Discipline/Field: Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

Based in: Long Beach, CA

About: Madeline is a veteran journalist who grew up in Kansas, lived in Switzerland, Japan, and Spain, and has called California home for the last 15 years. As a recent graduate from UC Riverside’s MFA program in fiction, she has studied craft with Jane Smiley, Laila Lalami, Reza Aslan, and Susan Straight, among others. As a resident, she will complete a revision of her multi-generational novel, set on the Great Plains, about the crisis of topsoil worldwide. 

Project Title: Ad Astra Per Aspera is a novel about the human relationship to a limited, life-giving resource. It tracks the evolving awareness of the global climate crisis from the 1970s to today, and explores themes of toil, class, culture, motherhood, family, and violence – against person and land – as a way of understanding how we live personally, politically, and ecologically.

Relevant links: Instagram, @madholler; Twitter, @mholler, Facebook, Madeline Holler