We're thrilled to share with you our inaugural cohort of writers at the House.
Rose Himber Howse -- Asheville, North Carolina
Rose Himber Howse is an essayist and fiction writer from North Carolina. She’s a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as fiction editor of The Greensboro Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Hobart, The Carolina Quarterly, Sonora Review, YES! Magazine, and elsewhere.
Much of Rose’s writing is informed by her independent research on the history and culture of marginalized communities in the Southern Appalachians, where she was born and raised. She is currently at work on a novel and a group of essays. Both explore questions of queer identity in the context of the American South.
Sandra Ang Osborn -- Salt Lake City, Utah
Sandra Ang Osborn is a Chinese-Mexican American writer based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. She has had a career in healthcare as a scientist, and now is an emerging writer and MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at University of Utah. Her essays are emotional explorations of loss, home and life, migration, and human connection. Founder of the Peregrine House Literacy Project, a nonprofit organization focused on diverse, international children’s literature, she is committed to helping families access high-quality literature for children and young adults.
Sandra’s work explores the idea of home: is it found in the presence of those we love, or as a fixed geography? After the tragic loss of her sons, Sandra’s writing is part-memoir, part-grief love-letter to the boys and the world that now misses them, chronicling bereavement, senselessness, the difficulty of articulating loss, and the possibility of rekindling heartspace and homespace.
Alona Williams -- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Alona Williams is a poet and Pittsburgh-native. She is a 2020 graduate of Chatham University where she earned a BFA in Creative Writing with a Minor in Music. She participated in the Winter Tangerine’s 2018 workshop, and has been published (or has work forthcoming) in 1839 Magazine, The Minor Bird, MoonStone Arts Center’s Philadelphia Says: Resisting Arrest, and Femme Literati: Mixtape. She is a contributing author in two anthologies, the forthcoming Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook and the recently released Tenderness – a Literary Anthology and Book of Spells: Evidence.
In 2016, as Alona witnessed gentrification swallowing her community and the displacement of Penn Plaza residents, she started a series of poems called "Those Who Don't Know." Titled after a Sandra Cisneros poem, the series focuses on this gentrification and Alona’s personal processing of it. She started the series at the age of 19 and, now, at 23, she is ready to return to and expand upon this collection. Deeply connected to murals, some that remain and others that have disappeared, Alona not only sees this work culminating into a book, but also an online gallery.
Gina Ryder -- New York, New York
Gina Ryder is a writer and teacher who has lived in New York City for the last decade. Her independent journalism has appeared in The Guardian, Marie Claire, New York Magazine and countless other publications. Raised in a union family in the greater Philadelphia area, Gina was the first in her family to go to college. She graduated from Columbia University's MFA program where she wrote her thesis on the loneliness epidemic. She has worked as a staff editor for various media outlets and as an adjunct professor of English where she's taught composition, journalism, and narrative medicine. Gina has also facilitated storytelling programs in hospitals, nursing homes, centers for recovery, and homeless shelters for a variety of populations ranging from teens to emergency medicine physicians.
After losing a full and part-time job in March of 2020, Gina, like many journalists and academics across the country, was forced to examine an unjust and isolating labor system and her place within it. A year with Writers House offers Gina support in an unstable economy and time to not only recalibrate, but return to the book writing, reporting, and community service that her journalism deadlines and teaching course load hasn't afforded.
Gina plans to revise a memoir-in-essays that unearths what divides us and how we bridge that divide. Her work explores education, behavioral health, social class in America, and human intimacy. She will also continue to work as a freelance journalist, broadening her scope across her home state of Pennsylvania, Appalachia, and the Rust Belt.
You can learn more about each resident and their work on our website.
And thank you for your ongoing support!