Spotlight: Ellen Meeropol

The best encouragement I can give to other literary late bloomers is that age brings a depth and width of life experience and wisdom to our work, as well as understanding about how complex our world can be. This ability to reflect on what we’ve seen and thought, to dig deeply into big questions, is a potentially amazing resource usually not available to young writers.

Spotlight: Marilyn McCabe

Even if I’m not writing specifically about the Adirondacks, the nature reflected in so much of my poetry is invariably this kind of nature: dark pines, rushing streams, a bumpy horizon designed by departing glaciers and old tectonic shrugs.

Spotlight: Ginnah Howard

That, and yes, this first May poppy’s
burst into scarlet guffaw (after weeks
of nodding tight-lipped hush.)
After inevitable March, May
and we are—praise the gods—
budding, bursting, juicy
again. – Ginnah Howard

Spotlight: JP Howard

praise daily poems in my inbox
how they make me laugh in one stanza,
then break my heart the next
praise how poets hold onto our first loves,
and scent of mama, now gone
praise how we nurture our child self,
gently wrap her around stanzas,
baby girl is resilient
praise our spunk and our sadness,
let our writing heal

Spotlight: Keisha-Gaye Anderson

The market was a living thing. Its flesh was mounds of mangoes, sweet sop, naseberry, bananas. The steady calls of the higglers, its rapid heart. And those women with heads tied with colorful scarves, and legs splayed wide with skirts cascading between like waterfalls, were its bones.

Spotlight: Esther Cohen

Writing is what so many of us want to do.   Finding the stories we want to tell, and then writing them is what our work together will be.  Some of us are beginning.  Some of us are continuing.  Together we will all be looking for stories, good stories, working together to understand what good stories are, and where they come from.

Spotlight: Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

“I write first and foremost because the stories I grew up reading in school bore no resemblance to world of my family and my community. Those stories did not tell about the way the sun fell on my grandmother’s hands as she handed me my fresh bread and butter breakfast every morning or the smell on my abuelo’s skin when he came home from the cane fields. Nowhere did I see my family’s many shades of brown complexions or the sound of my mother’s voice when she called me mamita.”

Highlights and Holidays

What a wonderful weekend we had! View highlights of our sixth great year of celebrating women writers.

Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018

The Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2018 was held on September 7, 8 &9th Our sixth consecutive year of celebrating the work of women writers in the town of Hobart, New York, The Book Village of the Catskills. It was a glorious weekend! enjoy these photos by Nivea Castro