About the Staff
Learn more about the researchers who help make The Writer’s Almanac possible.
Betsy Allister
Betsy Allister grew up listening to Garrison Keillor make fun of English majors, but she couldn't help herself and majored in English anyway. These days she is a writer and farmer in her hometown of Northfield, Minnesota. When she is not researching writers, she is probably weeding carrots, moving sheep, feeding pigs, harvesting kohlrabi, or engaging in some other activity that involves dirt and manure. In the winters you might find her baking bread, making sausages, and reading as many books as possible. Favorite writers include Wendell Berry, E.B. White, Louise Erdrich, Anthony Doerr, Arundhati Roy, and Virginia Woolf. She is also a fan of children's books, Buddhist teachings, and cookbooks.
One of the things she enjoys most about writing for The Writer's Almanac is learning how writers approach the day-to-day business of writing — who writes in pajamas in a darkened room (Zadie Smith), who sticks to a perfect schedule that depends on physical training (Haruki Murakami), and who writes in the bedroom while throwing wild parties in the living room (Zora Neale Hurston). She also likes uncovering unexpected, funny, or moving stories of how writers find their way to publishing their first books.
Holly Vanderhaar
Holly Vanderhaar was born in Austin, MN (Spamtown, USA!) but grew up in Phoenix, where she attended Arizona State, earning a B.A. in film studies and a Master of Liberal Studies. She lived in New York City for a while — long enough to fall in love with it, but not long enough to get sick of it — and ended up in St. Paul, where she moved in 2007 to get her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota.
She's worked as an office manager, a personal assistant, an intern for a film producer, a teacher, and a psychology lab assistant handling rats and pigeons. She's thrilled to be a working writer now, since she's much less likely to be bitten (that was really only a problem with those last three jobs).
Her favorite authors include Dorothy Parker, Michael Ondaatje, Charles Simic, Joan Didion, George Orwell, and David Foster Wallace. Her secret fantasy is to be part of a 21st-century Algonquin Round Table. She finds it tremendously heartening to learn how other writers overcome their dysfunctions, insecurities, and struggles with their own work, and that's her favorite part about working on The Writer's Almanac.
She's a single mom to 8-year-old twin daughters, and if she had any spare time, she'd be working on an essay collection about her ancestor, one of the Salem witches.
