Hugh Ryan: Related Content

In 2022, undergraduate and Bennington Writing Seminars alumni and faculty published over 50 books. Their writing spanned a wide range of genres from nonfiction essays, memoirs, and biographies, to novels, poetry, young adult literature, and short stories.

By Craig Morgan Teicher

Hugh Ryan graduated from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2009 and went on to publish two acclaimed books of nonfiction, When Brooklyn Was Queer (2019) and The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, which won the Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Award for Nonfiction and the Warren Johansson Award. He has taught nonfiction at the Writing Seminars since 2022, and just sold his next book, Becoming History, a memoir in essays. He talked with me about turning research into writing and falling back in love with the essay.