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

Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken lived here while serving as U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant, from 1950 to 1952.

Aiken wrote to his daughter that the job provided “so little to do that I am bored except when I can do work of my own…It’s largely a matter of receiving visitors and answering peculiar questions and turning down invitations to speak or read…The best thing is my office, generally reputed to be the handsomest in the city, top floor, overlooking Capitol on one side and Supreme Court on tother, with view out to river and country too—all Washington. A fine stone balcony on which to perch, too…Washington is dull, I think, like something abandoned by a World’s Fair…”

Aiken wrote or edited over 50 books. His poetry books include Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), The Kid (1947), The House of Dust (1920), and A Letter from Li Po and Other Poems (1955). In 1930, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his Selected Poems. In addition to poetry, he also published novels, short fiction, an autobiography, and literary criticism.

(Read more)

Just some of our many homes...

Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice

1525 H St NW, Washington, DC, United States

John L. McCreery

230 11th Street Northeast, Washington, DC, USA

Anna Roosevelt Halsted

2131 R Street NW, Washington, DC

Anna Roosevelt Halsted

1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW

Ann Darr

4902 Falstone Ave.

Lucille Fletcher

3435 8th St S

Ella Dorsey

2121 California St. NW

Gwendolyn Bennett

1454 T St. NW, Washington DC

Barbara Raskin

1820 Wyoming Ave. NW

Ananda W. P. Guruge

2503 30th St., NW

Robert E. Sherwood

1401 Pennsylvania Ave. NW

Charles Warren Stoddard

300 N St. NW, Washington, DC

Ann McLaughlin

6702 Maple Ave., Chevy Chase, MD

Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren

Commandant's Headquarters, Navy Yard, Washington DC

Lillian Rogers Parks

1846 Vernon Street, Washington DC

Adam Francis Plummer

4811 Riverdale Rd.

Helen Herron Taft

2215 Wyoming Ave. NW

Helen Herron Taft

1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, USA

George Washington Parke Custis

3200 Mount Vernon Memorial Hwy

George Washington Parke Custis

321 Sherman Dr., Fort Myer, VA

Laurence Stallings

1701 16th St. NW, Washington, DC

Willis Richardson

512 U St. NW, Washington, DC

Mary Church Terrell

326 T St. NW, Washington, DC

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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)