Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Julia Ridley Smith, interviewed by Ashley Trebisacci

Happy birthday to me! I got to take this month off, as the December 2021 Non-Fiction by Non-Men interview (which was published on my 34th birthday!) was done by my very excellent former GrubStreet student, Ashley Trebisacci! Check out their conversation with the brilliant Julia Ridley Smith.

For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Published on December 16, 2021.

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Julia Ridley Smith is the author of The Sum of Trifles, a memoir in essays about the process of dispersing her parents’ belongings after their death, with each essay focusing on a different object. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, the New England Review, and The Southern Review, among other publications, and her nonfiction was recognized as notable in The Best American Essays 2019. After earning her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she worked for nearly twenty years as a freelance copy editor of academic books. She’s taught creative writing and literature at UNC Greensboro, as well as art-based writing workshops for educators and other adults at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. She is the 2021-22 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in her hometown of Greensboro, NC.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Ashley Trebisacci. She currently works as a Study Abroad Advisor at Brandeis University, and her writing has been published by The Journal of College Student Development and Sinister Wisdom. They live outside of Boston with their wife, who just so happens to be Julia’s literary agent.