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, and Whole Earth Review. 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 has years of experience teaching, including professional writing at the University of Maryland, creative writing at Writopia Lab, and leading workshops at the New Directions Program at the Washington/Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She also facilitates small group workshops.
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. In summer, as director and founder, she provides a warm welcome to an international cadre of writers at Pyrenean Writing Retreats, in the uniquely inspirational setting of Iaulin Borda, 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.