Memoir / Creative Nonfiction
Memoir and/or Creative Nonfiction writers from Minnesota.
Rachael Hanel
Rachael Hanel is a nonfiction writer and the author of Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman’s Path from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army, forthcoming in Fall 2022. She is also the author of We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter. The book was a finalist…
Melanie Hoffert
Melanie Hoffert is the author of Prairie Silence, which won the 2014 Minnesota Book Award in Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. She has been published in several literary journals. The Baltimore Review and the New Millennium Writings each selected her work for a Creative Nonfiction Writing Award. She has taught several writing classes, including at the…
Sue Leaf
Sue Leaf, a Minnesota native, was trained as a zoologist and taught environmental science. She writes on natural history and environmental topics from her home on the shores of Pioneer Lake. An avid hiker, paddler, cross-country skier, and bird watcher, Leaf believes that being attuned to nature is good for the soul.
Catherine Madison
Catherine “Cathy” Madison is a veteran journalist who has served as editor-in-chief of Utne Reader, senior editor at Adweek and Creativity magazines, founding editor of American Advertising, and editor-in-chief of Format Magazine. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Minnesota, where she has taught continuing education classes in editing. Madison’s award-winning…
Sherry Quan Lee
Sherry Quan Lee, MFA, taught Creative Writing at Saint Catherine University and Metropolitan State University. She is author of Chinese Blackbird, a memoir in verse; How to Write a Suicide Note: Serial Essays that Saved a Woman’s Life; Love Imagined: a Mixed Race Memoir, a 2015 Minnesota Book Award Finalist; How Dare We! Write: a…
Michelle Leon
Michelle Leon is a writer, musician, and teacher for Saint Paul Public Schools. She was the bass player for the influential punk band Babes in Toyland from 1987 to 1992 and again in 1997. Her writing has appeared in City Pages, the music essay compilation The First Time I Heard David Bowie, Saint Paul Almanac,…
Carter T. Meland
Carter Meland is a writer of Irish, Norwegian, and White Earth Anishinaabe heritage. He takes writing seriously, but tries to do so with good humor. By day he teaches students in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth about the wicked smart, moving, and profound things that Native writers have to say about the…
Carrie L. Mesrobian
Carrie Mesrobian is the author of five novels. She has a B.A. in Creative Writing & Hispanic Studies and an MFA in Fiction from the Rainier Writers Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University. She has written essays and poetry for Brain, Child magazine, Calyx, the Star Tribune, and two anthologies for young adults. Her first book,…
Rachel Moritz
Rachel Moritz is the author of Borrowed Wave, a finalist for the National Poetry Series as well as the 2015 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Her second poetry collection, Sweet Velocity, won the 2016 Besmilr Brigham Women Writer’s Award from Lost Roads Press. Moritz is also the co-editor of a collection of personal essays, My…
Kaethe Schwehn
Kaethe Schwehn is the author of the post-apocalyptic novel The Rending and the Nest, the poetry collection Tanka & Me, and a memoir, Tailings. Her poems and prose can be found in journals such as Crazyhorse, Pleiades, jubilat, Witness, Minnesota Review, and the anthology Fiction on a Stick. She has been the recipient of a…