Deep Dive: Writing from the Heart: Where Grief Becomes Art (Sunday, Option 2)

Melanie Brooks is the author of A Hard Silence and Writing Hard Stories. She teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Bay Path University and Western Connecticut State University and professional writing at Northeastern University. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine and a certificate in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. Her essays and interviews have been published in The Boston Globe, HuffPost, Yankee, The Washington Post, Ms., Psychology Today, The Globe and Mail, and other notable publications. She lives in New Hampshire.

Eileen Vorbach Collins writes true stories she wishes were fiction and fairy tales she wishes were true. Her essays have received the Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, The Gabriele Rico Challenge Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and two Pushcart Prize nominations.  Her essay collection, Love in the Archives, a Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, published in 2023, was a Foreword Indies Finalist and received a Pencraft Award for Literary Excellence and the Sarton Women’s Book Award for memoir.

Lisa Cooper Ellison is an author, speaker, trauma-informed writing coach, and host of the Writing Your Resilience podcast. She works at the intersection of storytelling and healing, blending personal experience with suicide loss and complex PTSD with clinical training to help writers transform difficult experiences into powerful art. Her essays and stories have appeared on Risk! and in The New York Times, HuffPost, Hippocampus Magazine, Kenyon Review Online, and other notable outlets.