Cottage Chats
About
Hosted by Hedgebrook’s Program Director and alumna, Amber Flame, these conversations between two of our alumnae are live-streamed to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Explorations on joy, sharing new work, talking craft, and collaboration, these organic conversations are spawned through the Hedgebrook connection - even when the two in conversation are meeting for the first time! These events are provided free of charge to our community, although donations are always welcome!
We’ll hold Cottage Chats throughout the year, and will record them for future viewing on our YouTube channel.
Nicole Shawan Junior (they/them) was bred in the bass-heavy beat and scratch of Brooklyn, where the cool of inner-city life barely survived crack cocaine’s burn. Their work appears in Oprah Daily, Guernica, Zora, Gay Mag, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. Nicole has received residencies and fellowships from Hedgebrook, Tin House, Periplus, NYFA, Lambda Literary, the San Francisco Public Library’s James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center, and more. Nicole is Deputy Director of Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America, and founder of SeaSalted Honey and Roots. Wounds. Words. (two distinct literary arts revolutions that serve BIPOC writers), and former editor-in-chief of Black Femme Collective. They have guest-edited for The Rumpus as well as served on the editorial teams at Women’s Studies Quarterly of The Feminist Press, SLICE Magazine, and more. Nicole curated Raising Mothers' limited Justice Involved Mothers column, which was penned by formerly incarcerated Black women.
Crystal Wilkinson, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is Kentucky’s Poet Laureate. She is the award-winning author of Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence , Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of a 2022 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, a 2021 O. Henry Prize, a 2020 USA Artists Fellowship, and a 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Foundation and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, is forthcoming from Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Professor of English in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.
Past Chats
You can view them on our YouTube Channel
