Community Conversation

Joyce Kleiner

Joyce Kleiner is a recipient of the 2025 Milley Award for Creative Achievement in the Literary Arts. She is the author of two books about Mill Valley: Legendary Locals of Mill Valley (Arcadia Publishing) and Kind of Close to Heaven (Lulu Publishing). Her columns and essays ran in the Mill Valley Herald, the literary journal Dos Passos Review, the Marin Independent Journal, the Ross Valley Reporter, the Novato Advance, and Mill Valley Patch.

Joyce has lived in Mill Valley since 1995 and has served as a Library trustee, a Parks and Recreation commissioner, a member of the Bayfront Park General Plan committee, and in several roles as a parent and community volunteer.

Erma Murphy

Since moving to Mill Valley in 2000, Erma Murphy has been a fixture in the local arts community. With her life partner Daniel Patrick and Murphy Productions, she produced hundreds of musical shows and events across Marin County, earning a Milley Award in 2014. She currently serves as Executive Director of the O'Hanlon Center for the Arts in Cascade Canyon, where she programs exhibitions, art talks, and literary and music events.

Tim Ryan

Tim Ryan is a Mill Valley community artist and 2023 Milley Award recipient whose projects, including metal hearts distributed to grieving neighbors during the pandemic, are as much about the objects as they are about the people they bring together. He serves as senior director of strategic facility planning at San Rafael City Schools, and his public installations have become fixtures of Mill Valley's creative landscape.

Veery Maxwell

Veery Maxwell is a founding partner and co-head of Innovation and Expansion at Galvanize Climate Solutions, where she invests in technology companies driving decarbonization across energy, agriculture, and transportation. As a Mill Valley mother of two, she thinks about this community's future as both a neighbor and an investor in what comes next.

Raven Twilling

Born and raised in Mill Valley and a graduate of Tamalpais High School and Scripps College, Raven has spent the past four years working with Bay Area Community Resources and Marin County Health and Human Services on tobacco and nicotine prevention: community outreach, youth engagement, and public health policy advocacy. She heads to law school this fall.