Ironwood

STUDIO FACULTY

Our faculty brings Ironwood Writers Studio to life through engaging workshops, sessions, and activities. Learn more about each member of our team below

Sonja Livingston is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. She teaches private workshops every summer and regularly shares writing prompts, tips and author interviews via her project, The Memoir Cafe. Sonja is married to the artist Jim Mott and splits her time between Virginia and New York State. Sonja’s latest nonfiction project blends research and imagination to explore and reclaim the branches of a broken family tree. Her first book, the childhood memoir Ghostbread, has been adopted for classroom use around the nation. Essay collections, Ladies Night at the Dreamland and Queen of the Fall, illuminate the lives of women while The Virgin of Prince Street uses an unexpected return to church and a search for a missing Marian statue to explore changing concepts of devotion in the culture and in her own life. Sonja’s writing has been honored with an AWP Book Prize, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Virginia Faulkner Prize in Excellence, an Iowa Review Award, a VanderMey Nonfiction Prize, an Arts & Letters Prize, and grants from Vermont Studio Center and The Deming Fund for Women. Her work appears in outlets such as Ploughshares, Salon, LitHub, The Kenyon Review, America, Sojourners and are anthologized in textbooks, including Contemporary Nonfiction, Short Takes, The Truth of the Matter, The Curious Writer, Poverty/Privilege, Brief Encounters, The Best of Brevity, and Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women.

Danni Quintos is the author of the poetry collection, Two Brown Dots (BOA Editions, 2022), chosen by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Prize, and PYTHON (Argus House, 2017), an ekphrastic chapbook featuring photography by her sister, Shelli Quintos. She is a Kentuckian, a knitter, an educator, and an Affrilachian Poet. She received her BA from The Evergreen State College, and her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Cream City Review, Cincinnati Review, The Margins, Best New Poets 2015, Salon, and elsewhere. Quintos lives in Lexington with her kids & farmer-spouse & their little dog too.

Wendy Dinwiddie is a queer Appalachian writer, editor, and educator. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Alabama, where she served as the managing editor of the Black Warrior Review.

Originally from East Tennessee, she currently lives in Tuscaloosa, AL, where she is working on her novel in progress, the story of a young girl whose mother tells her on her 13th birthday, by way of explaining her father’s absence, that he is sometimes a catfish. The unfolding story braids together the tale of an above-average catfish and the mystery of a woman whose body was discovered in the lake. Wendy likes to think of it as Big Fish meets Fried Green Tomatoes.

Matt McBride is the author of two full-length collections, City of Incandescent Light (Black Lawrence, 2018) and At the Mercy of the Flies (Half Mystic, 2026) as well as four chapbooks. His most recent, Prerecorded Weather, co-written with Noah Falck, is available from Survision Books. He is the winner of the James Tate Prize, the St. Lawrence Book Award, and the Ohio Chapbook Award. He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council grant, an Elliston Poetry Fellowship, and a Writers in the Heartland residency. Currently, he lives in Chambersburg, PA, where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing for Wilson College.

NitaJade is an Affrilachian Poet and a self-proclaimed weirdo hailing from Asheville, North Carolina. They earned their BA in African and African-American Studies from Berea College and their MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Kentucky. They insist that their late O.G. Queen’s sweet potato pie epitomizes love, and they aspire to embody the aesthetics of sloths and narwhals (slarwhals, if you please). They laugh loudly and stubbornly.