Allison Kirkland

You can find my essays in River Teeth, Brevity, Pithead Chapel, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. My personal essays have placed in local and national competitions and my work has received support from the Norman Mailer Center and the Durham Arts Council.

I earned an undergraduate degree in English from Duke University, an MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and a Graduate Certificate in Publishing from the Denver Publishing Institute. I’ve also been certified in Leading Others in Writing for Health by the Duke University Center for Integrative Medicine.

For nearly a decade I’ve been working with adult writers who are writing memoirs, personal essays or other types of creative nonfiction. I’m skilled at asking the right questions to unlock a new layer of understanding, locating the heart of your story, infusing play and ease into workshop, and providing feedback in a way that honors the vulnerability of the writing process.

To learn more, I encourage you to subscribe to my Substack publication, the intangibles, which is a celebration and exploration of creative nonfiction, often through the lens of my own experience: allisonkirkland.substack.com