Angela Rydell dabbles in creative writing of all stripes, polka dots, and plaids, from novel to flash fiction to poetry. She’s also a teacher at heart, and wrote her way to an MFA in poetry after drifting away from her first gig as a band director in a small town in southern Illinois. Before too long she found herself standing in front of classrooms again discussing the creative process, examining the nuts and bolts of the writer’s craft, and learning more about writing along the way.
From 2006 to 2021 she wrote, designed, and taught dozens of offerings for UW-Madison’s Division of Continuing Studies, and was a featured instructor at the UW’s Writers’ Institute, Weekend with Your Novel, and School of the Arts.
Angela also taught creative writing at Edgewood College, worked as an elementary school poet-in-residence, judged contests for Wisconsin People and Ideas, the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge, and others, and worked as a reader and/or contributing editor for The Madison Review and The Midwest Review. In 2016 she founded Writers’ Inlet, where she runs workshops and coaches novelists, poets, and writers of short and flash fiction.
A manuscript of her poetry won the Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, and her work has been longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. She has been nominated for a Pushcart, and published in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly, Daily Science Fiction, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review , The Sun Magazine, Indiana Review, Flashquake, Poets & Writers, and many other journals.
She’s an amateur rockhound and self-taught landscape architect who loves to push boulders around her garden, or when she’s feeling more ambitious, hike in the North Woods of Wisconsin. She lives in Madison, with her husband, the science fiction writer and game designer Brendan Day.