Introducing 2018 Hedgebrook Alumnae
Chrissy Anderson-Zavala
Academic/ Critical Writing, Poetry
Awards & Recognitions: 2012 Pushcart Prize Nominee
Chrissy has been working on a series of “unsendable” letters. These letters are an opportunity to time travel to ask the questions and point to the silences that cannot be. Each letter is necessarily a poem or a fragment of a poem, an attempt to leave a trace for the children of her family and community past and future.
Poetry
Awards & Recognitions: 2017 Jack Straw Writer’s Fellow
Publications: Poetry in Rattle; the Seattle Review of Books
Jamaica is a graduate of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pacific University Oregon.
Clarisse Baleja Saidi
Political/ Activist Writing
Publications: The Professional Mourners, novel
Clarisse Baleja is an Ivoirian-born writer, of Rwandan and Congolese origins who holds Ugandan and Canadian nationalities. The daughter of refugees, most of her work explores interethnic and inter-sectional points of view. The Professional Mourners is primarily based in Cote d’Ivoire and reveals how women’s issues in the region were exacerbated by conflict: access to health care and education, marital abuse, the rise in homophobia, and other prejudices.
Hybrid Poetry Memoir
Awards & Recognitions: Academy of American Poets Award, University of Washington in 2014
Publications: Unmanned (2018); The Desiring Object(2016); The Mermaid, Singing(2015); and Blue in All Things: a Ghost Story(2015)
Jessica Rae utilizes dialogic and textual tropes from the Nancy Drew franchise to create a landscape where Nancy investigates the mystery of her girlhood.
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: gold medals in the Independent Book Publisher Award and the Next Generation Indie Book Award
Publications: Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (2016), book
Piyali has published short fiction and nonfiction essays and is currently working on a novel, An Inventory of Errors.
Creative Non-fiction
She is currently working on an environmental nonfiction book, THE MOURNER'S BESTIARY: Finding Hope at the Edge of Extinction, a story of extinction and personal loss, recovery, and hope. Eiren has published several essays, as well as recorded three albums, which she has performed nationwide.
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: Fellowships with VONA/Voices; a Graduate English "Place for Writers;" Gender and Women's Studies Award for Commitment to the Advancement of Feminist Ideals from Scripps College
Claire's current project is a hybrid of memoir and historical fiction, based in Chile, where she is trying to juxtapose noise, prestige, and presence with the hidden and to use the stark contrast to draw out the truth.
Lan Samantha Chang
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: Diversity Catalyst Award, University of Iowa; PEN Open Book Award; John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction; and the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship
Publications: All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost; Inheritance: A Novel
She is currently working on a Chinese American novel, an homage to The Brothers Karamazov, wherein she deals with issues of masculine domination, racism and self-hatred, hard work, and spiritual enlightenment.
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: finalist for Pulitzer Prize; PEN/Faulkner Award; NYPL Young Lions Award; PEN/W.G. Sebald Award; Asian-American Literary Award; Lambda Literary Award
Publications: Trust Exercise: A Novel; she haspublished with HarperCollins Publishers and Viking; The New Yorker; The New York Times Book Review; All Things Considered; Washington Post Book World
Her current novel is based on the life of her grandfather, a prominent public intellectual in Japanese-occupied Korea during the 1930s and 1940s.
Poetry
Awards & Recognitions: 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry; Cave Canem fellow
Publications: Haint
She currently works as the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: Brunel University African Poetry Prize; Josephine M. Bresee Memorial Fiction Award
Publications: Black Warrior Review; New Generation African Poets; Tangerine Review
Chekwube’s current work, a novel, follows a genderqueer Muslim youth coming of age in the gentrifying Washington, D.C. of the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Poetry
Awards & Recognitions: 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow
At Hedgebrook, she worked on a poetry manuscript currently titled, Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust.
Non-fiction
Awards & Recognitions: Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Waiter Scholarship in Poetry; CantoMundo Poetry Fellowship; Academy of American Poets Prize
Publications: New York Magazine; Los Angeles Review of Books; Gulf Coast Journal; The Point Magazine
She is working on a collection of closely linked essays that hybridize memoir and criticism.
Elisabeth Finch
Creative Non-fiction
Awards & Recognitions:
Publications: Elle Magazine; Cosmopolitan
A television writer, playwright, and essayist. She currently serves as a writer/Co-Executive Producer on Grey's Anatomy. At Hedgebrook, she will continue working on her book, Done Behaving. It tackles years of groundbreaking clinical trials and inevitable minefields thirty-something women face in male-dominated medicine. It's an irreverent, moving call to arms for anyone who has lost their voice in the face of illness.
Graphic Novel
Awards & Recognitions: Stranger "Genius" Award in Literature; "Best Graphic Novel of 2012" by Washington Post, Time, Publishers Weekly, and more
Publications: Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo; Me: A Graphic Memoir; featured in The Guardian; Huffington Post; Morning Edition; NPR; Ms. Magazine
While at Hedgebrook, she worked on a self-help book/graphic memoir for teens with mood disorders.
Poetry
Awards & Recognitions: 2016 Montana Prize in Nonfiction
Tracy is working on a manuscript currently titled Dictate Herthat explores the personal as political and the political as personal through the lens of her family history in Kurdistan, an imagined country that has been the site of violence, war, revolution, and re-imagining of the state.
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: "Best Fiction Books of 2016" by Entropy Magazine
Publications: The Sleeping World; several published short stories
She is currently working on Settler's Point, a novel which reimagines Wuthering Heights as a Latina novel of passing. Her novel explores the great American myths of pioneering, racial purity, and independence.
Non-fiction
Publications: Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud; featured in O, the Oprah Magazine; VICE
In her current nonfiction Love Lockdown
Vero Gonzàlez
Poetry, Autobiographical Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: A Room of Her Own Foundation's Touching Lives Fellow; an Iowa Writer's Workshop Dean's Graduate Fellow; Pratt Institute Thesis Prize in Fiction
At Hedgebrook, she will be working on finishing and revising her hybrid autobiographical novel, Or, which explores and recreates the messy and spiraling nature of healing from trauma. Oris a story about decolonization and healing from patriarchal and sexual violence.
Screenwriting
Publications: Skin Trials series,Hope Defined
While at Hedgebrook, Shannon will be working on a screenplay entitled, Glories of the Snow. The Glories are a secret society of powerful women who prevent global catastrophe, even if whole groups or tribes suffer fatally or brutally to advance the human race.
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: Black Excellence Award in Literature, African American Arts Alliance; Gwendolyn Brooks, Henry Blakely Literary Award; American Library Association Black Caucus Award
Publications: Curbside Splendor Publishing; Obsidian Journal; Ballantine/One World
Sandra is currently working on a novel exploring Sino-African ancestral lineage inspired by an image she found while in Shanghai, of an African woman and Cantonese man in Guangzhou.
Graphic Novel
Awards & Recognitions: Barnes & Noble Discover New Writer's pick; named best book of 2014, The Boston Globe, Kirkus, Bustle, Goodreads and The Millions
Publications: The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing; The New York Times; Guernica; Electric Literature; Vogue; The Telegraph
Mira is working on a graphic memoir Good Talk, and a novel, Dear Femina, about the toll white American feminism takes on one Indian-American family.
Poetry
Awards & Recognitions: Furious Flower Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Prize; the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award; Academy of American Poets College Prize
In her second full-length collection of poetry, Ashley is boldly exploring issues of race, class, and gender through a variety of forms. She feels a fiery desire to write the truth of what it means to exist in the world as a Black person today.
Creative Non-fiction
Awards & Recognitions: Numerous awards and two honorary degrees
Publications: The Mercy Rule: A Novel,The New York Times; The New England Journal of Medicine; Harvard Review
Perry is currently working on a series of thematically linked short stories and personal essays about writing and illness and the medical world, from her perspectives — as a physician, writer, medical journalist, patient, and caregiver.
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: 2015 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship at IAIA American Indian College Fund
Publications: The Rumpus.net; News from Native California; Los Angeles Lawyer Magazine
Michelle is working on a novel called, The Fantasy Spring, which takes place on several Indian reservations and features siblings whose
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: two-time Columbia University Fellow (University Writing Program Teaching Fellowship, and Writing Fellowship)
Tsering’s current novel, In the Age of Constant Moving, spans over sixty years and follows a Tibetan family's movement through exile and experiences of displacement and enduring connection to one another and the past.
Fiction
Publications: New Quarterly; littlefiction.com; thetoast.net; therumpus.net.
While at Hedgebrook, Amanda will be working on a collection of fabulist stories currently titled, The Resurrectionist and Other Stories. In each story, the appearance of otherworldly events operates as a force for the characters to grow and move beyond their current lives, asking “what does it take for a life to be different, to be extraordinary?”
Fiction
Publications: Smokelong Quarterly; Blue Monday Review; The Tishman Review; Evansville Review; Burrow Press Review
At Hedgebrook, Denise will be working on her first novel. Having grown up in a small, rural town in Illinois, Denise is interested in exploring and better understanding the nuance and complexity of Middle America, and the stereotypes and assumptions that run rampant there.
Creative Non-fiction
Awards & Recognitions: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; the Rona Jaffe Award
Publications: The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir(Flatiron Books/MacMillan)
Alexandria is a trained, though
Children's
Awards & Recognitions: Jane Addams Peace Association Book Award; Sydney Taylor Honor Award; Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year; NCTE Charlotte Huck Honor Award
Publications: Penguin Random House; Holiday House; Cornell University PressSusan is a creative writing college professor who plans to complete her novel, Who By Fire while at Hedgebrook. Racial identity, racism, and social injustice are issues that Susan keeps returning to in her writing.
Memoir, Short Story
Publications: Esquire; Cosmopolitan; Good Housekeeping; Woman’s Day; Redbook; Elle
While at Hedgebrook, she will be working on a memoir, We Run to Crush the Grass, exploring trauma, how we deal with it, and how we heal from it.
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: named one of Africa’s most promising writers under the age of 40 in 2014; named in 2016 as one of the 100 Most Influential Nigerian Writers Under 40; Fellow at the University of Iowa.
Publications: Eyes of A Goddess (Piraeus Books); The New York Times; and her novel, Eyes of a Goddess, was published by Piraeus Books.
Ukamaka is a novelist, short story author and screenplay writer currently working on a historical novel.
Zhayra Palma
Creative Essay
Awards & Recognitions: Poets 11 Award from the San Francisco Public Library
Publications: Forum Magazine; LIES Vol IIZhayra is currently working on a collection of essays that challenges assumptions and blends memoir and poetry titled, A Disgraced Place of Eclipse. Written from the perspective of a Peruvian-Ecuadorian American woman reconciling her involvement in the sex trade, her spiritual childhood, and her past.
Syeda Rad Rahman
Fiction
Awards & Recognitions: Winner of the 2006 Bard College Undergraduate Fiction Prize; Open Society Foundation Fellow; International Women's Media Foundation Fellow; PEN America Fellow; Harvard Kennedy School Emerging Leader program
Publications: The New York Times; The Paris Review; The Guardian; Guernica Magazine
She’s working on the novel, Privilege, exploring justice, love, desire, regret, and extremism.
Non-fiction
Awards & Recognitions: Senior Soros Justice Fellow
Publications: New York Times Sunday Review; Beacon Press
Andrea is an attorney, researcher, writer, and advocate for women of color and their experiences of racial profiling, police violence, and criminalization. While at Hedgebrook, her project will examine the broader process of criminalization of women of color, and the ways it is being deployed in the current political climate.
Yaccaira Salvatierra
Poetry
Awards & Recognitions: Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize; Dorrit Sibley Award for Poetry
Yaccaira is a poet and elementary school teacher. She will be working on A Home for the Dead, a manuscript in five sections, which are inspired by stories about her family and friends, mostly immigrants, all border-related. She grapples with the question of which country to bury the dead of immigrants.
Short Story
Awards & Recognitions: John Steinbeck Award for Fiction; the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction; the James R. Carlson Fellowship; Walter E. Dakin Fellowship
Publications: Shout Her Lovely Name(2012); O, the Oprah Magazine; The Rumpus
Natalie’s current project explores socio-economic pressures in the lives of women who belong to a cooking group.
Anna Stull
Memoir
A medically retired Captain in the Army Nurse Corps, Anna is writing a memoir of her experiences deployed to Abu Ghraib Prison in 2006 and as Saddam Hussein’s nurse while detailed to the Iraqi High Tribunal Court during the Al-Anfal Trial.
Jasmin Iolani Hakes
Creative non-fiction
Publications: The Los Angeles Times and Sacramento Bee
Jasmin ‘Iolani is a writer from the Big Island of Hawaii. Much of her work focuses on the connection between cultural inheritance and personal identity. At Hedgebrook she will be working on Hula, a book based on Hawaiian Homelands that provides a contemporary perspective on the complex social makeup of the islands and the repercussions of America’s occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
