Hope Edelman is an author, ghostwriter, essayist, writing instructor and life coach. The through-line connecting much of her work, from the collaborations she’s helped to write to her own best-selling memoirs, is the theme of parent-loss.

“Navigating motherhood without your mom is like assembling a complex puzzle without the picture on the box,” she writes in a blog post on her website. She’s been writing about the Grief and loss in her own life since her best-selling 1994 memoir Motherless Daughters—a book she began as a graduate student at the University of Iowa, when she realized she was being called to write about her mother’s death more than a decade earlier. 

It’s a calling that connects Hope to her ghostwriting clients as well. Her first collaboration, a dual memoir written with actors Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez—Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son—is informed by the death of Sheen’s mother, when the actor was just 11 years old, while her current project, written with Owen Elliot-Kugell, the daughter of the late Cass Elliot—My Mama, Cass—finds its narrative drive in the sudden death of the author’s mother, who died in her Sleep in a London apartment nearly ten years after she shot to fame as a member of The Mamas & The Papas.

The recipient of a Pushcart Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Hope has taught writing at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the University of Iowa, and Antioch University-Los Angeles. 

Join us for a compelling conversation on what it means to find a way to heal as you find your voice as a writer.   

Learn more about Hope Edelman:

• Website
• Facebook
• Instagram

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Daniel Paisner Daniel Paisner - author, collaborator, podcaster

Daniel Paisner is an author, collaborator and podcaster. He is the author or co-author of over 80 books, including four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, and he is the ghostwriter behind 17 NYT best-sellers, written in collaboration with such celebrated personalities as Whoopi Goldberg, Serena Williams and Denzel Washington. He is the host of the podcast “AS TOLD TO: The Ghostwriting Podcast,” a production of the Writers Bone Podcast Network, which features conversations with his fellow ghostwriters, as well as songwriters, speechwriters, screenwriters and other artists who work in service of someone else’s voice or vision.