a bit about me and what I’m up to
I am a writer from West Virginia and Ohio. I currently live in Laramie, Wyoming with my partner and our dog.
I wrote the first drafts of The Running Body while I was an MFA student at the University of Wyoming from 2015 to 2017. Though, I first began to write essays and poetry about my relationship to running, to my body, and to my teammates while I was a student athlete at Ohio University, running cross country and track and studying journalism, literature, and creative writing.
When I first moved to Laramie in 2015, I had no plans to write about running. By my second semester I understood I would have to (write about running, that is) if I ever hoped to write about anything else.
Alongside my creative writing, I am also a writing teacher and doctoral candidate at Syracuse University, where I was recently awarded a research fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year. My dissertation traces rhetorics of rural nostalgia across cultural texts and spaces and bridges academic research with creative nonfiction. I am also at work on a few pieces (essays, poems) that prod at the distances, tensions, intimacies, (im)possibilities, and (un)certainties (and the broader political and cultural contexts) that often seem to animate my/our most significant relationships and kinships.
You can reach me via email at piferemily@gmail.com or Instagram.
Emily Pifer 