Sandell Morse

Artist Statement

As a memoirist who began her career writing fiction, I use imagery, scene, dialogue, and detail to bring my words to life on the page. As a former dancer, I feel the rhythm of my prose in my body. My work circles questions of mothering, mother loss, identity, and a family’s legacy of trauma and pain. I seek to honor the beauty, sadness, strangeness, complexity, and love that comprise our humanity. I seek connection.

Sandell Morse, The Spiral Shell, A French Village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II, a memoir paperback April 2022, hardcover April 2020

Bio

Sandell Morse is the prize-winning author of the memoir, The Spiral Shell, A French Village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II (Schaffner Press, April 2020, paperback April 2022). The Spiral Shell is a Silver Medal winner in the Story Circle Women’s Book Awards, 2020, memoir, and a finalist for the New Hampshire Literary Award, 2021, nonfiction. Morse’s essays have been noted in The Best American Essays series and published in Creative Nonfiction, Ploughshares, the New England Review, Fourth Genre ASCENT, Solstice, and Tiferet among others. She has won the Michael Steinberg essay prize, been nominated for Best of the Net and two Pushcart Prizes. Morse has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a resident at the Hewnoaks Artists’ Colony, and a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia and in Auvillar, France. She holds degrees from Wilson College, the University of New Hampshire, and Dartmouth College. She lives in New Hampshire with Zeus, her Standard Poodle.

sandellmorse.com