We’re already celebrating! Spring is here and The Hobart Festival of Women Writers is returning to an in-person gathering on the weekend of September 9, 10 & 11, 2022. We’re ecstatic to be able to return to our signature weekend of celebrating the work of women writers. We’ve invited a stellar group of Participating Writers who’ve published their work in all genres and styles. They will offer workshops, will read from their work and their books will be available for purchase. Join us in the Hobart Book Village for a glorious celebration of women writers.

Joining us for the first time:

Laurie Lico Albanese

Laurie Lico Albanese is a novelist, journalist, and poet. Her upcoming novel, Hester (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), is a first-person account of a fictional love affair between Nathaniel Hawthorne and the woman who inspires his iconic heroine, Hester Prynne. Laurie’s, Stolen Beauty (Atria, 2017), about Gustav Klimt’s iconic golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Baeur, was praised by the Wall Street Journal as “a work of art itself.”

Myriam J.A. Chancy

Myriam J. A. Chancy, Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College, is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College.  She is the author of What Storm, What  Thunder, a novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake which has been named a Best Book of Fall by TIME, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, The Chicago Tribune, VULTURE, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, BOSTON.COM, Parade, THRILLIST, LitHub and Harper’s Bazaar among others. It is shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was longlisted for the Bocas Lit Prize for 2022.

Ysabel Y. Gonzalez

Newark, NJ native Ysabel Y. Gonzalez, received her BA from Rutgers University, an MFA in Poetry from Drew University and works as the Assistant Director for the Poetry Program at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She’s a CantoMundo Fellow and has been published in Tinderbox Journal; Anomaly; Vinyl; Waxwing Literary Journal, and others.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of Wild Invocations (Get Fresh Books, 2019).

Marina Antropow Cramer

Born in postwar Germany into a family of refugees from the Soviet Union, Marina Antropow Cramer has enjoyed the benefit of lifelong ties to Russian expatriate communities. Her work has been performed by Roselee Blooston’s Short Story Theater. A short story, “Pear,” appeared online in Blackbird Literary Journal in 2009; another story, “Grave,” came out in the Fall 2009 online issue of Istanbul Literary Review. The digital journal Wilderness House Literary Review published “In Case of Fire” in the Winter 2010 issue, and “Half the Bed” in Winter 2012. Roads was her first novel. Her second, Anna Eva Mimi Adam, is scheduled for a February 2020 release. She holds a BA degree in English.

Khaliah D. Pitts

Khaliah D. Pitts is a writer, culinary griot and curator. She considers herself a cultural memory-worker, documenting stories of the African diaspora. Khaliah is the Co-founder and Director of Our Mothers’ Kitchens (A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Social Engaged Art, 2018; Leeway Art & Change Grant, 2016) and Co-founder / Creative Director of Griot Girls. She is a recipient of the 2020 Leeway Foundation Transformation Award and a current Activist-Curator fellow for PACSCL’s Chronicling Resistance. Khaliah’s work can be found in Blackberry: a magazine (2013), the Dig Deep Facing Self Anthology ‘Dream a Drowning by my Tongue’ (2014), The Fem Lit Mag (2016), Vagabond City (2019), A Gathering Together Literary Journal (2018, 2019), ‘A Garden Of Black Joy: Global Poetry From The Edges Of Liberation & Living’ (2020) and forthcoming in ‘Love Letters to this Bridge Called My Back’ (2022).

Jane Schulman

   Jane Schulman is a poet and fiction writer.  In 2020, she published a book of poetry, Where Blue Is Blue, with the terrific small press,

Main Street Rag.  She explores themes of love, death, disability, and wonder in the everyday. Jane’s poems have appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Sixfold, The Lake and many others. She is now at work on a book of short stories. Jane was born in Brooklyn and lives in Jamaica, Queens. A seeker and finder of voices, she works as a speech pathologist in a Brooklyn public school with children with autism and learning challenges. 

Returning to The Festival for 2022:

Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

American-Ghanaian author and poet Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
has written for AOL, the Village Voice, Metro, JET Magazine, and Trace Magazine. Brew-Hammond has just released a new children’s book, Blue: A History of the Color As Deep As The Sea and As Wide As the Sky

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet, author, and curator. Cheryl’s verse memoir, Mama Phife Represents, stands as a tribute to her late son, hip hop icon Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest.  Alongside Mama Phife Represents, her four collections of poetry, Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, Convincing the Body, and Arrival, a finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Award, present a lifetime dedicated to the written word. Cheryl’s latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets is forthcoming in 2022 by Northwestern University Press. Her poetry has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater and the National Endowment for the Arts for Ronald K. Brown: Evidence, A Dance Company.

Esther Cohen

Esther Cohen is a novelist and poet living in New York City. She’s the author of several books, cluding Book Doctor. Her writing appears daily on her blog Overheard at https://overheardec.substack.com/which features her intensely personal poetic observations of life in New York City and the world.

Alexis DeVeaux

Alexis DeVeaux, a celebrated writer and activist recognized for her lifelong contributions to a number of women’s and literary organizations, has collaborated with the visual artist Valerie Maynard and poet Kathy Engel on the digital project, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been Terrorized?”(available on YouTube). She is the author of Don’t Explain, an award-winning biography of jazz great Billie Holiday, written as a prose poem. As a freelance writer and contributing editor for Essence Magazine in the 1980s, Alexis was chosen by the magazine to go to South Africa in 1990 to interview Nelson Mandela upon his historic release from prison, making her the first North American writer to do so. Alexis published the award-winning children’s book, An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987). A project nearly ten years in the making, her biography of Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet (2004) has been the recipient of several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (2004), the Lambda Literary Award for Biography (2004), the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005).

Stephanie Nikolopoulos

Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer and editor, based in New York City. She is the author, along with Paul Maher Jr., of the book Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”  She also wrote the introduction to the reissue of the travel classic A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird and contributed to Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia.  Her personal essays and journalism on visual arts, literature, endangered languages, and Greece and Sweden have appeared in as BOMBlog, Brooklyn Rail, Gothamist, The Literary Traveler, and  others. She is also the visual arts editor for Burnside Writers Collective, where she writes a column about church architecture called Church Hopping and offers live tours.  She has taught writing classes in New York and Michigan and written curriculum for authors.  She has given readings at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Bertha Rogers

Bertha Rogers, named First Poet Laureate of Delaware County, New York, in March 2005, is a poet, translator, visual artist, and master teaching artist. More than 250 of her poems and critical reviews have appeared in such journals as Many Mountains Moving, The MacGuffin, Connecticut Review, Laurel Review, Karamu, Nimrod, Chelsea, Pivot, Yankee, andBarrow Street; and in several anthologies. Her poetry collections include Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen, 1991), The Fourth Beast (Snark Publishing, 2004), For the Girl Buried in the Peat Bog (Six Swans Artists Editions, 1999), and A House of Corners, winner of the Maryland State Poetry Society and Review Competition (Three Conditions Press, Baltimore, 2000). Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, was published in 2000 by Birch Brook Press, Delhi, NY, and her interdisciplinary Beowulf exhibit with readings and workshops toured the U.S. from 2000-2002.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2021), the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015), winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Fiction from Lambda Literary, and the forthcoming novel Big Girl. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College. In her fiction, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young Black women through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques.

Lisa Wujnovich

 Lisa Wujnovich is a farmer, poet, activist, educator, and herbalist, writing and performing in the heart of the Marcellus Shale Region. Her anti-fracking poems were on the forefront of the movement to ban fracking in New York State. She directs the Hancock Community Education Foundation Elementary K-4 After School Garden, where students and families grow, learn about, and cook fresh vegetables from the garden. Lisa teaches poetry as an enrichment tutor at the afterschool program.  She received her MFA in poetry from Drew University and BA in drama from Antioch College. Poetry Publications: Fieldwork (Finishing Line Press) 2012This Place Called Us (Stockport Flats Press) 2008

Continuing a Festival tradition we are offering two Intensive Workshops. The very popular immersive workshop, Good Stories taught by Esther Cohen and, new for 2022, Flashing Through The Genres, taught by Elizabeth Searle and Suzanne Strempek Shea, members of the faculty of The University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program.

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Learn more about Hobart Festival of Women Writers and our Participating Writers

at www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.com and at http://www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.blog