Reading, Writing, Workshops, Conversations, and Camaraderie on June 7, 8 & 9th

Hobart Festival of Women Writers is entering its eleventh year of in-person platforming and promoting the work of women writers. We’re thrilled to welcome new participating writers and returning writers. Our writers will offer two-hour writing workshops, readings, and two special panel discussions. Of course, the Intensive Workshop, Good Stories led by Esther Cohen is also offered.

Participating Writers for Festival 2024

Nancy Agabian is the author of The Fear of Large and Small Nations, a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, recently published by Nauset Press. Her previous books include Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque Books), a collection of poetry and performance art texts, and Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (Aunt Lute Books). In 2021 she was awarded Lambda Literary Foundation’s Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. A longtime adjunct writing professor at NYU and CUNY, she has also led creative writing workshops for community organizations in New York City, Los A., and Armenia. For more info: nancyagabian.com

Breena Clarke is the author of four novels, most recently published, Alive Nearby, a gently ruminative, epistolary work that explores characters in Angels Make Their Hope Here, Clarke’s 2014 novel set in an imagined mixed-race community in 19th century New Jersey. Breena Clarke’s debut novel,River, Cross My Heart, was an October 1999 Oprah Book Club selection and was named by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the seven essential books about Washington, D.C. Her critically reviewed second novel, Stand The Storm, was named one of 100 Best for 2008 by The Washington Post. Her short fiction has appeared in Washington Post Magazine, Kweli Journal, Stonecoast Review, Nervous Breakdown, Mom/Egg review, The Drabble, Catapult, Solstice, and Now, the online magazine ofThe Hobart Festival of Women Writers. She is co-founder of The Hobart Festival of Women Writers, an annual three-day celebration of the work of diverse women writers. She has been a member of the fiction faculty of Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Southern Maine. Breena Clarke is co-editor of NOW, an online journal of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers.

Cheryl Clarke‘s new collection of poetry, ARCHIVE OF STYLE: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED will be released from Northwestern University Press in August. She is the author of six previous poetry collections, in addition to the critical study AFTER MECCA: WOMEN POETS AND THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT (2004) and THE DAYS OF GOOD LOOKS: PROSE AND POETRY, 1980-2005 (2006). Clarke is one of seven organizers of the annual Hobart (N.Y.) Festival of Women Writers.

Esther Cohen is a writer, teacher, bookdoctor, and cultural activist.  She is the author of All Of Us: Stories and Poems Along Route 17. She posts a poem every day  at Overheardec@substack.com.  Her website: esthercohen.com.

Alexis De Veaux was a freelance writer and contributing editor for Essence Magazine in the 1980’s, where she penned a number of socially relevant articles. She 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 a second award-winning children’s book, An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987) before moving to Buffalo, where she earned a doctorate in American Studies in 1992. Her biography, Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet (2004), has been the recipient of several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (2004).She 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). Her novel, Yabo, won the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction.

Lynne Elizabeth is the founding director of New Village Press, an independent nonprofit publisher of progressive books, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. The press evolved from a periodical of the same name twenty years ago and now publishes ten to twelve titles per year. New Village books are distributed by New York University Press. Lynne is also the coeditor/coauthor of collected works including Beyond Zuccotti Park, What We See, and Works of Heart.

Cheryl J. Fish’s debut novel Off the Yoga Mat, the story of three characters coming-of-middle age, was published by Livingston Press/UWA in 2022.She is the author of The Sauna is Full of Maids, poems and photographs celebrating Finnish sauna culture, the natural world, and friendships, and Crater & Tower, poems reflecting on trauma and ecology after the Mount St. Helens Volcanic eruption, and the terrorist attack of 9/11. Fish has been a Fulbright professor in Finland and is a co-editor with Farah Griffin of A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Literature. Fish’s poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Maintenant, Terrain, Mom Egg Review, New American Writing, Reed, Postcard poems, Santa Monica Review, About Place Journal, ISLE and Poetics for the More-than-Human-World.  She is a creative writing editor at the journal Ecocene and professor of English at BMCC/City University of New York.

Jewelle Gomez, (Cabo Verdean/Wampanoag/Ioway, she/her), is a novelist, poet and playwright. Her eight books include four collections of poetry and the first Black Lesbian vampire novel, The Gilda Stories, in print for more than 30 years. She has been playwright in residence at New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC) since 2011 where she was commissioned to write three plays: “Waiting for Giovanni,” “Leaving the Blues,” and “Unpacking in P’Town” each of which was produced by NCTC. Her new collection of poetry is: Still Water. Follow her on TWITTER & Instagram: @VampyreVamp.

Mary Johnson, a self-proclaimed “naughty nun” who served with Mother Teresa for twenty years, left the convent in 1997, wrote An Unquenchable Thirst about her experiences there, helped turn the book into the award-winning podcast The Turning: The Sisters Who Left, and is now an executive producer for a limited tv series based on the podcast. Mary currently works as an End of Life Doula, a certified Psychedelic Practitioner, and a Humanist Celebrant who creates ceremonies for life’s big moments. A lover of nuance and explorer of complexity, Mary’s latest work-in-progress is tentatively titled Making Friends with my Brain. Mary loves the Hobart Festival of Women Writers and is so pleased to be back.

Briona Simone Jones, PhD, is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is editor of the multi-award-winning Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, the most comprehensive anthology centering Black Lesbian thought to date. Jones developed the concept of “Black Lesbian Aesthetics” to describe the heretical shift in self-definition that transpired after the ground-breaking formation of the Combahee River Collective in 1974. Jones is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, working on her manuscript, The Pleasure of Rebellion. 

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s first novel, Daughters of the Stone, was shortlisted for the 2010 PEN Bingham Award. The 2020 self-published trade paperback edition won the 16th Annual National Indie Excellence® Award for Multicultural Fiction. Other awards include the 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction Award and the Mellon Foundation Letras Boricuas Award in 2022. Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals including Kweli Journal, Label Me Latina, The Latino Book Review, The Afro-Hispanic Review,  Auburn Avenue and Pleiades. She has contributed to several anthologies, including Breaking Ground: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York City 1980-2012; Latina Authors and Their Muses; Trauma, Tresses and Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives; Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latina Women, and Indomitable/Indomable: a Multigenre Chicanx/Latinx Women’s Anthology (2023). Ms. Llanos-Figueroa’s second novel, A Woman of Endurance, (Spanish edition: Indómita), was published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins in Spring 2022. The Brazilian Portuguese, edition of Woman of Endurance will be published in 2024.

Linda Lowen is a book reviewer for Publishers Weekly in Adult Memoir and Nonfiction and Children’s Fiction/Nonfiction, and for Blue Ink Review which focuses on the self-publishing industry. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Sunday New York Times and in “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less” (Artisan Books 2020).  She’s written two books, “100 Things to Do in Syracuse Before You Die,” (Reedy Press 2022) and “Secret Syracuse: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure,” (Reedy Press 2023). Linda is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Author’s Guild.

 Ellen Meeropol is the author of the novels The Lost Women of Azalea Court, Her Sister’s Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest and guest editor of the anthology Dreams for a Broken World. Essay and short story publications include Ms. Magazine, Lilith, The Writer Magazine, Literary Hub, Guernica, and The Boston Globe. Her work focuses on the lives of women, especially those on the fault lines between political activism and family, and has been honored with the Sarton Women’s Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Women’s National Book Association.

Natalia Molebatsi is a Pan-African feminist and queer poet-performer from South Africa. She is the editor of two poetry anthologies, We Are: A Poetry Anthology and Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems. She is the author of two poetry collections, Sardo Dance and Elephant Woman Song. Her collaborative music and poetry albums include Natalia Molebatsi and the Soul Making and Come as You Are: Poems for Four Strings. Her scholarly writing is included in, among other journals and books, Agenda, Muziki, National Political Science Review, Third World Thematics, and Sasinda Futhi Siselapha: Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa’s Twenty-Five Years Since 1994. Natalia is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She holds an M.A in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and an M.A in Communication Science from the University of South Africa where she is associated with the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation project centers Black feminist poetry and performance as strategies for survival and liberation. Natalia has workshopped and performed poetry in over 15 countries globally

Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer and editor based in New York City. She is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”; a contributing writer to Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Making “Me Time”; and introduction author to the Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird and Hunting the Grisly by Theodore Roosevelt. She earned her MFA in creative writing, nonfiction, from The New School and BA in English from Scripps College.

Elisabeth Nonas is the author of four novels. The earlier ones focused on how lesbians form community and create family. Given that her first book appeared in 1985 when she was in her mid-30s, she clearly has different concerns as she ages and her life continues to unfold. These were what sparked her recently-published novel, Grace Period. She taught screenwriting and writing for emerging media at Ithaca College for over twenty years. She condensed her pedagogy into the self-published Story Workout: Exercises to Help You Connect to the Stories You Want to Tell. You can find her at www.elisabethnonas.com. 

Bertha Rogers is a poet, translator, and visual artist. Her poetry collections include the Salmon Press titles What Want Brings: New & Selected Poems, 2024), Wild, Again, 2019; Heart Turned Back, 2010; and several chapbooks and interdisciplinary collections. Her illustrated translation of Beowulf was published in 2000. Her translation, with illuminations, of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Poems from the Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, was published in 2019. Other poems and translations appear in literary journals and anthologies; and she has been awarded fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden, Millay, and others. With her husband, Ernest M. Fishman, she founded Bright Hill Press & Literary Center in 1992.

Margaret R. Sáraco, a storyteller writing at the intersection of poetry, fiction, and memoir, is the author of two poetry collections If There Is No Wind and Even the Dog Was Quiet, (Human Error Publishing.) She is poetry editor for the Platform Review, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice recognized in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest. Her poetry and short stories appear in Paterson Literary Review, Exit 13, The Path Literary Magazine, Book of Matches, Greening the Earth (Penguin Books), Lips, and Kerning. Since retiring from teaching middle school math in 2022, she is a full-time writer.

Jane Schulman is a poet and short fiction writer. She published her first book of poetry, Where Blue Is Blue, with Main Street Rag in 2020.  In her work, Jane explores themes of love, death, disability, and wonder in the everyday. Her work has appeared widely online and in print including in Mezzo Cammin, Sixfold, and The Lake.  Jane was a finalist for the Morton Marr Prize at Southwest Review.  She works as a speech pathologist with children with autism and developmental challenges.  You can reach her through her website at www.janeschulman.com 

Lisa Wujnovich writes poetry at Mountain Dell Farm in Hancock, NY. She is the author of the chapbooks, Fieldwork, (Finishing Line Press) and This Place Called Us, (Stockport Flats Press). Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies. Individual poems appear in Collateral, Calyx, NOW, The Wide Shore, 5A.M., Naugatuck River Review, High Canary, and FEDCO catalog among others. I Know How to be Helpful, a limited edition, letterpress printed book by Z’roah Press features Lisa’s poem by the same name.

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