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.

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Just some of our many homes...

Henry Berenger

2460 16th St. NW

George Watterston

224 Second St. SE, Washington, DC

John L. McCreery

230 11th Street Northeast, Washington, DC, USA

John A. Joyce

3238 R St. NW, Washington DC

Paul Wellman

400 Shepherd St NW, Washington, DC, USA

Reed Whittemore

4526 Albion Rd.

Reed Whittemore

1518 28th St. NW

Paul Laurence Dunbar

1934 4th St. NW, Washington DC

Jessie Benton Frémont

1305-1315 30th St. NW

Essex Hemphill

3351 Mt. Pleasant St. NW

Selden Rodman

1207 35th St NW, Washington, DC

Joseph Auslander

3117 35th Street NW

Joseph Owono

2349 Massachusetts Ave, NW

O.B. Hardison, Jr.

1708 21st St. NW, Washington DC

Walter H. Mazyck

1229 Park Rd. NW, Washington DC

Herman Taube

10500 Rockville Pike

Blanca Varela

1928 35th Pl. NW

Ellis L. Yochelson

12303 Stafford Lane

Donald Britton

1630 Corcoran Street NW

Elinor Wylie

1707 N St. NW, Washington, DC

Elinor Wylie

2153 Florida Ave. NW

Sam Lacy

1910 13th St. NW, Washington DC

Sam Lacy

775 Hobart Place NW

Caresse Crosby

2008 Q St. NW, Washington DC

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Author 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)