Vanessa Martir
Wellesley High School Author: Vanessa Martir
Vanessa Martir is a writer, educator and social activist. The 1993 Wellesley High School graduate and Wellesley ABC Program alumna credits Brooks Goddard for introducing her to Latinx writing when, in her junior year, he gave her How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez. This was one of the critical steps to Vanessa becoming a writer. Her Humanities teachers Jeanie Goddard and Gerald Murphy inspired and encouraged her commitment to social activism, which Vanessa says she’s carried all these years. Vanessa’s work has been widely published, including in The NY Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Poets & Writers, and numerous anthologies.
She is the recipient of the 2021 Letras Boricuas Fellowship, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; a 2019 Bronx Recognizes Its Own Award in Creative Nonfiction; a 2019 AWP Kurt Brown Award in Creative Nonfiction; and a 2013 Jerome Foundation Award.
Vanessa is the creator of the Writing Our Lives Workshop and the Writing the Mother Wound movement. Her heart genre is creative nonfiction, and she’s also a novelist, poet, and playwright.