writing retreat for women
2015 Writer-in-Residence
Jennifer Cody Epstein
Jennifer Cody Epstein’s most recent novel, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (W.W. Norton) won the 2014 Asian Pacific Association of Librarians Honor award for outstanding fiction and was an Oprah book-of-the-week selection. Her first novel, The Painter from Shanghai (W.W. Norton 2008) was a Barnes and Nobles “Discover Great New Writers” selection and Top 10 Debut for 2008, as well as a Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award Nominee. Published in 16 countries, it was an international bestseller. Jennifer has an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University and a Masters of International Relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS. She did her undergraduate work at Amherst College, where she graduated magna cum laude with a double degree in English and Asian Studies. In addition to writing fiction, she has also written for Knight-Ridder Financial News and The Wall Street Journal in Tokyo, Japan, and has written and produced for the NBC network in Hong Kong, Washington and New York. Her freelance work includes articles for Vogue, Self, Mademoiselle, Parents and Real Simple magazines and The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand.
Jennifer is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University, where she has taught historical fiction and composition and currently advises graduate candidates as they work on their theses. She has also lectured at Amherst College, Florida International University and Milikin University as well as at the Brooklyn Art Museum, and taught first-year English at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two daughters.
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Writers-in-Residence
The Salty Quill
2016 Writer-in-Residence
Ellis Avery
"All of my work has been about the transformative power of attention. Attention is the heat that fires the raw clay of research and daydream into fiction. A tea master’s meditative attention turns eating and drinking into a ritual performance; a painter’s sexual attention turns a model into a lover. And the attention required to write a haiku every day for seventeen years turns life into a treasure hunt.”
The only writer ever to have received the American Library Association Stonewall Award for Fiction twice, Ellis Avery is the author of two novels, two memoirs, and a book of poetry. Her novels, The Last Nude (Riverhead 2012) and The Teahouse Fire (Riverhead 2006) have also received Lambda, Ohioana, and Golden Crown awards, and her work has been translated into six languages. She teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and out of her home in Manhattan's West Village.
Raised in Columbus, Ohio and Princeton, New Jersey, Avery’s first love as a reader was the high fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. LeGuin. In her teenage years, she discovered writers like Annie Dillard and Virginia Woolf, whose lush specificity tempted her back to the waking world.
Interested in the overlap between theater, anthropology, and religion, Avery pursued an independent major in Performance Studies at Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1993. She spent the next few years in San Francisco working for queer youth organizations and earning an MFA in Writing from Goddard College’s low residency program. Drawn back to the seasons and architecture of the East Coast, she settled in New York in 1997, where she met her partner of seventeen years, Sharon Marcus.
After personally witnessing the devastation of September 11th, 2001, and the anti-war response that swept the city in its wake, Avery wrote her first book, a personal account of the attacks and their aftermath entitled The Smoke Week (Gival Press 2003). She spent five years studying Japanese language and tea ceremony, including seven months in Kyoto, in order to write her first novel, The Teahouse Fire (Riverhead 2006). A lifelong love of Paris in the 1920s led Avery to write her second novel, The Last Nude (Riverhead 2012), a love letter to Sylvia Beach, founder of Shakespeare and Company bookshop and publisher of Ulysses; to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast; and to the sleek Art Deco imagery of Tamara de Lempicka. Avery's most recent work, The Family Tooth (Seventeen Reasons 2015), a memoir-in-essays on cancer, daughterhood, and food, was heralded as the work of "a writer at a pinnacle of her craft" by Lambda Literary and singled out for starred review by Kirkus. Broken Rooms (Crumpled Press 2014), Avery’s first volume of poetry, features selections from a year’s worth of haiku, paired with images by sculptor Will Corwin. In order to foster writing that brings the same attention to city life that she brings to her daily haiku, Avery edits a column on the Public Books website called Public Streets. For more about Ellis, visit her website.