Hillary teaches contemporary and hybrid nonfiction; lyric essays: hermit crab, collage, segmented, braided; digital storytelling; documentary poetics; poetics; fiction; environmental studies, anti-racist and contemplative andragogy, narrative medicine, and empathetic medical writing. As a neurodivergent, Hillary applies methods from her research on neurodiversity, specifically synesthesia, and how everyone can learn techniques that open a pathway to exploration and sensory techniques to approach craft from angles that bend and blur. She is an advocate for her son and others who live with epilepsy and other neurological conditions in navigating a world where chaos is normative. She focuses her support on her community and the people who create beautiful art and words.
Long Bio
Hillary Leftwich is a neurodivergent writer and author of two books, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press, 2019 and Agape Editions, 2023 new edition), Aura (Future Tense Books and Blackstone Audio Publishing, 2022), and Saint Dymphna’s Playbook (TBA). She has published or has work forthcoming in The Sun, Santa Fe Writers Project, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, and other publications and has written reviews for High Country News, Heavy Feather Review, and others. She teaches creative writing at The University of Denver, Colorado College, Unity Environmental University, and Lighthouse Writers, and teaches youth for Lighthouse Youth. She is an active judge for the Colorado Book Awards and has served as a judge for the James Yaffe Prize in fiction and The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in poetry. She has been awarded scholarships for her writing from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Margaret Randall scholarship from Naropa University, and Voices for the West Writing Workshop from Torrey House Press (2024). Buzzfeed News chose Aura (Future Tense Books, 2022) as one of “17 Recent and Upcoming Books from Indie Publishers You Need to Read.” The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes requested Aura for consideration in the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose category and was also a winner of the Reader’s Choice Award for the 2022 Big Other Book Awards and a finalist for the Big Other Book Awards 2022 in the Nonfiction category. Her first book, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press, 2019), won Entropy’s Best Fiction Book (2019) and was a finalist for the Reader’s Choice Award for the 2020 Big Other Book Awards and a finalist for the 2020 Big Other Book Awards in the Fiction category.
Short Bio
Hillary Leftwich is a neurodivergent writer and author of two books, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (Agape Editions, 2023, new edition) and Aura (Future Tense Books and Blackstone Audio Publishing, 2022). She owns Alchemy Author Services and Writing Workshop and teaches writing at several universities and colleges along with Lighthouse Writers, a local nonprofit for adults and youth. Her latest work can be found or forthcoming in The Sun, Santa Fe Writers Project, and The Rumpus. She lives in Denver.
She is currently working on a digital poetry project involving motherhood, epilepsy, and its historical references in possession and lunacy; a series of hermit crab/collage essays investigating gun violence along with her background and experience growing up in Colorado and its history with mass shootings; and a collaboration with author and photographer Jay Halsey, where photography paired with text illuminates north Denver’s forgotten blue-collar areas.
All photos by Jay Halsey copyright 2023
Copyright © 2023 Hillary Leftwich | Denver, CO| Headshot By Jay Halsey
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