Tessa Fontaine
Instructor
About Tessa
Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, a New York Times Editor's pick, an Amazon Best of 2018 (so far) pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, an Amazon Editors' Best of the Month featured debut, an iBooks favorite, and more. Tessa spent the 2013 season performing with the last American traveling circus sideshow, the World of Wonders. Essays about the sideshow won the 2016 AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction, and have appeared in The Rumpus, Hayden's Ferry Review, Autre, and elsewhere. Other work can be found in Glamour, The Believer, LitHub, FSG's Works in Progress, Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, [PANK], Brevity, and more. Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa got her MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Utah. She is the recipient of the University of Alabama’s 2012 graduate departmental awards in fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and the 2013 awards in fiction and nonfiction. She has won the University of Utah’s Academic Fellowship and the University of Alabama’s National Alumni Fellowship, Boone Fellowship, Truman Capote Award and First-Year Teaching Award, and has recieved awards and fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Taft Nicholson Center, Writing by Writers, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and more. She has taught for the New York Times summer journeys, at the Universities of Alabama and Utah, in prisons in Alabama and Utah, and founded a Salt Lake City Writers in the Schools program. Around the country, she has performed her one-woman plays in theatres ranging from New York to San Francisco. The scar on her cheek from a 2am whip act is slowly fading.