Co-Director & Workshop Leader

Suzanne Strempek Shea is the author of six novels: Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, Around Again, Becoming Finola, and Make a Wish But Not for Money. She has also written three memoirs, Songs From a Lead-lined Room: Notes - High and Low - From My Journey Through Breast Cancer and Radiation; Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama and Other Page-Turning Adventures From a Year in a Bookstore; and Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith, all published by Beacon Press. Suzanne is also the author of This is Paradise: An Irish Mother’s Grief, an African Village’s Plight and the Medical Clinic That Brought Fresh Hope to Both, and co-author of140 Years of Providential Care: The Sisters of Providence of Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Suzanne began writing fiction in her spare time while working as reporter for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Newspapers and The Providence (Rhode Island) Journal. Her freelance journalism and fiction has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Yankee, The Bark, Golf World, The Boston Globe, The Irish Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Brevity, Down East, Organic Style and ESPN the Magazine.  She was a regular contributor to Obit magazine. Her awards include the New England Book Award and the Oskar Halecki Prize. Her journalism was shortlisted for the Penney-Missouri Awards, and her creative writing was recognized in Best American Fiction. Suzanne has been featured in national and international media including twice on NBC’s Today, and on The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, NPR and Voice of America. 

She taught at the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing for 18 years and for 12 years was inaugural writer-in-residence and director of the creative writing program at Bay Path College in Longmeadow, Mass., where she created an MFA in creative nonfiction and in 2015 founded the annual event that in 2024 became the Dingle Writers’ Workshop, which she runs with Ann Hood . Suzanne also is co-director of the Maine-based Iota Short Forms Writing. She lives in Bondsville, Mass., with lifelong journalist Tommy Shea.

Co-Director & Workshop Leader

Ann Hood is the author of over a dozen novels, including the international bestsellers The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer, and The Book That Matters Most. Her debut novel, the bestseller Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, has been in print since 1987. She has also written five memoirs, including Fly Girl, which is about her days as a TWA flight attendant in the 1970s and 80s; and Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which is the story of her five-year-old daughter Grace from a virulent form of strep in 2002. The book was a NYT Editors’ Choice and was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly.

Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Food and Wine, Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and many more.

She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing awards, a Best American Travel Writing award, and a Best American Spiritual Writing award,

Hood’s most recent book is the novel The Stolen Child. She lives in Providence RI and New York City with her husband, the writer Michael Ruhlman.

Workshop Leader

Michael Ruhlman has written or co-authored more than 30 books of non-fiction, fiction, memoir and cookbooks, including  Boys Themselves, Wooden Boats, and Walk On Water. He’s best known for his writing about food and cooking, both at home (Ratio, Ruhlman’s Twenty) and in professional kitchens (the Making of a Chef trilogy). He has three James Beard Awards for writing about food and cooking. He has worked with many chefs on their books, including Thomas Keller (The French Laundry Cookbook), Eric Ripert (A Return To Cooking), and Jean-Georges Vongerichten (JGV: A Life in Twelve Recipes). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He lives with his wife, the novelist Ann Hood, in New York City.

Workshop Leader

Lifelong Yankees fan Tommy Shea was an award-winning reporter and columnist for four decades at the Springfield (Mass.) Newspapers and spent a year as foreign editor at The National in Abu Dhabi. He co-wrote Dingers: The 101 Most Memorable Home Runs in Baseball History, with Joshua Shifrin, and 140 Years of Providential Care: The History of the Sisters of Providence, with Suzanne Strempek Shea and M.P. Barker. Tommy has taught journalism at Springfield College, Elms College and Holyoke Community College, and was a founding faculty member at Bay Path University’s MFA in creative nonfiction.

Workshop Leader

Penny Guisinger is the author of two memoirs, Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions from University of Nebraska Press and Postcards from Here from Vine Leaves Press. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Guernica, Solstice Literary Magazine, and others. Pushcart nominated, a four-time Maine Literary Award winner, and a three-time notable in Best American Essays, she is a co-director of Iota Short Forms and a former assistant editor at Brevity. Penny is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program. She lives near Lubec with her wife, college-aged kids, and a slowly evolving number of dogs.

Keynote Speaker

Sara Baume is the author of three novels, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, A Line Made by Walking and Seven Steeples, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and one book of narrative non-fiction, handiwork, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. She has received the Rooney Prize for Literature, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the E. M Forster Award and in 2023 she was named one of Granta magazine’s “Best Young British Novelists.” She is based in West Cork on the south coast of Ireland, where she works also as a visual artist.

Sara Baume photo credit: Kenneth O’Halloran

Workshop Leader

Luis Alberto Urrea, a Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the author of 19 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. His latest novel, Good Night Irene, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is based on his mother’s service as a Red Cross “Donut Dolly” serving troops on the frontlines of the European theater in WWII. The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. His novel, The House of Broken Angels, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award for his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North is a Big Read selection of the National Endowment of the Arts. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Workshop Leader

Madeleine Blais is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, finalist for the National Book Critics award, and author of two memoirs (Uphill Walkers, about her Irish Catholic family in western Massachusetts,  and To the New Owners, about a house on Martha’s Vineyard that belonged to her husband’s family)), a collection of essays (The Heart is an Instrument), a nonfiction narrative hailed by ESPN as one of the top hundred sports books of the twentieth century (In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle) and a full-scale biography of a once famous, now forgotten female athlete (Queen of the Court: The Many Lives of Tennis Legend Alice Marble, optioned by Red Bull Studios). A professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst she has been a guest lecturer and/or writer in residence at various institutions including Florida International University, Warren Willson College,, Harvard School of Education, Brown, Columbia, Princeton,  MIT, Holyoke Community College, Springfield Technical College, and the Penn State.  Her current project is set in Miami in the eighties when she was a reporter at the Miami Herald and when Miami was widely regarded as the most dangerous place on earth.

Workshop Leader

Mia Gallagher was born in Dublin, where she still lives. She writes novels, short stories and essays and has also devised and written for theatre. Mia’s most recent works include Great Beasts of Myth, a short story broadcast on RTÉ Radio October 2024 and Two Wheels Good?, an essay on cycling, power and the will to keep going for The Stinging Fly’s Climate Issue (Autumn/Winter 2025). She is currently completing her third novel.

Mia is a recipient of the Irish Tatler Literature Award and the START Short Fiction award, and many long- and short-listings. She is a contributing editor with The Stinging Fly and a member of Aosdána, an affiliation of Irish artists elected by their peers for their contribution to Irish culture.

Mia has facilitated writing and performance workshops since the late 1990s in a range of contexts – from prison, rehab centres and schools to formal university MFA programs. She is delighted to be rejoining Suzanne and team in Dingle, and to be working with a new group of writers.

Conference Administrator

Annabelle Mei is a queer theatre-maker and artist based in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. They are a senior at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. Annabelle has been coming to Ireland for the Dingle Writers’ Workshop for more than a decade! They love knitting, crochet, D&D, and playing video games. They have four cats and LOVE coffee.

Reader

Theodore Deppe worked as a registered nurse for many years before becoming a full-time writer and teacher.  He has published eight full-length collections, most recently Impossible Blackbird (2024, Arlen House). Deppe has received a Pushcart Prize and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2023, his “Lullaby Before Leaving” was one of four poems shortlisted for Poem of the Year in the Irish Book Awards. Deppe taught in graduate programs in Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S., including the Stonecoast MFA program. He and his wife, the poet Annie Deppe, have lived in Ireland since 2000

Reader

Annie Deppe is the author of three books of poetry, Sitting in the Sky and Wren Cantata (2003 and 2009, Summer Palace), and Night Collage (2021, Arlen House). She is the recipient of writer’s grants from the Irish Arts Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was chosen by Poetry Ireland for their Introductions series. Her work has appeared in The Forward Book of Poetry 2004, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Sojourners, and On the Seawall. For many years, she was Associate Coordinator of Stonecoast in Ireland, and she and her husband Ted co-directed writer’s weeks for Curlew Writing Conferences.