Sylvia Sukop, senior fellow in creative non-fiction in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences
I collect hometowns, having lived long years in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, each time putting down roots that grew into abiding circles of friends and colleagues. You might say I’m a connoisseur of hometowns. St. Louis, where I’ve lived since 2016, is the first one that I explicitly chose to nurture my life as a writer. I moved here after being accepted into the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, where I now teach.
While the program provided a welcoming, built-in community to help ground me, I soon discovered the diverse and vibrant literary scene beyond my campus, and how St. Louis can help make a writing life possible—and revelatory—in ways that larger and more expensive cities often cannot.
Read the full piece in Literary Hub.