Readings, Workshops, Art, Discussions, and Book Sales

Writers joining us for the first time

Valerie Cole has been writing fiction full-time since 2021. Her debut novel, The Old Witches Home, a cozy senior fantasy, was published under the pen name Avian Swansong in June 2024 by Wildebeest Publishing. She is currently working on a climate fiction novel set in the near future in the Western Catskills. Her stories and articles have been published in Catskills Literary Journal and the New Franklin Register. She currently is a member of three writing groups, takes classes with the Downtown Writers Center at the Syracuse YMCA and foists a biweekly blog on about a hundred friends and fans. Cole is a lifelong witch, guardian of the amazing cat, Opus, and resident of Oneonta, NY. Valerie will present the workshop: Witches are People, Too: A Creative Writing Workshop for Women

Honoring foremothers who couldn’t read and tapping her own prior careers on Broadway and in law, Stephanie Cotsirilos writes about humor, injustice, and resilience. She’s author of the novella My Xanthi, essayist in Beacon Press’ Breaking Bread anthology on food, hunger, and family, and has been published in The Sewanee Review (forthcoming), Narrative, and McSweeney’s, among others. A values panelist at Olympia Snowe Leadership Institute’s 2024 fall forum, she’s a Sewanee Writers’ Conference alumna and was Katahdin fellow at Alaska’s Storyknife retreat for women writers. She holds degrees in music and law from Yale and in comparative literature from Brown. Workshop: Dare to Begin: Writing In Later Life

Irena Klepfisz has taught English literature, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish Women’s Studies at Long Island University (Brooklyn Campus), Columbia University and was guest lecturer at numerous universities.  Beginning in 1996 she taught Jewish Women’s Studies as an adjunct for 22 years at Barnard College.  Simultaneously she also taught English literature and Women’s Studies for 10 years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison for women in upstate New York. Since retiring she has led numerous creative writing workshops.
Workshop: Texts of Betrayal:  Secrets and Boundaries

Sally Simon’s debut novel, Before We Move On was published in June, 2024. Her flash has been published in various journals including: Emerge Journal, Citron Review, Flash Boulevard, Gooseberry Pie Lit, and Dribble Drabble Review. Recent awards include 3rd place in National Flash Fiction Day’s Micro Contest, 3rd place in Not Quite Write’s Flash Contest and 8th place in TL;DR’s Annual Word Herd Competition. Her story, “Tenth Summer,” was nominated for Best of the Net in 2023. Sally is guest editor for Five Min Lit and a long-standing reader for Fractured Lit. She lives in Fleischmanns, NY. Sally Simon is presenting the workshop: Writing Flash Fiction

Writers returning for Festival 2025

Margot Farrington is a poet, writer, and performer.  Her two most recent books are The Blue Canoe of Longing (Dos Madres Press, 2019), and Early Cover Art: From Shellac To Vinyl (Edition Longplay, 2022, with Rainer Haarman). Three prior poetry books plus reviews, essays, and exhibition catalogues comprise other published works.  Radio interviews with readings include Art On Air International, Wave Farm, Out Of Bounds, and others. Farrington has read and performed in venues around the U.S., and in France, England, Wales, and The Netherlands.  From 2014 to 2019, she served as founder and director of Writers At The Eyrie in Brooklyn, NY. Workshop: All Those Others: An Exploration Of Animals

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. She is a product of the
Puerto Rican communities on the island and in the South Bronx. Her 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® Awards for Multicultural Fiction. She has been awarded the 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Ar.st Fellow in Fiction and the Mellon Foundation Letras Boricuas Award in 2022 among other literary recognition. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Kweli Journal, Label Me Latina, The Latino Book Review, Pleiades, 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 City1980-2012 , Latina Authors and Their Muses, Trauma, Tresses and Truth, and Daughters of Latin America.Ms. Llanos-Figueroa’s second novel, A Woman of Endurance, (Spanish edition: Indómita), was published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins in Spring 2022. She will present the workshop: Creative NF: Alternative Ways of Telling Your Life Story

Ellen Meeropol is the author of five novels (The Lost Women of Azalea Court, Her Sister’s Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest) and the guest editor for the anthology, Dreams for a Broken World. Her work has been honored by the Sarton Women’s Prize, The Women’s National Book Association, and the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Ellen is a frequent presenter at conferences and book festivals, including the AWP annual conference, The Muse and the Marketplace, Wordstock, Virginia, Salem, and Maine Festivals of the Book, the San Miguel International Writing Conference, and the WriteAngles Writers Conference. She has taught fiction workshops at Writers in Progress in Florence, MA, Grub Street in Boston, SouthWest Writers, and World Fellowship Center in New Hampshire. She is a Founding Member of the Straw Dog Writers Guild, a member of the Guild’s steering committee and coordinator of the program committee for the WriteAngles writers conference to held in October, 2025. Ellen will present the workshop: The Writer in the World: literary activism and literary citizenship

Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer and editor based in New York City. She is the author, with Paul Maher Jr., of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and a contributing writer to Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Making “Me Time.” Afar animated her flash travel story “Seeing the Light in Sweden” for their Travel Tales series in 2019, and the Albany International Airport Gallery selected her “Essay after Visiting the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Written from a Skyscraper” for their Landmarks exhibit in 2018. Nikolopoulos is currently the content manager of Farmers Business Network, where she writes guides for farmers. Stephanie Nikolopoulos has been a participating writer at Hobart Festival of Women Writers since 2014 and serves on the writer selection committee. Stephanie Nikolopoulos will present the workshop Making and Breaking Writing Rules

Sophfronia Scott is a novelist, essayist, and leading contemplative thinker whose work has received a 2020 Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts. Her book The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton won the 2021 Thomas Merton “Louie” Award from the International Thomas Merton Society. She grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a hometown she shares with author Toni Morrison. She holds a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She began her career as an award-winning magazine journalist for Time, where she co-authored the groundbreaking cover story “Twentysomething,” the first study identifying the demographic group known as Generation X, and People. When her first novel, All I Need to Get By, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2004 Sophfronia was nominated for best new author at the African American Literary Awards and hailed by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as “potentially one of the best writers of her generation.” Sophfronia Scott is also a founding Participating Writer at the Hobart
Festival of Women Writers. Sophfronia Scott will present the workshop: Almost Straight to the Heart: Using the Self-Discovery Process as a Craft Tool in Creative Writing.

Margaret R. Sáraco writes about love, family, politics, and nature. A poet, short story, and memoir writer, she grew up in New York and lives in New Jersey. Margaret began her professional writing career as a magazine columnist writing about feminism, music, health, and contemporary events. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies and journals. Margaret’s poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice received Honorable Mentions in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. Her debut poetry collection, If There Is No Wind (Human Error Publishing, 2022) is available where books are sold. Even the Dog Was Quiet will be published in the Fall 2023. Margaret Sáraco will present the workshop: Unlock Untold Stories and Poetry: Use the Jobs You’ve Worked to Generate Writing.

We’ve added a special children’s program this year presented by poet, translator, visual artist, and teacher, Bertha Rogers

Bertha Rogers is a poet, translator, visual artist, and teaching artist. Several hundred of her poems appear in literary journals, anthologies, and in her poetry collections, including Wild, Again; Heart Turned Back; Sleeper, You Wake; Even the Hemlock; A House of Corners; and The Fourth Beast. More than 500 of her poems have been published in literary journals, and she has received eight nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf was published in 2000, and her translation of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Poems from the thousand-year-old Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, was published in 2019. In 1992, with her late husband, Ernest M. Fishman, she founded Bright Hill Press & Literary Center of the Catskills; in 2017 she was commended for her work with Bright Hill in the Congressional Record; she retired as executive director in 2017 and now leads the Bright Hill Youth Workshops and serves as Editor in Chief for the Poetry Series. Bertha Rogers is a founding Participating Writers at the Hobart Festival of Women Writers. Bertha Rogers will present RIDDLES and RHYMING for KIDS 6-12

We’re offering an exciting collaborative project by poet, artist, and farmer, Lisa Wujnovich

Lisa Wujnovich writes poetry and farms at Mountain Dell Farm in Hancock, NY; mountaindellfarmny.com. She has written two chapbooks, Fieldwork, 2012, published by Finishing Line Press, and This Place Called Us, 2008, published by Stockport Flats Press. She also co-edited the anthology, The Lake Rises, poems to and for our bodies of water, 2013, by Stockport Flats Press. She hosts the poetic collaborative series, Bringing it to the Field, on-site farm performances honoring farms, in collaboration with poets, musicians, dancers, performance artists, sculptors, culinary artists and healers. She holds a MFA in poetry from Drew University. Lisa Wujnovich serves on the Hobart Festival of Women Writers Planning Committee. Lisa Wujnovich will present ILLUSTRATED BOOK, A Special project.

Esther Cohen returns with her perennial favorite Intensive Workshop: GOOD STORIES

Esther Cohen, author of Book Doctor, Don’t Mind Me and Other Jewish Lies, GOD IS A TREE AND OTHER MIDDLE-AGED PRAYERS, No Charge for Looking, and All Of Us, lives in New York City where she has served as Executive Director of Bread and Roses, the national non-profit cultural program of New York’s union for health care workers. Winner of a Pure Visionary Award for a photographic project she initiated to give cameras and photography lessons to working men and women across the country, Cohen is a storyteller and humorist. Esther Cohen is a founding Participating Writers at the Hobart Festival of Women Writers. She returns with her popular Intensive Workshop, GOOD STORIES.

The Hobart Festival of Women Writers has, since 2013, celebrated and recognized women‘s literary work. We’ve brought together writers who work in all genres to read, present workshops exploring writing craft, participate in panel discussions, and sell their books. We also exhibit artwork by local women artists. Our three-day weekend dedicated to women writers is open to all readers, writers, and lovers of language. All are welcome.

Note: The administrative staff of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers are all volunteers. We rely upon the generous support of the people of The Hobart Book Village. Please stop by for a visit and support our GoFundMe page to help us directly. All funds are used for The Festival.

Read our online magazine NOW which features the work of our Participating Writers

www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.com

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