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Tessa Fontaine is the acclaimed author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, A New York Times Editors' Choice; Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best book of 2018 from Southern Living, Amazon, Refinery29 and The New York Post.
Her debut novel, The Red Grove, is forthcoming from FSG in May, 2024. Woo hoo!
Tessa spent the 2013 season performing with the last American traveling circus sideshow, the World of Wonders. An essay about the sideshow won the 2016 AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction. Her writing can be found in Outside, AGNI, The New York Times, Glamour, The Believer, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, [PANK], Brevity, and more.
Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa got her MFA from the University of Alabama, and then 4/5 of a PhD from the University of Utah. It's a long story. She's received awards and fellowships from Tin House, The Sewanee Writers' Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Taft Nicholson Center, Writing by Writers, and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Tessa taught in prisons and jails for five years, and was a professor of creative writing at Warren Wilson College, in addition to guest teaching at dozens of other colleges and universities around the country. She has guided students on the New York Times summer journeys, and founded Salt Lake City’s Writers in the Schools program. She currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband, daughter, overly-friendly dog and sassy cat. Along with the writer Annie Hartnett, she runs the Accountability Workshops.
Tessa loves redwood trees, ghost stories, and goats. Every year on her birthday, as a gift to herself, she eats unlimited Doritos.
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