FEATURED AT ROOTED & WRITTEN 2024

Eirinie Carson is a Black British Londoner and writer living in California. She is a mother of two children, Luka and Selah. A member of the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, Eirinie is a frequent contributor to Mother magazine, and her work has also appeared in Mother Museand You Might Need To Hear This, with an upcoming piece in The Sonora Review’s Fall edition. Eirinie contributes to her local paper, The Argus Courier, via a column, Eirinie Asks. She mostly writes about motherhood, grief and relationships and the release of her first book, The Dead Are Gods (from on Melville House, 2023) was a critically acclaimed Spring release, with Oprah Daily, Shondaland, People Magazine and the Washington Post sharing rave reviews on their platforms. Most recently, Eirinie was asked to be a featured author at 2023 Texas Book Festival, and is also the Program Coordinator for the Mesa Refuge, a writers residency out of Point Reyes Station, California.

Eirinie was in conversation with Danny Thiemann.

Susan Ito began reading at the age of three, and writing stories at the age six. She is the author of award-winning memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell colony Fellow, and has also been awarded residencies at The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the US. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater She is a member of the Writers’ Grotto, and teaches at Mills College/Northeastern University and Bay Path University. She was one of the co-organizers of Rooted and Written, a no-fee writing workshop for writers of color. She lives in Northern California.

Susan was in conversation with Dominic Lim.

The Opening Session featured Ingrid Rojas Contreras, born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of the author's lineage of curanderos, shamans, and ghost whisperers, and her mother, who was the first woman in her family to become a curandera. The book won a Medal in Nonfiction from the California Book Awards, was a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and was long-listed for a Carnegie Medal in Excellence in Nonfiction. It was named a “Best Book of the Year” by TIME, People, NPR, Vanity Fair, Boston Globe, among others. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California. 

Ingrid is in conversation with Grace Loh Prasad.

Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, editor, and Black feminist scholar. The author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art, Dr. Foster’s work focuses on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. Forthcoming publications include poetry collections—Thingifications (Ugly Duckling Presse); A History of the Bitch, as well as a 2-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop (Wesleyan University Press); and an anthology of experimental creative drafts (Nightboat Books). A Radcliffe Institute @ Harvard University, a Creative Capital awardee, recipient of awards from Macdowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, NYFA, SF MOAD, and the Ford and Mellon Foundations, among others, Dr. Foster is the inaugural George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.

Tonya is in conversation with Maw Shein Win.