Memoir is a strange animal, living somewhere between fiction and autobiography. Life doesn’t unfold in neat little plot packages, and a novelist’s toolbox is required to bring our stories to life. Through short readings, generative exercises, and observation, we'll work together to stretch toward the universal by illuminating the particular.
Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the forthcoming The Leaving Season: A Memoir (W.W. Norton, 2023) and co-editor of the forthcoming Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film “The Atomic States of America,” a 2012 Sundance selection. The anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington PostMagazine, The Paris Review Daily, Literary Hub, The American Scholar, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Tin House, and more. Her writing has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Katharine Bakeless Nason scholarship to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference. She is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in NY.
Kelly will accept the first 10 manuscripts for critique. Visit Manuscripts on our website for details.
