Summer 2019 Writers
Thu Anh Nguyen
Thu Anh Nguyen is a poet, essayist, calligrapher, painter, teacher, and life-long student. Her day job is teaching English and Social Studies to students at Sidwell Friends Middle School, where she was also the Equity, Justice, and Community Coordinator for the past two years. Her essays about diversifying literature choices have been published in the November 2018 and June 2019 issues of Literacy Today. Her poetry has been published in The Crab Orchard Review, The Salt River Review, and on RapGenius. She is collaborating on a daily art blog that can be found at thuandbecky365.art. She is also writing a cookbook of Vietnamese recipes with her brother, and that can be found at momsvietkitchen.com. She hopes that this summer’s work will bear fruit in beautiful, hand-made books of her writing.
Read some of the work Thu produced during her time here at Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey!
Hiram Larew
Larew is a retired Director of International Programs within U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Institute of Food and Agriculture where he helped guide several global hunger programs. He worked as an agricultural and higher education policy specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development and held short-term detail assignments at the U.S. Senate and at the U.S. Department of State. He is also a poet whose work has appeared in many journals, anthologies and, in three collections. A recipient of a Creativity Grant from the Maryland State Arts Council and an Individual Artist grant from the Prince George’s Arts and Humanities Council, he has also initiated Poetry X Hunger to bring poetry more fully to bear on issues of hunger in the U.S. and around the world. He is a member of The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Poetry Board, and a He’s been nominated over the years for four national Pushcart Prizes in poetry. On Facebook at Hiram Larew, Poet, at The Poetry Poster Project and at Poetry X Hunger.
Read some of the work Hiram produced during his time here at Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey!
Mary Cate Curley
Mary Cate Curley is a novelist and short story writer living and working in DC. Her work has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Barrelhouse, River & Sound Review, and Eleven Eleven Review, among others, and her story "Elbows" was chosen by Danielle Evans as one of Wigleaf's top 50 short fictions of the year. She earned an MFA from Hollins University and served as an Assistant Editor for YesYes Books. Mary Cate is currently at work on When the River Knew Our Names, a novel.
Read some of the work Mary Cate produced during her time here at Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey!
Kristina Gaddy
Kristina Gaddy an award-winning writer who believes in the power of narrative nonfiction to bring stories from the past to life in order to inform the world we live in today. In her forthcoming nonfiction book Flowers in the Gutter (Dutton 2020), she tells the true story of the teenage Edelweiss Pirates who fought the Nazis. In 2018, Kristina received a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby's Artist Award for Well of Souls, a literary exploration of the little known history of the banjo in the Americas, it's role as a a spiritual device in the hands of enslaved Africans, and the instrument's legacy in today’s culture and society. Her writing explores and highlights forgotten and marginalized histories, and has appeared in The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Bitch Magazine, Narratively, Proximity, Atlas Obscura, OZY, Shore Monthly and other smaller history and music publications. Kristina sits on the board of the Baltimore City Historical Society, is on the planning committee of The Banjo Gathering, and is a member of the KnowYourHistory Collective.
Read some of the work Kristina produced during her time here at Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey!