Writer-in-Residence Program

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The small mission-style cottage was saved from demolition in 2001 when author Sonny Brewer and other concerned Fairhopians proposed to the City Council that it be saved and used as a residence for working writers.  After the Council generously approved the proposal, the newly formed Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts raised money to repair and furnish the cottage and named it in honor of Betty Joe Wolff, founder of Fairhope’s Page & Palette bookstore.
 

In the spring of 2004, the Center welcomed its first writer-in-residence, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and novelist Rick Bragg. Following Bragg, the cottage has been the temporary home and writing retreat for over 89 writers. These have included numerous novelists, journalists, memoirists, screenwriters, songwriters, and poets, including Karen Zacharias (After the Flag Has Been Folded); Janice Harayda (Manhattan on the Rocks); Sena Jeter Naslund (Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits); singer/songwriter Andrew Duhon (The Moorings); Philip Deaver (winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction); Tennant McWilliams (The Chaplain’s Conflict: Good and Evil in a War Hospital, 1943–1945); playwright and actor Joel Vig (Hairspray, A Christmas Memory); Judith Paterson (Sweet Mystery); Edgar Award-winner Charlie Price, Tami Sharpe (on sabbatical from the United Nations, serving as a Human Rights Fellow at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute), Suzanne Roberts, Charles Kriel, Julia Claiborne Johnson, Tomica Scavina, Claire Lombardo, NYT best seller, and Julie Cantrell.

We solicit applications for the month's residency each summer for the following year.