I think “finding literary community” has been an important “success story” for Writers as well as Participants at The Hobart Festival of Women Writers. We have created community among the nearly fifty writers who have participated in the Festival. Participants who have enjoyed our craft workshops return each year to participate with Writers they have enjoyed in past years. We have certainly brought new voices for lovers of literature to hear and read. – Cheryl Clarke
Tag: Festival of Women Writers 2017
Spotlight: Stephanie Nikolopoulos
Being among these incredible writers, teachers, learners, volunteers, and organizers inspires me, challenges me, encourages me far beyond the few days of the Festival.
— Stephanie Nikolopoulos
Spotlight: Blanche Wiesen Cook
“Politics is not an isolated, individualist adventure. Women really need to emerge as a power to be the countervailing power to the men. And Eleanor Roosevelt’s really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.”
— Blanche Wiesen Cook
Spotlight: Nancy K. Bereano
“The fact that her prose was published exclusively by small independently owned women’s presses was both a result of the major houses’ narrow perspective and the fact that Audre Lorde’s prose, particularly her myth-shattering essays, was instrumental in framing a changing reality for many women, primarily lesbian women (a readership long dismissed by the mainstream publishing world). ”
–Nancy K. Bereano
Spotlight: Sandra Rodriguez Barron
“A writer could spend a lifetime filling pages about the concept of home and its many definitions. Our mother is our first home, both physically and emotionally. Many of the complications of life spring directly from the memory of losing a primal home, whether that home was an actual place, or a parent, or both. Every break-up, estrangement, or emotional severance can contain a dim echo of its original impact.”
— Sandra Rodriguez Barron
Spotlight: Marianela Medrano
“Often, people come to my practice wanting to be liberated from the oppressive grip of depression. I have found Poetry Therapy to be an important tool in discerning a viable way to come out of depression.”
– Marianela Medrano
Spotlight: Elisabeth Nonas
The goal of this book is to encourage you to think about your own life, the kinds of stories you respond to, how they make you feel, and how those feelings relate to the effect you want your stories to have on your audience. – E. Nonas
Spotlight: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
” . . . most educational spaces for writers teach writers how to conform to certain conventions and norms, and that has its place. But my workshop will be a space for writers to surprise themselves and to transform all of us. ”
– Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Spotlight: Sonya Huber
The financial and physical uncertainty of living in a body without access to care or cure creates a kind of daily existential crisis, and that strange ride is a kind of emergency that so many people carry with them in their skins. We don’t often talk about the all-pervasive effect that these states of being have on our lives, past, present and future.
The Intensive Workshops
The Intensive Workshop is an opportunity for serious, committed writers to explore, to be challenged and to grow by working directly with an award-winning, published writer. Immerse yourself in the inspiration of Hobart’s mountain vistas and focus on your writing craft in a small group setting.
Spotlight: Elana Bell
This is the power of creative writing—that it allows you to access parts of yourself and your story that you may not realize are right under the surface, waiting to be released. And once you see how powerful they are, you want to share them with others, and in turn hear their stories. I believe that this act—of claiming and sharing our unique stories—is a crucial part of healing our fractured world.
Spotlight: Kathy Engel
I have no choice. I live in the lusciousness, power and danger of words, commas, dashes, line breaks, and also pauses and erasures, the stutters and struggles of the birth and death of language — even as I embrace silences, or quiet spaces between words. Poetry works through the poet I think. —Kathy Engel
Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2024 