Staff & Governance

For nearly 20 years André Bernard has been Vice President and Secretary of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which has awarded Fellowships to exceptional artists and scholars in 55 fields annually since 1925. He held various editorial positions at Viking Penguin, Simon & Schuster, David Godine and The Book-of-the-Month Club, and served as Editor-in-Chief and then Publisher of Harcourt Brace.  He is the author of five books of literary miscellany, for a decade wrote book-related columns for The American Scholar and The Kenyon Review, and has appeared on various media discussing writers and publishing, including “The Today Show” and National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”   He has had a lifelong relationship with the Berkshires; his father (the family house was in West Stockbridge) was a violist with the Boston Symphony, and as a child he was a constant reader of childrens’ and then older books at both the Stockbridge and Lenox libraries.

Mary Berle grew up in Stockbridge and spent many afternoons traveling the world through reading while perched on a window bench in the Stockbridge Library. She attended elementary school at The Stockbridge Plain School, which is now our town offices. After graduating from Harvard College, and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Mary became a researcher, writer, and project director for national education projects at TERC, a math and science education research and development firm.  She returned to Stockbridge to raise her own children and worked in many roles with the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, including principal of Muddy Brook Elementary School for 13 years .

Since 2018 Mary has served as the Chief Educator at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge where she leads public operations, the Museum’s work to realize its strong commitment to equity and justice, public programming, and community collaborations. In the last year Mary has also taken on responsibility for her mother’s farm, Lila’s Mountain Farm LLC, one of the largest sheep farms in New England.

As a lifelong patron of libraries, Ashley Buckley-Wright’s first stop after moving to the Berkshires in 2017 was the Stockbridge Library where she and her family of three signed up for their library cards. Their part-time residence quickly became a full-time home, and Ashley, her son, and husband now reside year round in Lee where they care for a registered historic house, battle invasive vines in their yard, and fill their shelves with an ever increasing collection of books.

Ashley has spent much of her career in the arts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Christie’s Auction House in NYC, and the Royal Academy in London. She currently helps manage a consulting firm that specializes in philanthropy.

Raised in the Catskills, Ashley is an avid reader, traveler, cook, and Anglophile. Her very favorite question is “What book are you reading now?”

Robin Dumas has practiced law for more than twenty years and is a trusted legal and business advisor to a variety of organizations and individuals. Her areas of expertise include complex commercial contracting, outsourcing, privacy and data security, general compliance, and governance. For many years, she was general counsel to Partners In Health, an international health and human rights organization. Her current clients include Boston Scientific Corporation, Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, and a variety of entrepreneurs/start-ups.  Before her legal career, Robin was a classically trained French Horn player, graduating from the Manhattan School of Music in 1987. After graduation, she performed professionally in New York City before commencing her legal studies in 1993.  Robin has longstanding ties to the Berkshires, beginning 30 years ago, when she was a student at Tanglewood. She currently lives in Stockbridge.

“As Einstein said, “The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library” and by, this I’m sure he meant the Stockbridge Library, which is the hub of our community. It is an honor to serve on the Board and support the Stockbridge Library’s essential role and cultural contributions to our town and to the broader community. “

Robin Dumas

Ed Lane’s first visit to the Berkshires was in 1969 and has returned often over the years.  His first weekend home, a log cabin in Otis, came along in the early 80’s and was followed by places in Housatonic, Lenox and Stockbridge where he now lives fulltime with his wife Barbara (a former Stockbridge library board member herself).  Ed is a retired actuary (working with large corporations and public sector organizations on pension plan design, financing and investments) who found that retirement offered opportunities to reinvent and do new things, so he began an investment management practice in 2008 (still going strong), returned to school in 2015 for an MBA so that he could teach and subsequently taught finance and economics at SUNY New Paltz, The College of St. Rose and at the University at Albany for 8 years, ending in 2022.

“Libraries have a special place in my heart as my daughter is the head librarian in Gardiner, New York.  I’ve seen the exciting ways in which libraries have also reinvented themselves to become community centers and I look forward to working with the Stockbridge Library in the years to come.”

Ed Lane

KellyAnne McGuire is a lifelong library user, and still has her first library card! She has worked, volunteered, and taught at public, high school, and academic libraries in MA and NY for over a decade. Her teaching includes information literacy classes at the high school and college level (both in person and online), technology workshops at public libraries for adults and seniors, and trainings for academic librarians on teaching information literacy skills. KellyAnne is currently the Outreach Librarian at the Alumni Library at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

“In recent years I’ve worked in academic libraries, but public libraries are where I started, and they will always hold a special place in my heart. I am excited to bring my enthusiasm and experience to the Stockbridge Library, and to learn more about this historic community.”

KellyAnne McGuire

For thirty-five years, John Perkel was a librarian for various orchestras, most recently for the Boston Symphony and Tanglewood Music Center. In 2016, he retired and initiated the Berkshire Chamber Players series at the Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives. Before serving as an orchestra librarian, John was a music teacher at the Berkshire Hills Regional School District and was a psychiatric worker at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge.

“After I retired from the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2016, I approached the beautiful Stockbridge Library about the possibility of initiating a chamber music concert series. The response was enthusiastic and supportive. Since then, I have spent many happy hours in the library and I have had the great privilege of working with the greatest people. The entire staff is knowledgeable, friendly, and fun.”

John Perkel

Louise grew up in Central New York.  At ten she figured out how to take the bus to the Utica Public Library for Saturdays exploring and reading above grade level.  Eventually, she became a librarian (Syracuse University) but ambled down an unusual path starting at AT&T Bell Laboratories where she did market research; managed a document delivery and information alerting service; managed sixteen libraries; and initiated the first digital content delivery service called AT&T Right Pages in partnership with Bell Labs scientists.  At UC San Diego, she led the IT department serving ten libraries.  In Fayetteville, AR, she delved into volunteer work including running annual and capital campaigns, starting a citizens organization advocating for planned growth, and saving an historic theater.  As the executive director of the Fayetteville Public Library, she led the transformation of a poorly performing library into a heavily used vital community service, built a 90,000 square foot library that was U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certified, and won the coveted Library of the Year competition (over Seattle, Cleveland and Minneapolis) sponsored by Library Journal.  Louise authored many papers, articles and chapters; given many talks; served as Distinguished Visiting Librarian at the New Orleans Public Library; and inaugurated and organized the Library Journal New Landmark Libraries annual competition.  Now she and her husband live quietly, grow vegetables, exercise, read and attend concerts and talks.

Leslie Shatz is currently serving her 3rd term on the board of the
Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives. Previously, she served on
the boards of Yellow Barn (an international center for chamber music
in Putney, Vermont); IS183, Art School of the Berkshires (now
Berkshire Art Center); and Literacy Network of South Berkshires
(LitNet). She’s been a LitNet tutor since 2019, and was previously a
Community Partner at Community Access to the Arts.

Prior to moving to the Berkshires in 2000, Leslie was the Director of
Development & Marketing at the Community Music School of
Springfield (MA). She worked for two art galleries for several years
after settling in Stockbridge and subsequently in the development
department at the Norman Rockwell Museum. During her first term on the Stockbridge Library board, she was actively engaged in organizing and leading the capital campaign to fund the Library’s renovation.

Leslie’s interests, in addition to volunteer work, include travel, opera,
theater, reading, cooking, and knitting.

My mother nurtured my interest in reading from a very early age. As a volunteer librarian in the town where we lived, and later as the owner of a paperback bookstore, she let me roam the shelves and pick out any book that appealed to me. My curiosity was easily piqued, and I developed a lifelong appreciation of the written word. The Stockbridge Library, Museum & Archives is our town treasure, open and welcoming to all. I am pleased to be a part of it.

Leslie Shatz

Sarah Stiner is a lifelong resident of Berkshire County.  She has been a co-owner in Creative Building Solutions LLC , a local design/build firm located in Great Barrington for the last 23 years.  She is the mother of Gabriela, a 17 year old senior at Monument and recently married to her longtime partner, Ned Baldwin.  She is an avid hiker; yogi and traveler.

Wendy Strothman has worked with books for more than fifty years, starting at the University of Chicago Press; there she launched the Critical Edition of the Works of Giuseppe Verdi and acquired books in art, architecture, and music. She moved to Boston in 1983 to become director of Beacon Press; while she was there, Beacon won a National Book Award and published two NYT bestsellers, including Marian Wright Edelman’s The Measure of Our Success.
In 1995 Houghton Mifflin Company recruited her to become Executive VP and publisher of Trade & Reference books where she oversaw everything from the Peterson Field Guides to Curious George, to the adult trade list. She was also editor for John Kenneth Galbraith and Philip Roth. She left in 2002 and set up the Strothman Agency. Three of the authors she has worked with became Pulitzer Prize winners and two Pulitzer Prize finalists. Her clients include
historians David Blight and David Kertzer, naturalist Kenn Kaufman, science writers, journalists such as Linda Greenhouse, educator Ruth Simmons. She represents the estates of children’s artist Barbara Cooney, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and poet Donald Hall. In 2023 she merged with Aevitas Creative Management. Wendy has served on a number of non-profit boards, including the Corporation of Brown University, the boards of Deerfield Academy, the Association of Authors Representatives, the Copyright Clearance Center, and the Authors Guild Foundation where she is Vice President.
She and her husband John Bishop, a pipe organ builder, are thrilled to be in Stockbridge.

“I grew up an only child at the end of a dead end road, so books were my companions from an early age, and I still remember the smell of our local library, and the thrill of going into the stacks and finding books to bring home. We learned about the Stockbridge Library on our first trip to town, and have been devoted to its work ever since.”

Wendy Strothman