about

Emmalie Dropkin is a fiction writer, teacher, and activist. Her work blends speculative and literary traditions to explore human responses to the climate emergency and has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Electric Lit, and the Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal. Emmalie is coeditor of Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, released in 2019 by the University of Massachusetts Press. She has taught creative writing and composition through the lens of the environmental humanities, and she has served as a VIDA Gender Count Coordinator for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and a coordinator for Extinction Rebellion Western Massachusetts. By day she is the Director of Data, Planning, and Evaluation for Head Start and Early Learning Programs at Community Action Pioneer Valley. She lives in western Massachusetts with her daughter and assorted creatures.

Emmalie received the 2018 LeeAnne Smith White Prize for lyric writing on topics including “place, landscape, the environment, and issues of identity,” was nominated for the 2016 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was awarded a fellowship to the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.

Before pursuing graduate work in creative writing, Emmalie worked in federal policy and advocacy for early childhood education and taught elementary and middle school special education in the Baltimore City Public Schools. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UMass Amherst; a Certificate in Mind, Brain, and Teaching from Johns Hopkins University; an MA in Leadership and Teaching from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland; and a BA in English with a Creative Writing Concentration from Amherst College.

Emmalie is represented by Danya Kukafka of Trellis Literary Management.