Jessica Reidy’s short story, “We Rise Up” Short Story of the Week in Narrative Magazine, was nominated for a 2014 Puschart Prize!  Jessica will be our Fiction Instructor at the 2014 Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Yoga & Creative Writing Retreat at the Château de Verderonne.  She is a writer, poet, and teacher from New Hampshire with an MFA in Fiction from Florida State University and a B.A. from Hollins University. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine as Short Story of the Week, The Los Angeles Review, Arsenic Lobster, and other journals. She’s a staff-writer for Quail Bell Magazine where she writes non-fiction pieces about feminism, Romani (“Gypsy”) rights and representation, social justice, arts and culture, and other topics, plus the occasional poem or short story. She is also part of the Social Media Outreach team for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and she’s delighted to be teaching and traveling with The Cambridge Writers Workshop. Jessica is currently working on her first novel about Coco Charbonneau, the half-Romani burlesque dancer and fortune teller of Zenith Circus, in post-WWII Paris, and her quest for vengeance and justice.  Read her review of our Summer 2013 Yoga & Creative Writing Retreat at the Château de Verderonne here.