All Student Success Letters
Hannah Thurman
Dear Gotham,
It was 2011 and I’d just moved to NYC. I’d graduated college a few months before, and my undergrad creative writing teacher had given me a bit of advice before moving to the city: “Find other writers!”
I had seen the yellow Gotham newspaper boxes dotting the sidewalks (outnumbered only perhaps by the ubiquitous advertisements for Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar and Dr. Zizmor), so I decided to try there first.
So with my first paycheck from my job at an ad agency, I bought tuition for a Gotham Writers Workshop Fiction class, taught by Shelly Oria.
Shelly was a great teacher, both of writing craft but also creativity. She pulled exercises from a book I was just beginning to hear about, The Artists Way, to help ignite our imagination. It was a wonderful experience—so wonderful that I kept coming back, semester after semester. In that class, I made one of my best writer friends, Amber Thompson, who continues to read my work to this day... including providing years of feedback on my debut novel, Mercy Hill. And Shelly is now a dear friend who when I asked her for a blurb for Mercy Hill, was one of the first people to say YES!!
I hope other Gotham writers will be interested to read Mercy Hill (out May 5, 2026 from Doubleday!!!), which my editor describes as “A debut family novel about four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. A richly moving story of sisterhood, loyalty, and mental health in America.”
It is a novel that could not have happened without the support and friendship of the people I met within Gotham.
Much love for all the yellow newspaper boxes,
Hannah Thurman
