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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 currently on a two year fellowship at Southern New Hampshire University's MFA program.

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."

Her short stories have appeared in Daedalus, Conte, Chelsea, Northern New England Review, Thieves Jargon, 971 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.

As a social worker, Newland has seen disconnection, where “illness is medicated, dissension labeled and people cornered, boxed, not allowed the space in the larger garden of the world.” She believes that with a world becoming so sheltered by American Idol/MTV/Fear Factor/Reality Show images in red, white and blue, or black and white that there “leaves little room for the gray or purple or wildly crazed chartreuse” of individuality. She hopes to describe, through her characters, “a telling of truths…of people digging through the darkness, hoping to find something other than the bite of exposure.” Newland believes that shadows give people dimension, flavor and she wants to honor the unseen sides of lives often marginalized and unseen. Show how they can shine if given direct light.