This project documents the homes of literary authors who once lived in the greater Washington, DC region. We wanted to honor the widest range of literary authors possible, including authors of different backgrounds, writing styles, and influences. We include novelists, poets, playwrights, and memoirists. We do not include writers who were solely journalists, and, with few exceptions, authors of genre literature. We have tried hard to include authors from a range of time periods, from the city’s founding in 1800 through the present.

Recent Additions

What’s New?

We got a great review in the Washington City Paper in August 2020, calling our project “an online database of more than 300 writers and their D.C. homes [that] offers a glittering who’s who of Washington literary history.”

Our official relaunch celebration took place on November 29, 2018. After a decade of implementing this project independently, co-editors Kim Roberts and Dan Vera were pleased to celebrate the project’s new permanent home.  Sponsored by HumanitiesDC, this updated version of the website features a responsive design easily navigable by desktop or smartphone users. They have promised to continue and preserve our research on writers’ homes in perpetuity.

HumanitiesDC is one of 56 state humanities councils and the capital’s local affiliate for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

With our latest additions, we are now documenting the homes of 405 writers who lived and wrote in the greater Washington, DC region!

Featured Author

Stanley Plumly

Plumly grew up on a family farm in Ohio and Virginia, and taught at Wilmington College, where he co-founded The Ohio Review, the University of Iowa, Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of Houston, Breadloaf Writers Conference, and at the University of Maryland, where he served as director of the creative writing program. He taught at UofM from 2009 until just before his death.

Plumly is the author of thirteen books of poems, including the posthumous Collected Poems (2025), Old Heart (2009, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize), In the Outer Dark (1970, winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award), and Out-of-the-Body Travel (1978, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award). He co-edited The New Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1999, with Michael Collier), and published four books of nonfiction, including Posthumous Keats (2008), and Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime (2018). Among other honors, Plumly was Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland, won the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Just some of our many homes...

Victor R. Daly

1614 T Street NW, Washington, DC

Victor R. Daly

1612 Manchester Lane NW

Helen Herron Taft

2215 Wyoming Ave. NW

Helen Herron Taft

1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, USA

Dee Brown

1717 R St. NW, Washington DC

Chasen Gaver

1801 Clydesdale Pl. NW

Louise Bogan

1207 35th St NW

Christopher Hitchens

2022 Columbia Rd. NW

Langston Hughes

1749 S St. NW, Washington DC

Langston Hughes

1816 12th St. NW, Washington DC

Catherine Marshall

3100 Cathedral Ave NW

Joseph Kraft

3115 O Street NW, Washington, DC

Edith Hamilton

2448 Massachusetts Ave. NW

Margaret Louisa Sullivan Burke

1602 15th St NW, Washington, DC, USA

Donald Britton

1630 Corcoran Street NW

Luis Muñoz Marín

1914 Connecticut Ave. NW

Edith Brown Mirick

3314 Newark St NW, Washington, DC, USA

Edith Brown Mirick

1638 R Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA

Tallulah Bankhead

1868 Columbia Rd. NW

Tallulah Bankhead

1900 Q St. NW, Washington DC

Elliott Coues

1726 N St. NW

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

1934 4th St. NW

Myrna Loy

3522 P St. NW, Washington, DC

David Brinkley

111 E. Melrose St.

John Philip Sousa

636 G St SE, Washington, DC

Ellis L. Yochelson

12303 Stafford Lane

Betty Parry

4814 Falstone Ave.

Walter Karig

3834 Seminary Road

Josiah Henson

11420 Old Georgetown Rd.

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Author Birthdays
in March

Emily Lee Sherwood (March 28, 1839)
Emily Hawthorn (March 21, 1845)
Ella Dorsey (March 2, 1855)
John Hays Hammond (March 31, 1855)
Isabel Weld Perkins Anderson (March 3, 1876)
Margaret Fishback (March 10, 1900)
Alba de Céspedes (March 11, 1911)
L. Ron Hubbard (March 13, 1911)
Lucille Fletcher (March 28, 1912)
Francis Coleman Rosenberger (March 22, 1915)
Henry Brandon (March 9, 1916)
Eugene McCarthy (March 29, 1916)
Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917)
Pearl Bailey (March 29, 1918)
Douglass Wallop (March 8, 1920)
Anne Truitt (March 16, 1921)
Shirley Graves Cochrane (March 5, 1925)
Stacy Johnson Tuthill (March 10, 1925)
Rafael Squirru (March 23, 1925)
Sandra Day O’Connor (March 26, 1930)
Judith Farr (March 13, 1936)
Jane Flanders (March 26, 1940)
James Oliver Horton (March 28, 1943)
Askia Muhammad (March 28, 1945)
Mark Wayne Craver (March 3, 1956)
Venus Thrash (March 30, 1959)