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
Maxine Combs
Maxine Combs is the author of three novels, The Inner Life of Objects (2000), Handbook of the Strange (1996) and The Foam of Perilous Seas (1990), and two poetry books: Swimming out of the Collective Unconscious (1999) and Listening for Wings (2002).
She moved to Washington, DC in the early 1970s and taught English at several universities, including American University (1970-1974), George Mason University (1979-1988), Howard University (1988-1989) and the University of the District of Columbia (various years from 1972 to 1990).
Combs won the Larry Neal Award for Fiction (1998) and the Slough Fiction Award (1990), and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the DC Commission on the Arts, and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was a fiction editor for The Antietam Review.
Just some of our many homes...
Esther Popel Shaw
111 Columbia Rd NW, Washington, DC, USA
Nancy Johnson
3612 Newark Street NW, Washington DC
Jean Jules Jusserand
2460 16th St. NW
Vasily P. Aksyonov
1812 Wyoming Ave. NW
Vasily P. Aksyonov
4434 Lingan Rd. NW
Charles Warren Stoddard
300 N St. NW, Washington, DC
Reed Whittemore
4526 Albion Rd.
Reed Whittemore
1518 28th St. NW
Ed Cox
1920 S St. NW Washington DC
Ed Cox
1301 15th St. NW, Washington DC
Ed Cox
11345 Saratoga Ave. NE, Washington DC
Gideon Ferebee, Jr.
71 N Street NW
Archibald MacLeish
1520 33rd St. NW
Archibald MacLeish
607 Oronoco St
John F. Kennedy
1400 34th St. NW
John F. Kennedy
1528 31st St. NW
John F. Kennedy
3321 Dent Place NW
John F. Kennedy
2808 P St. NW, Washington, DC
John F. Kennedy
3307 N Street NW, Washington DC
John F. Kennedy
2480 16th St. NW
John F. Kennedy
1147 Chain Bridge Road
John F. Kennedy
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Hervé Alphand
2221 Kalorama Road, NW
Myrna Loy
3522 P St. NW, Washington, DC
Anna Roosevelt Halsted
2131 R Street NW, Washington, DC
Anna Roosevelt Halsted
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Alain Locke
1326 R St. NW, Washington, DC
Alain Locke
1309 R St. NW, Washington DC
Anna Julia Cooper
201 T Street NW, Washington DC
Nan Fry
6512 79th Place
Julia Child
1677 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Julia Child
2706 Olive St. NW
Julia Child
1745 N St. NW, Washington DC
Julia Child
1311 35th Street Northwest, Washington, DC, USA
David Kresh
601 North Carolina Avenue SE
O.B. Hardison, Jr.
1708 21st St. NW, Washington DC
Caresse Crosby
2008 Q St. NW, Washington DC
Latest from Twitter
A Twitter List by TwitterDevAuthor Birthdays
in April
George Washington Parke Custis (April 30, 1781)
Edward Everett Hale (April 3, 1822)
Ulysses S. Grant (April 27, 1822)
John Willis Menard (April 3, 1838)
Augustus Goodyear Heaton (April 28, 1844)
Thomas Nelson Page (April 23, 1853)
Henry Berenger (April 22, 1867)
Yan Huiqing (April 2, 1877)
Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882)
Caresse Crosby (April 20, 1891)
Robert E. Sherwood (April 4, 1896)
Harlan Miller (April 3, 1897)
Duke Ellington (April 29, 1899)
Whittaker Chambers (April 1, 1901)
Clare Booth Luce (April 10, 1903)
Richard Eberhart (April 5, 1904)
Ward Dorrance (April 30, 1904)
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905)
William W. Warner (April 2, 1920)
Charles W. Bailey II (April 28, 1929)
Fletcher Knebel (April 28, 1929)
Octave S. Stevenson (April 28, 1930)
Doug Lang (April 11, 1941)
Gil Scott-Heron (April 1, 1949)
Christopher Hitchens (April 13, 1949)
Essex Hemphill (April 16, 1957)
Yvonne Brown (April 18, 1977)