Memoir / Creative Nonfiction
Memoir and/or Creative Nonfiction writers from Minnesota.
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…
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…
Staci Drouillard
Staci Lola Drouillard lives and works in her hometown of Grand Marais, Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. A Grand Portage tribal descendant, she has degrees from the University of Minnesota. Her first book, Walking the Old Road: A People’s History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe was awarded the Hamlin…
Alex Messenger
Alex Messenger is a Duluth, Minnesota, author, marketer, and photographer who, at seventeen, was mauled by a grizzly bear. In the decade afterward, he’s worked as a wilderness guide, marketing specialist, photographer, and volunteer search-and-rescue operator. His love of adventure, nature, and cultures has taken him all over the globe, but the north woods and…
Raki Kopernik
Raki Kopernik is a first generation American, queer, Jewish writer. She is the author of The Things You Left and The Memory House, both Minnesota Book Award finalists, and The Other Body chapbook. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and has been shortlisted and nominated for several other awards, including the Pushcart Prize for…
D. Allen
D. Allen is a queer and genderqueer poet and multidisciplinary artist living in Minneapolis. They completed an MFA in Poetry at the University of Minnesota in 2017 and were a 2019-20 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. They have received a 2019 20% Theatre Company Q-STAGE: New Works Fellowship, a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant,…
Judy McConnell
Judy McConnell’s writing career took off after retirement at age 70. Since then she has published three books: two memoirs about growing up in Minneapolis in the forties and fifties and a novel that depicts the rise of the local feminist movement during the national upheaval of the sixties and seventies. Her novel has been…
Genny Zak Kieley
Kieley has been writing nonfiction memoir, history, and nostalgia for more than 30 years. She meets with two writers groups regularly and has a warm, often humorous, hometown style of writing.
Alisha Perkins
Alisha Perkins is mom to two girls, wife to Glen Perkins (3 time All-Star Minnesota Twins pitcher), and owner to dog Harry Potter. Her non-fiction book, Running Home, is her story of dealing with mental illness in a world full of insane stigma. In 2019, she released her first fiction novel, Martyred, a feminist thriller…
Tracy Youngblom
Tracy Youngblom has been living and writing in the Twin Cities for 30 years. She earned an M.A. in English from the University of St. Thomas and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She has published widely in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; individual poems, stories, and essays have appeared in journals such as…