We were so very sorry to hear of the passing of writer and artist April Freely, who graduated from the NWP in 2008. As many of you know, April was a generous essayist, poet, editor, teacher, and activist who had published widely, won numerous awards, and directed the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR).  

For many, April Freely was a beloved friend and classmate. Below is a collection of alumni tributes, stories, and memories of their fellow writer. We start with a beautiful, beautiful essay by Mary Margaret Alvarado, NWP 2006, who shared an apartment with April for several years in Iowa City. 

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Mary Margaret Alvarado, NWP 2006: 

For two years, April Freely and I lived together on the top floor of a Victorian on Johnson Street in Iowa City. She told me her dad had died right before she started college. I said, I’m sorry. She said, What did she say? She seemed graceful about it, I mean: full of grace. It was from Vietnam: war sickness. She was so young when we first met, but in at least this way, old. 

She sang before class, after class. I dressed our pizzas from the corner store in basil I was growing in cans. April’s mother came to town; my mother came to town. We were daughters who loved their sick mothers. We went to the Lincoln Café for brunch, to Scattergood for dancing, to the painting house for painters. We were both supposed to be in paragraphs, but kept breaking into lines. I threw dinner parties with too much sangria and invited other writers and convinced her to come too. April would be quiet, would be watchful, then she would laugh. Her laughter was like (similes); this sounds hackneyed but it’s just true: it was music. What a laugh! I married someone I met in Iowa City for first of all his laugh. April’s was from similar cannot-be-fucked-with depths: I would follow it anywhere.

She seemed easier when we hung out with townies. Dinner at the apartment of her friend in Coralville. Regular Sunday evenings with our book group that included a man twice our age who appeared to be living out of his car and wore his belt very tight because the pressure comforted him. Another middle-aged man in the group had a halt way of speaking, almost a stutter, and April would coax his ideas from him with such gentleness. The one other student in the book group was Joshua Casteel, who died at the age of 32 in August of 2012. He died from care, from conscience, from war. It made April and I both so sad:

“Golly…Mia,” she wrote to me in December of 2011, when Joshua was ill, but still so hopeful for more life. “I woke up this morning thinking about how much my Father adores Joshua. And I thought about tiredness. And his mother. I think I react first to things like this in sort of caretaker mode: be calm, gather the details, process anything that needs to be processed in order, as it happens. […] But I woke up this morning, going back over those things, hit with much of it, thinking of His kind of in-love, unstoppable press towards Joshua. And then, the pain he must be in, as some sort of atmospheric affect. It must be warping every color…” 

Her emails from all these years are like that, beautiful. I keep re-reading them: 

“Getting a fair amount of reading done. Mostly Grimm’s and some books about grace.” 
 
“So I wonder if the syntactical hinges seem to work just as well with only the caesura?” 
 
“Even though I try to be vocal and I have my statistics about black women die 3x as often.” 
 
“Suffering has been my best way to see His face.” 
 
“Hope there’s light where you are, as He is, on this longest day in history.” 
 
“I’m a tad broken, as this has been the hardest four-five years of my life. Ah well I am trying to go only where the pillar of fire is going.” 
 
“So I’m just stunned, shocked, about having life.” 
 
“look at us be ‘old’!” 

She signed the early ones “-a,” the late ones “-A.” 

April’s being was vast. She knew deeply about “caretaker mode,” and the work of care. She was an artist and a woman, a Midwesterner and a New Yorker, a teacher and an organizer. She was Black and queer. She shared with me one of the depths she kept close, which was that she adored God, who was a very real and near presence for her, that “in-love, unstoppable press.” 

April got upset about the right things, not all the other things. Joshua’s death, for instance: I remember she said she did not understand. But when a tornado took the roof right off of our building in Iowa City, covering its contents in a muddy wet sludge, the verb she used to describe the destruction was “dashed,” isn’t that pretty? We wandered around in the slop more intrigued than sorry, like we’d gotten a great writing prompt. Stars were the ceiling. Would you look at all those stars.

I went to see her in San Francisco in the years to come. Back when she was dating guys, I set her up with two. She came to see me twice in Colorado and once in Cincinnati. We walked and talked on the phone. Manuscripts back and forth. She got quieter during the hardest years in Cleveland, carrying for her mother, but even then, and always, her reports out made a song:  

“it all feels pretty whiny: oh, my life, busy with stuff, don't have time to work on the writing, boo hoo 
some people have real problems and these are not those 
but, you know, my task is my task... 
so far, rejections! yay! but who knows what tomorrow has goin 
i feel myself planning and planning, the way you make folks in signatures and press them down 
with a heavy weight—you try to be obedient to your good work, right?  
the joy-making, the beauty-making, all that witness 
that's part of it 
but there are many other tasks as well, like fixing dinner, and being a whole person 
helping folks in need, speaking truth to power 
and being attentive to the students in a real way, all that 
despite my hiccups and stiffness 
i kind of have the feeling that things are gonna be awesome 
and i kind of feel like this now, this is also the real work 
i try to let Him intervene in my folding, open me up to rest 
we shall see” 

I loved any news from her. But the sweetest time was that ordinary time. Back when we got the car going every other Friday for a shopping trip to the Hy-Vee. When we took an extremely part-time job together as medical subjects answering weird questions at the university hospital. Readings. Potlucks.  

The last year I was in Iowa City I lived mostly alone in the big house on Church Street that was for the post-graduate writing fellows (most of the other fellows slept elsewhere). It was such a beautiful house, but I was often not well there. At some point I got so depressed that I was on the phone with the suicide hotline and not eating and not sleeping and just generally ready to go. The whole world sort of disappeared. Color did, taste did, possibility. There were three things that I could perceive right then as real at all, and therefore good, and they saved my life. My grandmother; Virginia Woolf’s The Waves; and my favorite cookie, the last food to have any taste at all, which happened to be the big soft vegan ginger cookies from the New Pioneer Co-Op. The only reason I ate them is that April Freely kept bringing them over and in her bringing and in her giving they were medicine, do you get what I mean, life-saving medicine. That’s how April loved people and was present to them: a commodity became became life, color, ongoing, balm. 

I got better. April got glorious. We spazzed out on the dance floor.   

April came into her style, her body, her desires, her lines, her loves, her voice, her great beauty. I do not understand her going when she did. It makes me angry. It makes me want to go back, and tell some doctors to run every last test, and, and… 

I must imagine (I still imagine) that before she passed she’d just seen something beautiful. This is imperative: something beautiful that she loved. Was it a bridge? Was it blossoms? Was it the face of a human, the humans she was so good at seeing and loving?

She was a miracle baby, earthside too early. She was a miracle adult, called back, the same. I knew her funeral would not contain the whole of her—queer and Black and brilliant and Christian and an artist and an auntie and a personalist of the most profound sort—and it didn’t. It felt good to see her, though. And it felt so good to sit by her. My whole being said: stay with her, kneel, so I did. I kneeled by her and with my whole heart I told her thank you. I wanted to hear her laugh. I wanted to go to Fire Island. I was supposed to see her there this fall. I have never been. I may never go. The words are a metaphor to me now: Fire Island.

I am imagining the glitter of the beaches. The people so beautiful and whole. The sun a friend. The night a friend. The air free of all toxic shit. The cares of caretakers lifted, laundered, folded, done. Are you there, my radiant friend? And so entirely loved and known and well and whole? Amen. May it be so. 

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June Melby, NWP 2010: 

Here is just a small moment with April, that meant the world to me. While we were in grad school together, I developed a terrible tendonitis on my wrist. I couldn’t write without pain, and I also couldn’t complete my assignments for a book binding class. April was a book binder too. (I think she inspired quite a few of us from the NWP to take classes at the Center for the Book.) When she heard me in a panic about the wrist problems, she offered to help. She spent the afternoon ripping paper for me so I could keep up with class. It was a simple act, sitting in the book studio, patiently ripping pages, and I was just overcome with gratitude. When I tried to express that to her, April just smiled and shrugged. And that’s how I’ve come to remember her, smiling and shrugging. As if to say “no big deal,” and “I’m here to help,” and “all is good.” How many others could tell similar stories? How many other people did she help in small but important ways? We were years apart, but she was a role model for me on how to be gracious in your generosity. Thank you, April. A gem you are.

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David Hamilton, Emeritus Faculty and Former Director of the NWP: 

I would like to say something about April, at least try. April was in part my student, but that is a clumsy idiom: I was at least as much hers. We spent a fair amount of time together, in conferences, and I believe I tried hard to be a good listener. She had much to talk and write about. Her Cleveland home and her mother were steady points of reference, and desire. I can see now that she cared more to be a poet, and was one, in hiding perhaps. I of course was trying to guide her toward a more conventional prose, and that was an uneasy fit. She was at least as patient with me as I hope I was with her, and at times that led to a good deal of laughter. Anyone who remembers her at all will remember the pleasure and grace of her laughter and her smile. I also remember a strange and strangely wonderful evening my wife and I had with her and Mia Alvarado, in their damaged apartment, a day or two after the tornado in 2006. April was much less appalled by it all than I would have been; so there was a grace to that evening, in the aftermath of a dangerous storm, and if that grace didn’t in fact stem mostly from April, it is easy now to imagine that it did. Nothing has pleased me more in recent years than to learn of April’s blossoming as a poet, teacher, and force in a wider literary community. Nor has anything been more bitter, and shocking, than to learn of her sudden, early death. I wish I had been better for her than I managed to be. And I wish I had had the chance, that we both had had the chance, for me to be in her audience, for a reading as the accomplished writer and poet she became. 

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Elena Passarello, NWP 2008:  

Even though it’s been over fifteen years since I counted April as my classmate and bandmate, so many of her insights, lines of great prose, and lovely bursts of song from that precious time are still a part of me now. One example: the way April often described a nebulous quality present in high-functioning essays as ‘the shake.’ Almost two decades later, no other word will do when I encounter such a feeling as a reader. I’ve used her words in countless student meetings, craft talks, and while writing. I am so grateful to have been near April for a bit of the short time she was here on the planet. Please count me among the many who will never forget her generosity or her gifts or her undeniable ‘shake.’ 

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Deborah Taffa, NWP 2013: 

April immediately struck me with her competent, no nonsense vibe. I admired the way she committed to her community as an individual, a literary citizen, and a friend. Her passing is a loss for the NWP and the world at large. May she walk in grace and beauty, and may her loved ones find reassurance in the happy memories she inspired.

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Riley Hanick, NWP 2008: 

April Freely’s voice made the question of spirit real. As an opening or upswell that showed itself through sudden and startling displays of control, April’s voice could lay you out flat with its sheer power, but just as often she held back and took her time. Her gift and her relation to it showed up in an ethic of patience and handling with her audience, as well as her capacity to overwhelm that audience. She traced lines quietly and exquisitely, with measured care, so that you felt safe in her hands and almost able to withstand the wave of her voice as it began to crest. Her voice let you into moments that made you feel like a flicker, both barely there and inundated by the present. And the present was a capacity. It was a space of beauty, pain and the tenderness of their holding and collapse, which was a sound.

I am talking about April’s singing voice, which is distinct from the experience of hearing her on the page. Though for me, as time passes, the two can’t stay away from one another. I think about the way that April changed the room when she first sang “Wicked Game” at Amelia Bird’s house, on a night when we were still mostly joking about playing covers together. April laughed as much as anyone but, when it came time to sing, she wasn’t joking in the slightest. She chose a song that was hard to pull off and reinvented it, letting the chorus cascade down through the basement and the bedrock that held us up, barely. I only had three chords to keep track of but I nearly stopped playing. I’m sure I closed my eyes more than once because I wanted the song to be more fully around me, because I wanted to witness what April was showing us about sprit.   

When it was over, everyone burst into cheering and laughter because that is almost always what we did when we made it to the end of another song together. This time it was a different kind of laughter. It wasn’t nervous and it wasn’t relieved, or it was somehow both and unable to decide. Overwhelmed, surprised, delighted. Saturated with joy that April had found her way to this town, this program, and this room. And that our lives happened to intersect with hers, for a little while. 

“The problem, if I remember correctly, was that it would take a very long time to say everything.” So she wrote, in 2009. Then, in 2018: “Between what is breaking and what is whole there is shared ground.” 

The last time we spoke was over the phone this past winter. I had sent her a draft of an essay that I hoped we could talk about and we did. We talked about Nashville, which is the last place I saw her in person. We talked about her upcoming trip to Rome. It was unseasonably warm that afternoon in Harlem and she and Jennifer had made plans to go out. Because we hadn’t been able to catch up for a while and because I can be difficult to finish a conversation with, but mostly because she was as generous a person as I have ever known, April put an ear bud into her cellphone and took me along. We talked for a few blocks and she passed the sound of small crowds and buskers, traffic and laughter. She had to get back to her life. To the person and place she was becoming, where her love was continuing to find its shape. But she let something extra into the room where I was sitting, the glimpse of an elsewhere and an otherwise and a future whose trajectory would continue past the point where you could see or hear it. That was the sound of April’s singing, or her thinking, her praise and her questions and especially her laugh and the way she would try to catch it with her own two hands as it left her mouth, though it was too late. It was already out in the world, all around us and now in us, and we would never be the same. 

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Jennifer S. Cheng, NWP 2009: 

Dear April, 

I love you, and I miss you. I hadn’t planned to include any words in the newsletter from the program where we met, since my words for you live in another space. But I think there are some things you would have wanted me to say; I feel somehow I would be letting you down if I did not say them. In the last couple years, you and I had been trying individually and together to heal old traumas from the program; we wanted to figure out ways to speak gently but firmly to the wounding voices and to reclaim our own voice. I’m not sure I knew, before this, the intimate manner in which those years had haunted you. One of the truest things I ever wrote about you is that, ever clear on the world’s brokenness, you were full of love for it anyway. This might also be true with regard to your feelings about the Nonfiction Writing Program. Your love for people in the program never precluded or occluded your criticisms of the program—which were severe, incisive, unforgiving. And your criticisms of the program never kept you from loving the people in it. The way in which you were able to honor both commitments authentically and humanely still astonishes me. Truly, there was something astonishing and rare about your heart, your praxis. Once, years later, when we were having dinner with our old writing teacher from Brown, I identified the harm that was done to me and to you at the NWP, but I also offered excuses—it was before social media and the mainstreaming of certain critical discourses, we were all very young—but when I finished speaking, you said I was being too forgiving and evasive. You stated the harm and condemned it plainly. I was surprised because I knew how you had cared for—still cared for—the people in the program. I was not surprised because you and I had been friends for many years, and I knew I was a deeply imperfect friend. I guess I am trying to say something here about grace, how you lived a life with abundant grace. 

Toward love and clarity, 

Jennifer S. Cheng 

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Julia Conrad, NWP 2020: 

I met April at a residency and I don’t think I’ve ever met someone as warm and brilliant in equal measure. Everything she said and was working on awed me—I literally would take notes to remember—and the chance to see her writing studio felt like seeing her mind: beautiful, with soft light, wide-ranging sources and quotes on the wall like an anthology I would have liked to read. She had the most musical laugh and the most musical way of cutting incisively through bullshit, whether on the page or in a conversation. I would have read anything she had written, and the loss of her as a person and writer feels so unfair.

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Ori Fienberg, NWP 2008:  

Shortly after I entered the NWP, I realized that I really wanted to be writing poetry. April Freely had just turned in a mind-meltingly beautiful lyric essay for the workshop we were in together, and I asked her if she’d be interested in swapping poetry, and so I was lucky to get to read her essays, poetry, and generous feedback for the next three years. We didn’t keep in regular touch outside of social media, but every year I’d see her at AWP, where she never failed to make a beeline across the book fair to give me a hug and ask how things were going. She lit up a room with her enthusiasm and warmth.