Writers’ Retreats

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center holds two Writers’ Retreats annually. These retreats offer writers the opportunity to work with professional mentors, to network with other writers, and to build lasting relationships. Throughout the retreats, writers have the opportunity to work in Hemingway’s Barn Studio. Participants come from all backgrounds and experience levels. Not all come with something in mind to write, but many do. And, of course, we invite all of our past participants who become published to return for a reading and to celebrate with us.

June 17-21, 2024

Annemarie Kelly-Harbaugh, our 2024 Hemingway-Pfeiffer Writer-in-Residence, is the author of Here Be Dragons, a memoir about the wonderful misery of raising children with someone you love. She also hosts Wild Precious Life, a literary podcast about making the most of the time we have.

Kelly-Harbaugh teaches writing at Ashland University where she also works with incarcerated students trying to obtain their degrees. Her essays have appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered, in Today Parenting, Black Fork, Gordon Square Review, Anodyne, New York Observer, and her work has been staged with the Cleveland Humanities Festival and Listen to Your Mother, Pittsburgh. She’s received support from the Ohio Arts Council, Rockvale Writers’ Colony, Il Monasterino della Conoscenza, and was recently named the 2024 Erma Bombeck and Anna Lefler Humorist-in-Residence in Dayton, Ohio.

In her non-writing moments, Kelly-Harbaugh loves kickboxing, karaoke, dogs, ping-pong, books that make her laugh, movies that make her cry, and salads other people make her eat. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is currently querying a novel about all the truth in the lies we tell.

You can download the June 2024 Writers’ Retreat Registration here.

Recent Mentors

Matthew Pitt, our 2023 Hemingway-Pfeiffer Writer-in-Residence, previously worked in Los Angeles on a sitcom, New York as an editor, and Massachusetts as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. These days he operates out of Ft. Worth, as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at TCU. Matt’s third book, the novella The Be-Everything! Brothers, is forthcoming late in 2023. National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson recently selected his collection-in-progress, Unusual Poisons, for a 2023-24 Everett Southwest Literary Award. Matt’s prior books are the  story collections These Are Our Demands (Midwest Book Award winner) and Attention Please Now (Autumn House Prize winner). His stories have won numerous awards, are cited in several “Best of” anthologies, and appeared in a number of publications.

Matt Gallagher, our 2022 Writer-in-Residence, is the author of the novels Empire City and Youngblood, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has appeared in Esquire, ESPN, The New York Times, The Paris Review and Wired, among other places. He’s also the author of the Iraq war memoir Kaboom and coeditor of, and contributor to, the short fiction collection Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War.  A graduate of Wake Forest and Columbia, Gallagher is a 2021-23 fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, based in Green Country, Oklahoma. He lives with his wife and sons in Tulsa, and works remotely as a writing instructor for New York University’s English Department’s Words After War, a workshop devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature.