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.

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.

Paul Liberatore

Paul Liberatore is an award-winning journalist who has covered rock music and Bay Area culture for more than five decades. A longtime writer for the Marin Independent Journal and former San Francisco Chronicle staffer, he is also the author of "The Road to Hell," published by Atlantic Monthly Press and named a New York Times Book of the Times. A Milley Award honoree and Marin County Cultural Treasure, he has fronted his own band and is a proud member of the Rock Bottom Remainders.

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.