About
Diana Friedman
is an award-winning writer whose fiction, articles, and essays have appeared in numerous publications including New Letters, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, The Baltimore Sun, Bethesda Magazine, Washington Independent Review of Books, the Brevity Blog, and Gargoyle Online. She is the recipient of the Alexander Patterson Cappon Fiction Prize and a Pushcart Prize nomination, and her work has been selected as a finalist at multiple magazines and presses. She received funding from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the Maryland State Arts Council, and was a National Park Artist-in-Residence at Catoctin Mountain Park. Awarded residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, Cill Rialaig, Co. Kerry, Ireland, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Diana covers a wide range of topics including environmental disasters, badly behaved children, international families, the Basque Country, honey bees and the humans who love them, and the sometimes futile search for the meaning of life.
Her experience includes teaching professional writing at the University of Maryland and creative writing at Writopia Lab, as well as leading workshops at the New Directions Program at the Washington/Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She also works as a writing coach and editor and facilitates small group workshops.
Diana is also passionate about working with individual writers, whether it’s helping writers new to the artistic process find their voice or guiding mid-career and/or established writers through an editorial process to ready their work for publication. Diana also offers coaching for writers in need of more support.
Bringing all of these skills together, Diana can be found winter and spring facilitating writing retreats at Zigbone Farm Retreat Center near the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland and leading the Motherlode Retreat in Boyds Mill, Pa. In summer, as director and founder, she provides a warm welcome to an international cadre of writers at Pyrenean Writing Retreats, in the Basque Pyrenees of Navarra, Spain.
More Bio Bits
Diana was born and raised in New York City. She attended the University of California at Berkeley and Cornell University where she studied environmental science and sustainable agriculture, two topics about which she is almost as passionate as her writing. After a few bi-coastal shuffles, she landed outside of Washington D.C. in 1996. She’s been there ever since, writing, raising a family, a little bit of trouble, and the occasional vegetable. In 2018 she received an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins, and since then has devoted her time to writing and working with writers individually as a coach and editor. Please contact Diana if you’d like editing or coaching help, or if you’re interested in attending one of her retreats. She is also available to facilitate writing retreats for private groups.