Portland, ME
TBD
Co-sponsored by Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA)
Join MWPA as Melanie Brooks, author of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma, leads a conversation with Jaed Coffin, author of Roughhouse Friday: A Memoir (FSG, 2019), and Tim Hillegonds, author of the just-released The Distance Between (Nebraska, 2019), about contemporary masculinity, fatherhood, and using writing to reckon with your life.
Melanie Brooks is the author of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (February 2017, Beacon Press). She teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, Merrimack College in Andover, Massachusetts, and Nashua Community College in New Hampshire. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Hippocampus, the Huffington Post, and Word Riot. Melanie received her master of fine arts in creative nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program. Her almost-completed memoir explores the lasting impact of living with the ten-year secret of her father’s HIV disease before his death in 1995. Melanie lives in Nashua, New Hampshire with her husband, two children, and yellow Lab.
Jaed Coffin is the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants (Da Capo/Perseus, 2008) and, most recently, Roughhouse Friday (FSG, 2019). A regular contributor to Down East Magazine, his essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Nautilus, Jezebel, The Sun, and many other publications. He’s been a featured speaker at TEDx and Moth Radio Hour, as well as a guest at over twenty colleges and universities. Jaed teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Maine with his wife and two daughters.
Timothy J. Hillegonds is the author of The Distance Between (Nebraska, 2019). His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, River Teeth, Baltimore Review, Brevity, Hippocampus Magazine, The Fourth River, RHINO, and others. In 2019, Tim was named by the Guild Literary Complex as one of their thirty "Writers to Watch." He earned a Master of Arts in Writing and Publishing (MAWP) from DePaul University in Chicago.
