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Peggy Newland has recently been awarded 3rd place in Playboy's College Fiction Writers Contest, 1st prize in the Seacoast Writer's annual fiction contest and was selected as a semi-finalist in the Boston Fiction Festival. Peggy has received two NEA grants and was given a 2005 New Hampshire Council for the Arts fellowship for fiction. She is also recently graduated from Southern New Hampshire University's MFA program with at degree in Fiction.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she received her Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Maine and her Master of Social Work at the University of Utah after “being a ski bum for a couple of years." Peggy has been an adolescent psychotherapist for over twenty-five years. In her practice, she utilizes experiential journal writing techniques for clients who have difficulties with anxiety, depression, phobias, eating disorders, anger management, and familial/relational stress. In addition, she has taught sensory-based creative writing at The University of New Hampshire's Writers’ Academy where she, "Helps adolescents find voice as they travel inward to self and outward into the world."

Her short stories have appeared in Daedalus, Conte, Chelsea, Northern New England Review, Thieves Jargon, 971, Sub-Lit, Storyglossia, Meetinghouse (upcoming), Octopusbeak (upcoming) and Mississippi Review. She is currently working on a collection titled “Edge.” 

She published a memoir, “The Adventure of Two Lifetimes,” in 2001, which chronicled two cross country bicycling adventures—her mother’s of 1956 on a three speed Schwinn and her own in 1996 on a 24 speed. She has written many essays and articles concerning this trip (CHICKEN SOUP FOR A MOTHER’S SOUL, BREAKAWAY BOOKS “Bicycle Love,” CUP OF COMFORT, MOXIE, GRIT) and was featured on the Today Show as well as New Hampshire Public Radio.  

Newland has attended Sewanee, Dorset Colony, Kenyon Writers, Seacoast Writers, Utah Writers at Work and is currently a member of New Hampshire Writers Project. Her closest inspiration comes from the dark humor of TC Boyle and Cormac McCarthy. She fills her writing room with sprawled volumes of their work and loves to write amidst the chaos of overturned books and thrown magazine articles.