Memoir / Creative Nonfiction
Memoir and/or Creative Nonfiction writers from Minnesota.
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…
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.
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,…
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…