2025 Residencies

At Rosemary’s House, we offer three types of retreat programming, designed to meet the needs of our creative community. While our residential workshop retreat is our signature programming, we have expanded our offering to additionally include a storytelling incubator week. Regardless of which week you attend, all of our retreats are centered around three questions:

What makes a story compelling and sellable?
Which stories reflect our times?
How can you capture your unique story?

Residential Workshops

Rosemary's House offers signature residential workshop retreats, where each day unfolds with a group workshop dedicated to exploring the nuances of storytelling. Participants will benefit from personalized feedback, receiving insights from both the mentor-in-residence and their fellow writers. We advocate for writers to select a cohort led by a mentor whose expertise aligns with their individual craft and professional aspirations. Our workshops are intentionally multi-genre, bringing together writers with diverse strengths and backgrounds. This eclectic mix enriches the collective understanding of story architecture, allowing writers to cross-pollinate ideas and overcome narrative challenges.

Multi-Genre Workshops: Engage in daily sessions led by successful mentors to enrich your understanding across various writing genres.
Personalized Feedback: Receive in-depth mentor and peer feedback on a 3500 word sample and project outlines, tailored to your unique style and goals.
Dedicated Workshop Time: Enjoy a dedicated session to deeply engage with your work and receive focused group discussion and critique.
Project Crafting Guidance: Obtain expert advice on crafting your project and planning your professional trajectory, including insights into publishing and marketing strategies.
Storytelling Expansion: Learn new techniques for developing compelling characters, vivid settings, and mastering narrative structure and dialogue.

Fatimah Asghar

***Residential Workshop:***
**August 30- September 6**
***“In forms both traditional and unorthodox Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible.”***
***–The New Yorker***
***“These poems–both personal and historical, both celebratory and aggrieved–are unquestionably powerful in a way that would doubtless make both Gwendolyn Brooks and Harriet Monroe proud.”***
***–Chicago Review of Books***
Poet, screenwriter, educator, and performer, Fatimah Asghar is a South-Asian American Muslim writer who cares less about genre and instead prioritizes the story that needs to be told and finds the best vehicle to tell it. They are the author of *If They Come For Us* (One World, 2018), a collection of poems on orphaning, family, Partition, borders, shifting identity, and violence; the lyrical novel, *When We Were Sisters* (One World, 2022), an exploration of sisterhood, orphaning, and alternate family building which was longlisted for the National Book Award, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize; as well as the chapbook *After* (Yes Yes Books, 2015).
Play is critical in the development of Asghar’s work, as is intentionally building relationship and authentic collaboration. Along with Safia Elhillo, they co-edited *Halal If You Hear Me* (Haymarket Books, 2019), an anthology for Muslim people who are also women, trans, gender non-conforming, and/ or queer. The anthology was built around the radical idea that there are as many ways of being Muslim as there are Muslim people in the world.
They are the writer and co-creator of *Brown Girls*, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendship among women of color. They also served as a co-producer for Ms Marvel on Disney + and wrote the episode “Time and Again.” Their episode was listed on The New York Times and Hollywood Reporter’s best episodes of 2022 list.
Asghar is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. In 2017, they were a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and listed on Forbes’s 30 under 30 list.

Safia Elhillo

***Residential Workshop:***
**August 30- September 6**
“I am rapt, finding here the hurt and the heft of girlhood. All the old silences, all the unuttered shames are ruptured, tended to, and—finally—named. Elhillo is a poet of wisdom, rigor, and vindicating care.” —Tracy K. Smith
***“Elhillo’s poems dig deep into how shame is passed down generations of women. With these conversations comes power. Elhillo sings of the autonomy she imagines for her girls.” —NPR***
Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia Elhillo is the author of *The January Children* (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award; the national bestseller *Girls That Never Die* (One World/Random House, 2022); and the novel in verse *Home Is Not A Country* (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor. Her second novel in verse, *Bright Red Fruit* (Random House, 2024) is an unflinching exploration of a teenager’s journey into the poetry scene and the dangerous new relationship that could threaten all her dreams.
Of Elhillo’s most recent poetry collection, Aracelis Girmay notes, “Safia Elhillo traces the ongoing devastations of patriarchy while simultaneously making a refuge out of language, kinship, and sound. Electric, violet, plural with girls, this work pulses with memory and refusal, awakening language with its lucid imagination. *Girls That Never Die* is a book of resuscitations. Brilliant. And fierce.” In an interview with Hazem Fahmy, Elhillo spoke to the relationship between music and poetics in her work: “My poetics are really interested in memory; its failures and mysteries. For me, a song is like a container of the emotion I felt in the early days of encountering the song. When I talk about, or refer to, music, it’s shorthand for me engaging with some sort of memory or feeling that’s frozen in a moment. Music does so much locating and contextual work. Economy in a poem is very important to me, so I love being able to create a landscape and a time period just by naming a song.”
Elhillo’s work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, among others, and in anthologies including *The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop* and *The Penguin Book of Migration Literature*. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology *Halal If You Hear Me* (Haymarket Books, 2019), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2020.
Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Elhillo received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her work has been translated into several languages, and commissioned by Under Armour, Cuyana, and the Bavarian State Ballet.

Adam Leipzig

***Residential Workshop:***
**September 28- October 5**
Adam Leipzig is a filmmaker, producer, educator, and author. He has been a senior executive at Walt Disney Studios, the president of National Geographic Films, and has worked independently as a producer, distributor, or supervising executive on 38 films that have disrupted expectations, including *March of the Penguins*, *Honey, I Shrunk the Kids*, *Dead Poets Society*, *Titus*, *The Way Back* and *A Plastic Ocean*. Adam's movies have won or been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, 11 BAFTA Awards, 2 Golden Globes, 2 Emmys, 2 Directors Guild Awards, 4 Sundance Awards, and 4 Independent Spirit Awards. Adam began his career as one of the founders of the Los Angeles Theatre Center. As both producer and dramaturg for the center, Adam produced and supervised more than 300 productions.

Maggie Smith

***Residential Workshop:***
**September 28 - October 5**
***“Smith’s poems affirm the virtues of humanity: compassion, empathy, and the ability to comfort one another when darkness falls.” —D.A. Powell***
“Maggie Smith demonstrates what happens when an abundance of heart and intelligence meets the hands of a master craftsperson, reminding us again that the world, for a true poet, is blessedly inexhaustible.” —Erin Belieu
***“Maggie Smith’s are poems of transformation: haunting, gorgeous, intimately unsettling. I cannot remember when I last read a book to match her powers of delight.” —Linda Gregerson***
Maggie Smith is the author of seven books: *Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life* (Simon & Schuster, 2025); *You Could Make This Place Beautiful* (Atria Books, 2023); *Goldenrod* (Simon & Schuster, 2021), *Keep Moving* (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a national bestseller; *Good Bones* (Tupelo Press, 2017); *The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison* (Tupelo Press, 2015); and *Lamp of the Body* (Red Hen Press, 2005). *Lamp of the Body* won the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press. *The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison* won the 2012 Dorset Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn, and the 2016 Gold Medal in Poetry for the Independent Publishers Book Awards. The collection was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Montaigne Medal, and poems from this collection were awarded an NEA Fellowship in poetry. Smith is also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks: *Disasterology* (Dream Horse Press, 2016); *The List of Dangers* (Kent State/Wick Poetry Series, 2010); and *Nesting Dolls* (Pudding House, 2005). Smith’s newest poetry collection, *A Suit or a Suitcase*, is forthcoming from Washington Square Press in 2026.
*The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison* delves into the depths of fairy tales to transform the daily into encounters with the marvelous but dangerous. The Rumpus writes: “These poems are studded with images we recognize from fairytales, offering iconic color in the forest gloom: wolves, foxes, deer, skinned rabbits, apples, hearts, white bones. Through Smith’s imaginative leaps, a kind of sorcery occurs, the lines shape-shifting quickly and musically.”
*Good Bones* is Maggie Smith’s most intimate and direct book yet. Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These are poems that have a sense of moral gravitas and personal urgency, poems that stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility. Ada Limón writes, “Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark, the poems in *Good Bones* are lyrically charged love letters to a world in desperate need of her generous eye.”
The title poem of *Good Bones* went viral internationally after the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, and the murder of MP Jo Cox in England. To date the poem has touched more than a million readers and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Bengali, Korean, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. It was called the “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International, but the poem has continued to be shared widely around the world in these tumultuous times. In April 2017 “Good Bones” was featured on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary—in an episode also called “Good Bones”—and Meryl Streep read the poem at the 2017 Academy of American Poets gala at Lincoln Center. The Telegraph (London) wrote that the poem is “a beautiful elegy for an imperfect world marked by tragedy, exploring the difficulty of finding positivity in the face of suffering…. The poem is a call for us all to improve the world, even if it might just this moment seem beyond repair.”
Smith is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, among others. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, the Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Poems have been widely anthologized in volumes such as The Best American Poetry series, the Knopf anthology, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, Speigel & Grau’s How Lovely the Ruins: Inspirational Poems and Words for Difficult Times, and a number of textbooks.
A freelance writer and editor, and a Consulting Editor for the Kenyon Review, Smith is also a passionate and enthusiastic teacher. She has taught creative writing at Gettysburg College, in the MFA program at The Ohio State University, and at various conferences and nonprofits around the country. She is the Visiting Poet at Ohio Wesleyan University for 2017–2018. She lives with her family in Ohio.

Megan Stielstra

***Residential Workshop:***
**September 28 - October 5**
**“Stielstra is a masterful essayist." —Roxane Gay**
**“You can feel her beautiful heart pumping blood through every sentence.” —Samantha Irby**
**“Are you obsessed with Megan Stielstra yet? If not, it’s definitely time.” —Bustle**
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: *Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool,* and *The Wrong Way to Save Your Life*. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, Longreads, LitHub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and theaters, festivals, and classrooms across the country. She teaches creative writing in Chicago and is an editor at Northwestern University Press.

Jonathan Katz

***Residential Workshop:***
**October 6-13**
“Katz is a great storyteller who enmeshes the reader in a lively web of history, incident, and examples of humanity pushing through disaster, hard luck, iniquity, and triumph to muck it up all over again.”
―***J. Anthony Lukas Prize Jury***
***“One of America’s most important foreign correspondents”***
***—Christopher Leonard***
Jonathan Myerson Katz is a journalist and author who writes about politics, history, conflict, and disaster. Known for his fearless pursuit of truth and ability to connect seemingly disparate events across time and space, he is a sought-after commentator on domestic and global affairs.
Katz began his career as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Latin America, the Caribbean, as well as Israel and Palestine. From 2007 to 2011, he was the AP bureau chief in Haiti. The only full-time American correspondent when a catastrophic earthquake struck the country in January 2010, Katz provided crucial early reporting on the disaster. Months later, he broke the story that United Nations peacekeepers had caused and were covering up their role in a devastating post-quake cholera epidemic. His reporting on Haiti earned him the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism and other awards.
Since leaving the AP in 2012, Katz has contributed to numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of two books: *The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and *Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire* (St. Martin’s Press, 2022). Both books received wide critical acclaim and won awards, including the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award and being shortlisted for the biennial PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.
Katz continues to write about international affairs, U.S. politics, and other social issues in his newsletter, The Racket. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, NPR, Democracy Now!, and other outlets.

Andre Dubus III

***Residential Workshop:***
**October 6-13**
***“Dubus has a keen and generous eye, and the great gift of bestowing dignity on even the most confused of his people.” —Tobias Wolff***
***“Dubus can home in more quickly and efficiently on a character’s inner life than any writer I’ve encountered in recent memory.” —New York Times Review of Books***

***“Dubus proves himself both an exquisitely careful craftsman and a painstaking recorder of society.” —Boston Magazine***
As eloquent in person as in writing, Andre Dubus III speaks to audiences about the path that led him to become a writer—one that pulled him out of a life of violence and allowed him to find his voice through the arts.
Dubus’ nine books include the *New York Times* bestsellers *House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days,* and his memoir, *Townie,* a #4 New York Times bestseller and a New York Times “Editors’ Choice.” His novel, *House of Sand and Fog*, was a finalist for the National Book Award, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His 2013 novella collection, *Dirty Love*, was listed as a “Notable Book” by The Washington Post and The New York Times, and was named a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” and a Kirkus “Starred Best Book of 2013.” His 2018 novel, *Gone So Long*, was named on many “Best Books” lists, including selection for The Boston Globe’s “Twenty Best Books of 2018” and Amazon’s “The Best Books of 2018, Top 100.” His most recent novel, *Such Kindness*, was one of Amazon’s “The Best Books of 2023, Top 100.” His acclaimed collection of personal essays, *Ghost Dog: On Killers and Kin,* was published in March 2024. He is also the editor of *Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories* (Godine, 2023). His work has been included in *The Best American Essays* and *The Best Spiritual Writing* anthologies.
In his memoir, Dubus traces his upbringing in a depressed Massachusetts mill town where his father worked as a professor. Saturated with drugs and everyday violence, *Townie* narrates the clash between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of “townies” where the ambitions of students debating books and ideas couldn’t have been more stark. Dubus shows us how he escaped the cycle of violence and found empathy in channeling the stories of others―bridging, in the process, the rift between his father and himself. Of the work, Richard Russo said: “I’ve never read a better or more serious meditation on violence, its sources, consequences, and, especially, its terrifying pleasures, than Townie. It’s a brutal and, yes, thrilling memoir that sheds real light on the creative process of two of our best writers, Andre Dubus III and his famous, much revered father. You’ll never read the work of either man in quite the same way afterward. You may not view the world in quite the same way either.”
Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Generative Storytelling Residency

Rosemary’s House is proud to introduce our first-ever themed generator week, focusing this year on 'The Inward Journey”. Instead of the usual group workshops, this unique residency emphasizes generative writing exercises designed to foster creativity, develop process, and invite personal growth through storytelling. This retreat is open to writers at all stages of the creative process and invites those who are curious to explore the relationship between story, selfhood, and freedom.

Understanding Personal and Creative Identity: Explore how your personal experiences and identity shape your writing through identity mapping and intention setting exercises.
Active Participation in Healing and Craft: Learn to actively engage in your healing journey alongside enhancing your craft, using group feedback to refine your storytelling.
Embracing Liberation and Creativity: Discover the connection between liberation and creativity, imagining and discussing what you could create from a place of freedom.
Enhancing Storytelling Skills: Participate in daily workshops that cover narrative structure, character development, and thematic exploration.
Personalized Developmental Feedback: Receive targeted mentorship and developmental edits on your submissions, with clear steps for advancing your writing.

Chloe Dulce Louvouezo Qadree

***Generative Storytelling Retreat:***
**October 14-21**
Chloe Dulce Louvouezo Qadree is a Congolese-American author, creative and narrative strategist, and advocate for women whose work is driven by storytelling that advances narrative change. She currently serves as a Senior Communications Officer at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where she produces human-centered stories and leads creative strategy. Chloe is author of *Life, I Swear: Intimate Stories from Black Women on Identity, Healing, and Self-Trust* (HarperCollins Publishers, November 2021), through which she explores nuances and insights around identity, mental wellness, and healing from the lens of women from the Black diaspora.
The Rosemary’s House Team recommends Chloe’s residency for those eager to delve into the foundational elements of storytelling, refine their creative practices, and explore narratives centered around healing. This residency is particularly suited for writers who wish to deepen their understanding of impactful narrative construction and engage with themes that resonate on both personal and communal levels. Join Chloe for a transformative experience that aims to enhance your storytelling skills and expand your creative horizons.

Individual Tutorial Residency

Our individualized tutorial retreat caters to writers seeking to dedicate most of their time to writing, guided by expert supervision. In collaboration with Sally Bayley, Rosemary’s House has crafted a week-long experience reminiscent of an Oxbridge supervision term. Participants will have the opportunity to submit up to 10,000 words of a larger work for detailed review, complemented by personalized mentorship sessions, ensuring focused and constructive advancement of their project.

One-on-One Mentorship: Receive personalized, intensive mentorship sessions tailored to your specific project and writing goals.
Detailed Project Feedback: Get in-depth feedback on up to 10,000 words of your work to refine your manuscript and define a clear path forward.
Custom Writing Plan: Develop a writing plan customized to leverage your strengths and address your challenges, guiding your project completion.
Advanced Craft Techniques: Learn sophisticated storytelling techniques and narrative strategies to elevate your writing and storytelling skills.
Project Structuring and Planning: Obtain expert guidance on effectively structuring your project, from initial concept to final draft, focusing on pacing, plotting, and character development.