Introducing 2019 Hedgebrook Alumnae

For more than 30 years, Hedgebrook has served the mission to nurture women writers, building an alumnae community that has grown to more than 2,600 people. Each year it is still a wonderfully exciting thing for us to launch another cohort of women into our core Writers in Residence program, giving them a chance to enjoy the Hedgebrook retreat experience in depth. The women who are joining us on for fully-funded residencies this year have proven themselves in so many ways – with dedication to their craft, confidence in their unique stories, and the personal courage to put themselves on the line. 

All of these women have demonstrated a commitment to truth in their writing, and a compassionate awareness of our connected world – a world in which each woman's story reflects and contributes to all the others. We’re so excited to have shared the Hedgebrook ethos with them in person, and to boost them on their way to meeting you through their published works. As one of our funders said recently, “You may not have heard of these writers when they first come to Hedgebrook – just wait a couple of years.”

Rebecca Foust - Poetry

Overview: Foust writes experimental and politically-focused poetry based on issues related to immigration, gender, disability, race, social justice, and feminism.   While at Hedgebrook, Foust began the work of selecting poems for two forthcoming books: one of sonnets and one in free verse and more open forms. The Poet Laureate of Marin County 2017-19; Foust won the 2017 Cavafy Poetry prize; the 2015 James Hearst Poetry prize; and the 2015 American Literary Review Fiction prize. Publications/Productions: Books: Paradise Drive; All That Gorgeous; God, Seed: Poetry and Art; About the Natural World. Chapbooks: Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe. 600+ poems and prose pieces in 250+ journals including the Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, & Southern Review.

Laurie Kahn - Screenwriting

Overview: Kahn is a documentary filmmaker who is currently working on a feature-length screenplay about female pilot, Jerrie Cobb.  At the dawn of space age, Cobb passed the grueling astronaut tests with flying colors, and after recruiting other women to take the tests (12 of whom passed them), she sparked a dramatic public battle on the role of women in society.  While at Hedgebrook, Kahn worked on re-writing dialogue, shortening and sharpening the screenplay. Kahn has received numerous awards, including a primetime national EMMY for Outstanding Non-Fiction, and the George Foster Peabody Award. Publications/Productions: TV Documentary Episodes: A Midwife's Tale (PBS) Producer/Writer; Tupperware! (PBS) Director/Producer/Writer; Several other American Series Episodes (PBS) Producer

Christine Kandic Torres - Fiction

Overview: At Hedgebrook, Kandic Torres worked on finalizing revisions for her literary fiction novel, called Strike Three.  Set during the 2006 Mets playoff run, the novel explores the competition and codependency so often inherent in female friendship "in the hood" within the context of rape culture and toxic masculinity.  Kandic Torres received a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship in August 2017. Publications/Productions: Junction Boulevard, Cosmonauts Avenue; Carajola, Kweli Journal; Repeat as Necessary (or How to Blow Up Your Life), The Sonder Review; Circulatory, Newtown Literary Journal

Roseanne Pereira - Short story

Overview: Pereria is interested in what group narratives illuminate and what happens when cultural norms serve as obstacles to an individual's ability to face a difficult truth.  Pereria's current project When Did We Start Talking Like Ghosts is a collection of stories related to the Goan diaspora.  She is a Kroc Fellow for National Public Radio. Publications/Productions: Several stories published or produced by National Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, Sierra, CityPages.

Dena  Simmons - Non-fiction

Overview: Dena Simmons, Ed.D., is the assistant director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Dena brings with her a wealth of knowledge on teacher education and pedagogy and has published several popular articles on teacher education, social justice pedagogy, education reform, and bullying.  She has been invited to speak nationally, including a talk at the United Nations and TED talks. Publications/Productions: The Guava Tree Middlebury; We Cannot Afford to Walk Away Middlebury; Subway Prayer; On Being; and others.

Mary Williams - Memoir

Overview: Inspired by subcultures made up of individuals who find community in places and endeavors that the majority eschews or envies, Williams is currently working on a memoir written from a black Peace Corps perspective from her two years as a volunteer in Uganda.  The book will present stories of Ugandans and volunteers living together and how these contacts can enlighten and uplift rather than perpetuate ignorance and division.

Publications/Productions: Books: The Lost Daughter; Brothers in Hope; Stories published in: The Believer, McSweeney's, and O: The Oprah Magazine

Sahar Delijani - Fiction

Overview: Her writing focuses on themes of persecution and resistance inspired both by personal stories and historical facts. Delijani's current novel, Land of the Free, is about the fear, insecurity, and sense of loss and confusion that immigrants feel as they face increasing hostilities and their determination to resist and fight against it. Publications/Productions: Book: Children of the Jacaranda Tree, (Simon & Shuster). Articles/essays/short-stories: "Memories of Prison" (BBC); "My Promised Land" The Bellevue Review; "Southern Lights" Tryst; "The Bracelet of Date Stones" Phati’tude Literary Magazine; "Children of the Jacaranda Tree" Slice Magazine

MK Chavez - Hybrid

Overview: Chavez writes about the experiences of women-identified peoples and how the aftermath of explosive oppression manifests in our minds, bodies, relationships and roles in the world.  Currently, Chavez is writing about a Salvadorean diaspora, specifically centering on the experiences of women in her lineage.  Chavez recevied the Cosmonauts Poetry Award.

Publications/Productions: "Mothermorphosis” Nomadic Press; “Dear Animal” Nomadic Press; Also published in Squaw Valley Review, Rivet; Literary Journal; 580 Split, Eleven Eleven

Mira Rosenthal - Poetry|Translation

Overview: Rosenthal is an Assistant Professor, poet and translator.  She currently translating, from Polish to English, a book of Krystyna Dabrowska's poetry. With a selection of 64 poems from across three volumes, this translation introduces Anglophone readers to a politically charged, contemporary Polish voice. The project also helps remedy the lack of Polish poetry by women in English translation.  Rosenthal has received two Fulbright Fellowships, as well as a Stegner and NEA Fellowship, respectively.

Publications/Productions: Book/Poetry Collection: The Local World

Jill McCabe Johnson - Poetry

Overview: McCabe Johnson's current work is a poetry collection entitled The Disruption Regime. The collection considers potentially catastrophic events in nature, politics, and history that have served as stimulus for new growth, while simultaneously calling out injustice. Whileat Hedgebrook she explored new ways to push form to reflect shifts from territorially and culturally insular thinking to more open, inclusive perspectives.  McCabe Johnson is the winner of the Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry, among other awards.

Publications/Productions: Chapbook: Pendulum

JoAnn Balingit - Memoir

Overview: At Hedgebrook, Balingit worked on a memoir, sharing stories of her eleven (now ten) siblings who were fostered, or adopted after her parents died. Her memoir shares versions of the siblings' collective story & her's.  Her memoir explores domestic violence, racism, love, and growing up White/Filipino in a big family in a small town.  Balingit was the Delware Poet Laureate 2008 -2015, and she has won numerous awards and fellowships for her work.

Publications/Productions: Words For House Story (WordTech Editions, 2013); published in several anthologies including More Challenges for the Delusional (Diode Editions, 2018), Book of Curses (Asian American Literary Review, 2018). Poems featured in many publications including “Lies and Duplicity” (Vallum Contemporary Poetry, 2017); “Sanctuary” (The Rumpus Inaugural Poems, 2017)

Anni Domingo - Fiction

Overview: While in residence, Domingo worked on a historical novel set in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when slave trade was illegal but very lucrative.  Breaking the Maafa Chainis about individuals, black and white, caught in the moral dilemma of slavery and the slave trade.  Domingo's work has been shortlisted numerous times.

Publications/Productions: Tales Out of School (WriteOn Company, 2014); BREAKING the MAAFA CHAIN (2014); “Empty Cradle”, included in the anthology SECRET and SILENT TIMES (2010)

Bettina Judd - Academic/critical writing

Overview: Judd's current project closely examines aspects of pleasure in Black women's creative production. Her book, Feelin, argues that Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as internal and complex sensation entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, making artistic production itself the meaning of the work. Feelin intervenes in discourses in critical theory that would disembody feeling as knowledge, and expands notions of Black women's pleasure politics in Black feminist studies.  Judd has received The Hudson Prize and the Pavlis Award for Visual Artists.

Publications/Productions: PATIENT (Black Lawrence Press, 2014); Art Media Publications: “Binding,” “See Him”, “Run On Sentence”, and “The Speaking in Tongues Experiment” (Obsidian); Book Chapters include “Walking in a Tile Garden Searching for Our Mothers: A Womanist Response to El Anatsui,” EL ANATSUI: NEW WORLDS (Mount Holyoke College, 2015); “Writing About Race” The RACIAL IMAGINARY: WRITERS ON RACE in the LIFE of the MIND (Fence Books, 2015)

Serena Lin - Fiction

Overview: While in residence, Lin plans to revise and assemblenearly five years worth of Ramadan journals into one manuscript.  Since 2013, via online Ramadan journals, Linhas documented personal struggles as a single, queer, genderqueer child ofTaiwanese immigrants, trying to get pregnant. Through the lens of a mind bent to the whims of low calories, Linexplores the writing process while starving/fasting. From 2012-14, Lin was aTruman Capote Fellow in Fiction. Publications/Productions:“A Part of Me,” The Rumpus (2018); “AConversation and Constellation for Sandra Bland,” Bitch Media (2017); “TheSpeed of Love,” Drunken Boat (2016); “East Pine, ME,” Northern New EnglandReview (2015/16); “This Girl,” cream city review (2013/2014)

Christola Phoenix - Memoir

Overview: Phoenix's memoir, Paper Curls and Peanut Earring, is acoming of age memoir set against the backdrop of Harlem, New York in the 50s,60s, and 70s. The memoir centers on the beginning of the end of the happyperiod of her childhood, which is scarred by violence, and sexual and physicalabuse. Her mother died at the age of 38, the same year she become pregnant atfifteen years old. Determined to finish high school and go to college,Phoenix's life journey takes her and her daughter from the 70s to the presentday. Publications/Productions: "William" and "The EmergencyRoom", Alternating Currents-The Coil

Stefani Cox - Fiction

Overview: Cox is drawn to explore human-environment interaction,as well as personal and collective healing among communities of color. Cox'scurrent novel takes place in a futuristic California of extreme water scarcity,tackling questions of who is included and left out in environments of resourcecompetition, and how communities of color, low-income individuals, and othermarginalized people will respond to potentially being cut out of formal systemsfor this precious resource. Publications/Productions:"Valley Fieldwork" FIYAH magazine(2018); "Fyrewall" Glass and Gardens (2018)

Jessica Dickey - Playwriting

Overview: Dickey is taking a tender look at the sex lives of agroup of older people, exploring the relationship of the body and the spirit,and examine how our libido, our orientation, our sexual personality alter as weenter the final chapter of our lives. Dickey is a resident playwright of NewDramatists in NYC; she won the National Theater Conference Stavis Award; andhas received recognition for many other works. Publications/Productions: THE AMISHPROJECT (Samuel French); CHARLES IVES TAKE ME HOME (Samuel French); ROW AFTERROW; (Dramatists Play Services); THE REMBRANDT (upcoming with Samuel French)

Leslie Blanco - Fiction

Overview: Blanco will be working on her novel, The Year ofEducation. The novel is set in Cuba in 1961, the year Fidel Castro dubbed"The Year of Education," during which more than 100,000 children weresent to remote, rural regions to teach illiterates to read.  At the beginning of 1961, Cuba was not aCommunist country, at the end of 1961, it had been transformed at every leveland had declared itself Communist while the fully repressive mechanisms of atotalitarian government were also in place. Publications/Productions: Shortstories have recently appeared in TransAtlantic Panorama, The Kenyon Review,PANK, Confrontation Magazine and The Coachella Review.

Drea Brown - Poetry

Overview: Brown will be working on a manuscript that deepens herinquiry into the ghostliness of the poet Phillis Wheatley that she began in herchapbook, dear girl: a reckoning. It is set in 1761 Boston: the process ofnaming, the intimacy of "family slavery," and Phillis's relationshipswith her owners, with their other enslaved servants, and with a nearlylife-long friend.  Brown has been awardeda Naropa Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship, as well as other recognition.  Publications/Productions:dear girl: a reckoning chapbook (Gold LinePress, 2015); bop: deviled (Southern Indiana Review (2014); Poems: “what webeen knowing” STAND OUR GROUND: ANTHOLOGY for TRAYVON MARTIN and MARISSAALEXANDER (2013); “dear c.” Tuesday: An Art Project (2012); “adam after lilith,after eve” and “lilith after eden” FLICK of MY TONGUE ANTHOLOGY (2009)

Carla Du Pree - Fiction

Overview: Two hundred pages in, Du Pree will be working onfinishing her novel, Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, a story spun from loss,regret, and blessings. The tale of a young, African-American military familytraveling by car through an uncivil south during the 60's/early 70's. Toldthrough the eyes of Eudora, precocious and rattled with her misconception ofwhat married life looks like.  Du Preehas won awards and grants for her work. Publications/Productions: "Childhoodin the South" Baltimore City Paper (2016); “journey” the Potomac Review(1996)

Ashley Lucas - Academic/critical writing

Overview: When she was fifteen, Lucas's father went to prison,and stayed there for twenty years. Her work focuses on theatre in and aboutprisons around the world. Lucas will be working on WE ALL LOOKING at WALLS: Ethnographic Theatre and Prisons.The book examines three plays focused on living communities connected toprison, and analyzes these plays as disrupting popular narratives about prisonsand their inhabitants in the U.S.  Lucasis a Ford Foundation Fellow. Publications/Productions:RAZOR WIRE WOMEN: PRISONERS, SCHOLARS,ACTIVISTS & ARTISTS (co-edited, SUNY Press, 2011); Doin' Time: Through theVisiting Glass (one-woman play).

Margarita Ramirez Loya - Young adult

Overview: Ramirez Loya will be working on a realistic fictionpiece for young adults. Using the backdrop of the US-Mexico border during theTrump administration, I Only Know That Her Name is Mami, will be a boldtestimony of the many young voices that are currently being silenced and lockedin cages for no other reason than cruelty towards immigrants and theunwillingness to listen to the other side of the story. Publications/Productions: Beyond the ESL Classroom with Digital Storytelling inAPPRAISING DIGITAL STORYTELLING ACROSS EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS (Universidad deValencia Press, 2014); We Are Stories, capturing and preserving the oralhistory of the Arizona- Sonora borderlands community (Digital, Lulu, 2012);Experiencing Digital Storytelling in the ESL Classroom in EXPERIENCINT DIGITALSTORYTELLING ,(Kindle Edition, 2013)

Jaclyn Chan - Screenwriting

Overview: MUFFIN BOX, a half-hour episodic dramedy, is anamalgamation of Chan's experiences in the open mic scene in Singapore, which ispolitical, as well as LGBTQ+ and female-centric. Chan has been nominated andhas won numerous awards for screenwriting. Publications/Productions: Webseries: LIFE SPAM (Maker Studios, 2017) INTERNS: SEASON 2 (Adara Pictures,2016); SECOND CHANCES (Ananya Pictures, 2014); ZOOM ZIM ZAM: Season 2 (AnanyaPictures, 2013)

Zeeva Bukai - Fiction

Overview: Bukai is working on THE ANATOMY of EXILE, about anIsraeli immigrant family that leaves Israel after a beloved sister is killed inwhat appears to be a terror attack. The chapters deal with the mother’sstruggles to assimilate and keep the integrity of her family intact, while sheclings to old hatreds as a way to hold on to her identity.  Bukai has won the 2017 Curt Johnson Award forProse, and the Short Story Prize from Lilith Magazine. Publications/Productions: Published in Mcsweeny's, Image Journal, Decembermagazine, WomenArts Quarterly Journal, and Lilith.

Dana Fitz Gale - Fiction

Overview: Fitz Gale plans to finish the revisions of hermanuscript, ABLE, a novel about the intersecting lives of a small-townlibrarian, a retired NASA engineer, and a young woman with a strange, nomadicpast. Fitz Gale is interested in misfits, non-conformists, and those who liveon the fringes of society.  Also ofinterest are landscapes and the decline of wilderness, public lands,agricultural communities, and small towns. Fitz Gale is the recipient of the 2017 Ellen Levine Funds For WritersAward; 2015 Brighthorse Prize in Short Fiction; among others. Publications/Productions: SPELLS for VICTORY and COURAGE (Brighthorse Books,2016); "Crossroads of America" (The Georgia Review, 2016); “Leah,Lamb” (The Hudson Review, 2016); "El Vaquero" (Prairie Schooner,2014); “Jester” (Crazyhorse, 2013)

Jocelyn Johnson - Short story

Overview: Johnson's is working on a collection of storiestitled, Virginia Is Not Your Home. Short fictions of homegrowns and migrants,women and sons. Awards include: Best American Short Stories, 2018, Guest Editedby Roxane Gay; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship, 2018; 1stPlace winner of the Prime Number Short Story contest, 2016; 1st place winner ofRichard Bausch Short Story Award, Our Stories, 2015. Publications/Productions: "How to Explain to Your Son Why WhiteSupremacists are Marching" (Guernica); “Control Negro” (Guernica); “TheKing of Xandria” (Prime Number Magazine); “The Hasselblad Fiction” (OurStories); “Our Boy Powhatan” (Literary Mama)

Elaine Kim - Fiction

Overview: Kim is working on a novel, AND YOU, the LIVING, FOLLOWabout how we live after war, after loss; how we make sense of the forces ofhistory that squeeze and shape us; how we embrace or shy away from being agentsof change in our lives and in the world around us. Her characters have sufferedgreat loss and have been deeply affected by post-colonial establishment ofauthoritarian rule, the Korean War and its resulting destitution.  Kim is a Fulbright Foundation ResearchFellowship Grantee, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellow. 

Suado Sheikhhassan - Non-fiction

Overview: Sheikhhassan will be working on a series of  essays about silence from the lens of being ablack Muslim daughter of Somali Refugees in America during Black Lives Matterand the Trump presidency. The essays will explore her family's silence aroundtheir migration from Somalia and their years in the Dadaab refugee camps andhow it mirrors her own silence about being sexually assaulted while at apredominantly white liberal arts college.

Publications/Productions:“Silence is a lonely country: A Prayer in 12 Parts”(Longreads, 2018); “The Mundane Miracle of Resistence” (The Mirror, 2016); “Anddid you know?” (Documentum, 2016); “For women of color…” (The Dartmouth Radical,2015); “Brown Girl, Heal” (Black Girl Dangerous, 2014)

Rena Priest - Short story

Overview: In 2016, Priest (a Lummi tribe member) fought againstthe proposal to place North America's largest coal port in their traditionalfishing areas.  Through that work, manystories came to her by way of oral history and personal experience.  Priest will be working on a collection ofshort-stories which are connected by the theme of water, particularly theSalish Sea. The stories employ setting as both backdrop, and protagonist. Shehas received fellowships from the NYC Center for Book Arts Emerging Writers,and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Publications/Productions: Publishedin: Sweet Tree Review, Diagram, Floating Bridge Press, MoonPath Press, CollateralJournal

Mahreen Sohail - Fiction

Overview: Sohail is working on a manuscript of her novel,exploring the nuances of grieving and burial in Pakistan and how traditions andrituals rooted in Islam alienate and comfort women.  The manuscript explores the characters'changing relationship to gender roles, religion and each other as they dealwith the passing of a loved one.  Afterthe death of the father, mother and daughter learn to live alone in a societywhose public spaces and offices are built to cater exclusively to men.  Sohail is the winner of the Pushcart PrizeAnthology, 2018. Publications/Productions:Published in: A Public Space, Kenyon Review,No Tokens, Post Road, Cincinnati Review

Su Hwang - Political/activist writing

Overview: Hwang will be working on her second poetry collectiontitled ROOST.  At the moment, the essaysin verse contend with fraught histories through a blistering feminist of colorfilter with dashes of dark humor. She sees ROOST as the first of many manifestosexploring history, the lyric voice, politics, spirituality, various systems ofoppression, slavery, and the limitations of our humanity.  Hwang has received several grants for herwriting. 

Kathy Price - Hybrid

Overview: While at Hedgebrook, Price intends to work on herproject, Whiskey Gulch, EPA, Ca., focusing on the 1960's; Viet Nam War;  Black Panthers; first generation offspring;beneficiaries of The Great Migration; among other subjects, while examiningopposing black/white relationship coping mechanisms against the realities ofracism. Narratives reference brutality of recent and past history, with sexualabuse as subtext. African American music, mysticism, southern black culturebring context.  Price won the NationalCouncil of Teachers of English Notable Book Award, and is a New York Foundationfor the Arts Poetry Fellow. Publications/Productions:Published in: TriQuarterly Review, Rumpus,Chronogram

Laura Schmitt - Fiction

Overview: Schmitt's fiction is contoured by her background as amultiracial woman raised by monoracial parents. Her current novel entitled, The Free Country, explores how racism takesits turn in families and how intimate, absurd, and painful racism can be in thecontext of the multiracial nuclear family. The novel is ultimately an allegory about white supremacy and Americancolonialism, and is a harsh critique of America at a time when we have becomedangerous to ourselves and the world. Publications/Productions: Publishedin: Boulevard literary magazine

Cheryl Harris - Academic/critical writing

Overview: Harris’ book will use stories of black people facingthe threat of foreclosure, to ground an analysis of how the logic of debt andfinance situates them as simultaneously risky and valuable. She plans toillustrate how debt was manufactured and used in these black geographies tojustify the removal of democratic governance in the name of fiscalresponsibility. Harris is the recipient of many awards and recognitions for herteaching and civil rights work. Publications/Productions:“Whiteness as Property” (Harvard LawReview); “Bell's Blues” (University of Chicago Law Review); “The New RacialPreferences” (California Law Review); “Whitewashing Race” (ScapegoatingCulture)

Marie Cruz - Children's

Overview: Cruz's journey as a writer began with the desire tosee books on the American market that included stories of Filipino people andtheir culture, especially in the children's book market.  The novel she will be working on atHedgebrook explores the bonds of sisterhood and friendship, the healing bodyand mind, and a good dose of Filipino culture and mysticism. Cruz's book,Everlasting Nora was the Junior Library Guild Selection, Fall 2018. Publications/Productions: EVERLASTING NORA (Starscape Tor Books, 2018);“Lunacy”, WOLF GIRLS ANTHOLOGY (Hic Dragones, 2012); “The Secret PrincessSociety” FRACTURED FABLES ANTHOLOGY (Shadowline Comics, 2010)

Ama Codjoe - Poetry

Overview: Codjoe plans on completing her first full-lengthcollection of poems entitled, Iterations of Being.  These poems aim to investigate the identityof an African-American woman whose personal and familial stories stretch acrossboth sides of the Atlantic, while investigating the ideas of iteration,repetition, and transformation through subjects such as memory, girlhood,nature, and fertility.  Codjoe is therecipient of the Rona Jaffe Writer's Award. Publications/Productions: Publishedin: Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, Four Way Review, Georgia Review, TheGolden Shovel Anthology

Jennifer Lunden - Creative non-fiction

Overview: In ONE CANARY SINGS: Notes from an IndustrializedBody, Lunden's illness is the through-line consolidating a narrative blendingmemoir, history, science, and social criticism to reveal the health hazards ofunfettered industrial capitalism.  Lundenis the recipient of a $25,000 Canada Council for the Arts Research and CreationGrant, among many other awards and recognitions.

Publications/Productions:“The Butterfly Effect” True Stories, Well Told… From theFirst 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine (In Fact Books, 2014); “Exposed:The Mammogram Myth and the Pinkwashing of America” (Orion); “Evidence,” (RiverTeeth); Evidence, in Track Change” (DIAGRAM)

Michele Bombardier - Poetry

Overview: Bombardier investigates the idea of iteration,repetition, and transformation through subjects such as memory, girlhood,nature, and fertility. These poems aim to investigate the identity of an African-Americanwoman whose personal and familial stories stretch across both sides of theAtlantic.

Publications/Productions: What We Do (Aldrich Press, 2018); Journal publications: Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Artemis and many others

Suzanne Edison - Creative non-fiction

Overview: Edison is currently producing a "small" bookof original poems and visual art about autoimmune diseases in conjunction withthe Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle. She hopes to outline ideas for afull-length book and write a couple of essays while at Hedgebrook.  She has received three grants for her currentwork.

Publications/Productions:Published in Journal of the American Medical Association,Canadian Medical Association Journal, The Seattle Times. Included in theanthology FACE to FACE: WOMEN WRITERS on FAITH, MYSTICISM and AWAKENING.

Nichole LeFebvre - Memoir

Overview: Nichole received her MFA atthe University of Virginia, where she taught creative writing. Nichole hastaught courses on book publishing at Writer House(Charlottesville) and the Backspace Writers' Conference (New York). She isinspired by literary, music, psychological, and queer theory. She hopes towiden the scope of mental illness stories in the public conversation.

Publications/Productions:"A Tale of Two Sylvias",Lit Hub; "Three at the Bar on the Fourth of July”, Prairie Schooner;"My Mother, Killing A Lizard", Paper Darts; "Love in LilacVelcro", The Toast

Leah Hampton - Fiction

Overview:  Leah writes about Appalachia, corpses,ecoanxiety, and smart women. Her debut collection, F*ckface and Other Stories, will be releasedby Henry Holt in May 2020. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, shehas been awarded UT-Austin’s Keene Prize for Literature, the James Hurst Prizefor Fiction, and the Doris Betts Prize

Publications/Productions:  Parkway,” forthcoming in Ecotone magazine; "Fuckface,” in storySouth; multiple stories in Appalachian Heritage and North Carolina Literary Review; multiple poems and comedic pieces in online magazines; Editor in Chief of Bat City Review

Courtney Denelle - Short Fiction

Overview: Courtney is a fiction writer from Providence, Rhode Island. Her stories have appeared in The Alembic, Tahoma Literary Review, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a residency from Hedgebrook, and received her greater education from the public library.

Publications/Productions:  "Which You," Tahoma Literary Review, Issue 12, Summer 2018; "The Kiss," The Alembic, Spring 2017; The Seems-Like Kind, America’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction 2018; Use Your Words, The Southampton Review September 2019

Ann Patty - Creative non-fiction

Overview: Ann worked in New York trade publishing for more than thirty years. She was the founder and publisher of The Poseidon Press and an executive editor at Crown Publishers and Harcourt. Her first discovery as an editor was V. C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. 

Publications/Productions: Living with a Dead Language: My Romance with Latin, Viking/Penguin 2016, Penguin Paperback 2017; "The people who are bringing latin to life," The Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2016; "If you think Latin is dead, think again!", Lingua Franca, June 22, 2016; "Living with a Dead Language, "PW Soapbox, April 11 2016; "Learn the F**king Rules!" Publishing Perspectives; "Planting Flowers with V. C. Andrews, “TheToast.net