Sonya Huber is an American essayist and writer of memoir and literary nonfiction. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Fairfield University. [1] She is the author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, Opa Nobody, and other books. Huber's essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Hotel Amerika, LitHub , The Rumpus , River Teeth, among other literary journals, and in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, and the Washington Post Magazine.
Sonya Huber was born in 1971 in Evergreen Park, Illinois and grew up in New Lenox, Illinois.
Huber earned a BA at Carleton College in 1993 and a Master of Arts in journalism from the Ohio State University in 2000 through the Kiplinger Fellowship in Public Interest Journalism. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University in 2004.
Huber began teaching writing Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 2011 and as of 2018, was an associate professor there. [2] [3] She formerly taught at Georgia Southern University and Ashland University.
She published Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir in 2010, [4] and was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. [2] She wrote Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System five years after her symptoms began. [5] In 2011, she published the textbook The Backwards Research Guide for Writers: Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection, and Inspiration. [1] In 2008, after researching archival German records, she published the creative nonfiction book Opa Nobody, about the anti-Nazi activist work of her grandfather. [2] [6]
In March 2020, she contracted COVID-19, with months of ongoing symptoms. [7]
She served as guest editor for Experiences of Disability, a special issue of Brevity in September 2020. [8] She is the editor of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose and has served as a nonfiction editor for Literary Mama .
A disability advocate, Huber was one of the creators of the 2017 online Disability March. [9] [10] She has been vocal on the topics of disability and for treatment and support for chronic pain patients. [11] [12] She served on the Community Leadership Council of the National Pain Advocacy Center. [13] She was active with Jobs with Justice between 1998 and 2004.
Dinty W. Moore is an American essayist and writer of both fiction and non-fiction books. He received the Grub Street National Book Prize for Non-Fiction for his memoir, Between Panic and Desire, in 2008 and is also author of the memoir To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno, the writing guides The Story Cure,Crafting the Personal Essay, and The Mindful Writer, and many other books and edited anthologies.
Literary Mama (LiteraryMama.com) is a U.S.-based online literary magazine focused on publishing writing about motherhood in a variety of genres. The writings found in Literary Mama challenge all types of media to rethink its narrow focus of what mothers think and do. Updated monthly, the departments include columns, creative nonfiction, fiction, Literary Reflections, poetry, Profiles and Reviews, OpEd, and a blog. Literary Mama reaches 40,000 readers monthly.
Joy Castro is the award-winning author of the recently published novels, One Brilliant Flame, and Flight Risk, a finalist for a 2022 International Thriller Award; the post-Katrina New Orleans literary thrillers Hell or High Water, which received the Nebraska Book Award, and Nearer Home, which have been published in France by Gallimard's historic Série Noire; the story collection How Winter Began; the memoir The Truth Book; and the essay collection Island of Bones, which received the International Latino Book Award. She is also editor of the craft anthology Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family and the founding series editor of Machete, a series in innovative literary nonfiction at The Ohio State University Press. She served as the guest judge of CRAFT's first Creative Nonfiction Award, and her work has appeared in venues including Poets & Writers, Writer's Digest, Literary Hub, Crime Reads, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail,Senses of Cinema, Salon, Gulf Coast,Brevity, Afro-Hispanic Review,Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. A former Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, she is currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs the Institute for Ethnic Studies.
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