Elissa Altman is the author of the acclaimed hybrid memoir Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, an examination of the role that permission, story ownership, fear, and shame play in the creative process. She is the award-winning author of the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, and Poor Man’s Feast, and the bestselling essay substack of the same name.
Altman is a winner of the James Beard Award for narrative food writing, a finalist for the Pushcart Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, Maine Literary Award, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, and her work has appeared in publications including Orion, The Bitter Southerner, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, where her column, “Feeding My Mother,” ran for a year.
Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of permission, storytelling, and creativity, and has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theater in New York. She teaches the craft of memoir at Truro Center for the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Kripalu, Truro Center for the Arts, Rutgers Community Writing Workshop, and beyond, and lives in New England with her wife, book designer Susan Turner.
