Donna Coffey Little
Donna Coffey Little is the Founder of Reinhardt University’s Etowah Valley Low-Residency MFA Program and is currently the Assistant Director. A transplant from Virginia, she holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, an MA in Comparative Literature from UNC Chapel Hill, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. Her most recent essays have appeared in Five Points, StorySouth, Georgia Backroads, The James Dickey Review, and Tiferet. Recent poems have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Florida Review, and Leaping Clear. Her chapbook Fire Street was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012.
In 2019 Donna obtained a grant from the Council of Independent Colleges for Reinhardt University to create a physical and digital exhibit entitled Spirits on Pine Log Mountain: An Appalachian Community, 1830-1940. The exhibit can be found at https://dlc943.wixsite.com/pinelogmountain. Donna has also written many blog posts on the history and ecology of Pine Log Mountain and the Etowah River. Her blog can be found at https://etowahvalleypilgrimage.wordpress.com/.
In 2016-2018, Donna was awarded a Think Write Publish Creative Nonfiction Fellowship from the Templeton Foundation, in coordination with the journal Creative Nonfiction and Arizona State University. She was also selected for the Master Fiction Writing Workshop at the Tucson Festival of Books in 2018. She was a Finalist in the Atlanta Review poetry contest in 2016 and a Finalist in the Florida Review’s poetry contest in 2017.
Donna also published scholarly work. She was Guest Editor of Volume 31.2 of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, a special issue devoted to Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ecofeminism. Her academic articles have also appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Science as Culture, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the collection Holocaust Text and National Context (University of Delaware Press).
Donna is currently writing a historical novel, Wofford’s Blood, which is the true story of James Daugherty Wofford, a Cherokee man who was a detachment leader on the Trail of Tears and an informant for the ethnologist James Mooney in 1891. The white, Cherokee and African-American Woffords lived at the foot of Pine Log Mountain, and the novel explores their lives in the years leading up to the Cherokee Removal.
