBS Morning, FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and many others. Her last book, “The Plantations of Virginia,” written with Jai Williams, was published by Globe Pequot Press in February, 2017. Her podcast, WAT-CAST, interviewing men and women making news, is available on Soundcloud and on iTunes. She is one of the producers for the film “Life After You,” focusing on the opioid/heroin crisis that had its premiere at WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, where it won two awards. The film is now available to view on Amazon Prime, YouTube, and other services. Charlene and her husband live in Manhattan.
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Contributors
MJ Hanley-Goff
MJ Hanley-Goff has been contributing to Woman Around Town since its inception in 2009. She began her career at Newsday and has written for many New York publications including the Times Herald-Record, Orange Magazine, and Hudson Valley magazine. A former editor of Hudson Valley Parent magazine, she also contributed stories to AAA’s Car & Travel, and Tri-County Woman. MJ is thrilled to write for WAT and for the ability to shed light on so many creative thinkers, doers, and artists.
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Maria-Cristina Necula
Maria-Cristina Necula’s published work includes the books “The Voice Beneath the Quince Tree: A Memoir of Growing Up in Communist Romania”, “The Don Carlos Enigma: Variations of Historical Fictions” and “Life in Opera: Truth, Tempo and Soul”, two translations: “Europe à la carte” and Molière’s “The School for Wives,” and the collection of poems “Evanescent.” Her articles and interviews have been featured in “Classical Singer” Magazine, “Opera America,” “Das Opernglas,” “Studies in European Cinema,” and “Opera News.” As a classically trained singer she has performed in the New York City area at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, Florence Gould Hall, and the Westchester Broadway Theatre, and has presented on opera at The Graduate Center, Baruch, The City College of New York, and UCLA Southland. She speaks six languages, two of which she honed at the Sorbonne University in Paris and the University of Vienna, and she holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The Graduate Center, CUNY. In 2022, Maria-Cristina was awarded a New York Press Club Award in the Critical Arts Review category for her review of Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice” at the Metropolitan Opera, published on Woman Around Town. She was a 2022-24 Fellow of The Writers’ Institute at The Graduate Center. Currently, Maria-Cristina serves as the Director of Alumni Engagement at Lehman College. https://mariacristinanecula.com/
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Marina P. Kennedy
Marina Kennedy began her writing career when her four children were grown and she returned to college to study in the humanities. She is delighted to be a contributor for Woman Around Town. The majority of her articles focus on the culinary scene, theatre, and travel. Marina and her husband Chuck enjoy the rich cultural experiences of the New York metro area and beyond. She hopes that readers like reading her articles as much as she enjoys writing them.
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Carolyn Swartz
Carolyn Swartz is a writer, filmmaker, passionate home cook, and good-enough pianist who has live-scored silent films in at movie theaters in Berlin, Manhattan, and Portland, Maine. Her short films have been featured on websites and social media pages of Fortune 100 companies, and her writing has been published in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, and – best of all – Woman Around Town.
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Marsha Solomon
Marsha Solomon is a New York artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums. Her poetry has been published in both American and international art and literary journals, and recently a monographic book on her work, “From Rhythm to Form” was published by Cross-Cultural Communications.
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Mary Gregory
Mary Gregory is an award-winning art critic and journalist whose work with museums, galleries, and auction houses led her to writing about art for publications like Newsday, Long Island Pulse, Afterimage, Art Week, Our Town, and the Chelsea News. A member of the International Association of Art Critics, she has degrees in both English and art history, and her fiction has been anthologized by the Georgia Museum of Art.
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Hal Glatzer
Hal Glatzer is a performer, journalist, novelist and playwright. He has been singing all his life. Nowadays, he plays guitar and sings from “the Great American Songbook”the hits of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. Hal started in journalism in the 1970s as a daily newspaper reporter, and moved into TV news. But he focused on the rise of the computer industry, and stayed on that beat until the mid-’90s when, ironically, the internet killed the market for high-tech journalists. So he turned to writing mystery fiction, starting with a tale of a hacker who gets in trouble with organized crime. He next wrote a series featuring a working musician in the years leading up to World War II, whose gigs land her in danger. During the pandemic, he penned some new adventures of Sherlock Holmes. His stage plays are mysteries too: one with Holmes and one with Charlie Chan. More often, though, he writes (and produces) audio-plays, performed in old-time-radio style. A grateful product of the New York City public schools, including Bronx Science, he moved away from the city for many years, but returned in 2022 to live on his native island, Manhattan.
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