Sophfronia Scott is director of Alma College’s MFA in Creative Writing, a low residency program based in Alma, Michigan. She grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a hometown she shares with author Toni Morrison, and holds a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Sophfronia began her career as an award-winning magazine journalist for Time, where she co-authored the groundbreaking cover story “Twentysomething,” the first study identifying the demographic group known as Generation X, and People. When her first novel, All I Need to Get By, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2004 Sophfronia was nominated for best new author at the African American Literary Awards and hailed by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as “potentially one of the best writers of her generation.”
Her latest novel is Unforgivable Love (William Morrow). She’s also the author of an essay collection, Love’s Long Line, from Ohio State University Press’s Mad Creek Books and a memoir, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World, co-written with her son Tain, from Paraclete Press. Her essays, short stories, and articles have appeared in Yankee Magazine, Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Timberline Review, Saranac Review, Numéro Cinq, Ruminate, Barnstorm Literary Journal, Sleet Magazine, NewYorkTimes.com, More, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her essay “Why I Didn’t Go to the Firehouse” is listed among the Notables in Best American Essays 2017. Her next book, The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton, will be published in March 2021 from Broadleaf Books.
Sophfronia is the recipient of a 2020 Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts. She has taught at Regis University’s Mile High MFA and Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She’s also delivered craft talks and held workshops at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Meacham Writers’ Workshop, the Hobart Festival of Women Writers, and her own event, the Write of Your Life Writers’ Retreat, held annually in the Veneto region of Italy. She lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut where she continues to fight a losing battle against the weeds in her flower beds.
