Memoir / Creative Nonfiction
Memoir and/or Creative Nonfiction writers from Minnesota.
Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich is the author of novels, children’s books, short stories, volumes of poetry, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine,…
Karen Babine
Karen Babine is the author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life, both winners of the Minnesota Book Award for Memoir/Creative Nonfiction. She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction…
Ryan Berg
Ryan Berg is a writer, activist, and teaching artist at the Shipman Agency’s Work Room. His debut book, No House to Call My Home: Love, Family and Other Transgressions, won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction, the 2016 NCCD Media for a Just Society Award, and was listed as a Top 10 LGBTQ…
James Dawes
James Dawes is the author of The Novel of Human Rights; Evil Men, winner of the International Human Rights Book Award; That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, Independent Publisher Book Award Finalist; and The Language of War. He has written for or appeared as the feature guest on media outlets ranging from…
Jack El-Hai
Jack El-Hai, a writer of literary nonfiction and creative nonfiction, covers long-lost history — frequently the history of science, medicine, and crime. He leads workshops and gives presentations on research and writing techniques, the craft of creative nonfiction, and freelance writing as a career. A winner of two Minnesota Book Awards, El-Hai holds an MFA…
Atina Diffley
Atina Diffley is an organic farmer-educator and author of the 2012 award-winning memoir, Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works. From 1985 to 2008, she and her husband Martin ran an urban-edge, organic vegetable farm. In 1989, the 5th-generation Diffley family land was lost to suburban development. They started over on new land, but faced…
Shannon Gibney
Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color, a young adult novel that won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Young Peoples’ Literature. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where she teaches critical and creative writing, journalism, and African Diasporic topics. A Bush Artist…
Linda LeGarde Grover
Linda LeGarde Grover is a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe and a professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Her works reflect her scholarly research on federal policy and American Indian families. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have received the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Northeastern 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…