Memoir / Creative Nonfiction

Memoir and/or Creative Nonfiction writers from Minnesota.

Magnan_headshot_2021

Kandice Kay Magnan

Kandice Magnan grew up on a small dairy farm in central Minnesota. Surviving domestic violence, raising her four young children as a single mother, and recognizing the destruction her own choices were causing, she discovered Jesus. Allowing Jesus to guide her decisions, she was able to experience a transformed life of victor instead of victim.…

Slaght_headshot_2021

Jonathan Slaght

Jonathan C. Slaght is the Russia & Northeast Asia Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). He manages research projects involving endangered species such as Blakiston’s fish owls and Amur tigers, and coordinates WCS avian conservation activities along the East Asia-Australasian Flyway from the Russian Arctic to the mudflats of Southeast Asia. Slaght’s first book,…

Guzman_headshot_2021

Roy Guzmán

Roy G. Guzmán was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and grew up in Miami, Florida. Their debut collection, Catrachos, is a 2020 finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. Guzmán is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts fellow and a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg poetry fellow. They are currently pursuing a…

Zuckerman_headshot_2021

Jeffrey Zuckerman

Jeffrey Zuckerman is a Minneapolis freelance editor and writer. A native of Pittsburgh, Zuckerman is a former social worker, an award-winning newspaper reporter, editor, and university writing instructor at the University of Minnesota, and for many years he directed the writing center at Walden University. For the past several years he has cofacilitated a monthly…

PreusK_headshot_2021

Kaia Solveig Preus

Kaia Preus received her MFA from Hollins University and was a 2019 Author Fellow through the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her first book, The War Requiem, was a finalist for the 2021 Minnesota Book Award and won the 2018 Essay Press and University of Washington Bothell MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics Book…

DeGracia_headshot_2021

Donna Sidwell DeGracia

Donna Sidwell DeGracia is a physician assistant and an educator whose life and work have taken her from distant corners of the globe to intimate conversations about aspects of life that patients may not have shared with anyone else. Sometimes it is her own experiences as a patient, or as one acculturating to a new…

Owens_headshot_2020

Rosemond Owens

Rosemond Sarpong Owens loves the Lord, loves people, loves life, and loves to laugh. She is a storyteller with an infectious enthusiasm about life. She attended Wesley Girls’ High School in Cape Coast, Ghana, the University of Ghana, and University of Minnesota. Across the globe, she has developed a rainbow coalition – an amazing tribe…

Kaunonen_headshot_2020

Gary Kaunonen

Gary Kaunonen, Ph.D., is a historian of culture, labor, and immigration and a documentary filmmaker based in Willmar, Minnesota. His work includes the 2018 Hognander Minnesota History Award winner, Fanned Flames: A History of the 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike, and two award-winning books about Michigan, Challenge Accepted: A Finnish Immigrant Response to Industrial America…

Holbrook_headshot_2020

Carolyn Holbrook

Carolyn Holbrook is a writer, educator, and an advocate for the healing power of the arts. Her memoir, Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify, won the 2021 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. She is co-editor with David Mura of the anthology, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from…

Todd,K_headshot_2020

Kim Todd

Kim Todd writes about history and science. She focused on forgotten stories—uncovering events and people that, while overlooked, continue to shape our world. She is the author of four books of literary nonfiction: Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”; Sparrow; Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis; and Tinkering with…