Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop

Sophfronia Scott began her writing career as a journalist for Time and People magazines. When her first novel, All I Need to Get By, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2004, she was nominated for best new author at the African American Literary Awards and hailed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. as “potentially one of the best writers of her generation.” Sophfronia holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Harvard University and Master of Fine Arts in writing, fiction and creative nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her latest novel is Unforgivable Love (William Morrow). She’s also the author of an essay collection, Love’s Long Line (Ohio State University Press’s Mad Creek Books), and a memoir, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World, co-written with her son Tain (Paraclete Press). Her essays, short stories and articles have appeared in Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Saranac Review, Numéro Cinq, Ruminate, Barnstorm Literary Journal, Sleet Magazine, NewYorkTimes.com, More, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her essay “Why I Didn’t Go to the Firehouse” is listed among the Notables in Best American Essays 2017.

Sophfronia is the newly named founding director of Alma College‘s low residency MFA in Creative Writing program. She also teaches at Regis University and Bay Path University and has delivered craft talks and held workshops at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Antioch Writers’ Workshop, Meacham Writers’ Workshop, the Mark Twain House and the Hobart Festival of Women Writers in addition to her own retreat, The Write of Your Life, which takes place in Veneto, Italy, each September. She lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, where she is working on her next novel as well as a nonfiction book about her virtual mentorship with the monk Thomas Merton. This also means she is fighting a losing battle against the weeds in her flower beds.