Ren Cedar Fuller
About
Ren Cedar Fuller's debut book, Bigger, won the 2024 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize, and was a finalist for the 2024 Iron Horse Prize and the Santa Fe Writers Project 2023 Literary Awards Program. Bigger will be published in October 2025.
Ren's creative nonfiction essays have won Under the Sun's Summer Writing Contest in 2022, been a finalist in the 2022 Terry Tempest Williams Prize for Creative Nonfiction at North American Review, and placed second in the 2022 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize. Her essays have appeared in HerStry, Hippocampus, New England Review, North American Review, and Under the Sun, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays.
Ren taught public school in California, Oregon, and Washington before founding a nonprofit early learning center in the Seattle area. She continues teaching parent education and facilitates parent meetings at TransFamilies, an online hub for families with gender diverse children. The throughline in her teaching and writing is a commitment to celebrating people's differences.
After retiring from fulltime early childhood education in 2020, Ren began taking writing classes at Hugo House in Seattle. She thanks her instructors Theo Nestor, Sonora Jha, and Beth Slattery for introducing her to the craft of creative nonfiction. She is currently in the M.F.A. in Writing program at Pacific University.
Ren is grateful the writing friends she met at Hugo House who help her get to the heart of her stories: Darryl, Lacey, Stacey, Su, Uma, and Vani.
She lives in Seattle with her husband, Jason.
Photo by Deema Almunajem
"The pieces in Bigger accomplish what personal essays do at their best: they suggest a new way of looking at things. Whether the subject is an emotionally distant father, a transgender child, a rare disease, or a fondly remembered summer in youth, Ren Cedar Fuller's voice is wise, compassionate, self-aware, and searching. Bigger offers the deep pleasure of experiences thoughtfully considered, emotions examined, and ideas explored yet still left to us to ponder. This collection is a gem."
Clifford Thompson, author of What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues
Reviews
“Reading the essays in Ren Cedar Fuller’s Bigger made me feel as if I was sitting with a dear old friend and flipping through their family photo album for the first time. Each snapshot stands on its own, adding intricate detail to Ren as the child, sibling, spouse, and parent. I felt as if I was looking through her eyes, sharing the experiences in real time. Cedar Fuller masterfully weaves in people, places, time, senses, and heart in a way that leaves me saying, ‘May I have some more, please?’”
Aidan Key, author of Trans Children in Today’s Schools
“Bigger is a book absolutely of this moment in US culture. As the mother of a trans child, the daughter of a man whose undiagnosed affect pointed to being on the autism scale, and the wife of a man with the emotional courage to face such challenges, Ren Cedar Fuller has written a collection that charts a course for others to follow—or perhaps lead. With essays that range from traditional to experimental, Bigger embodies opening ourselves to new possibilities. In the end, this is a book about joy in all its possible manifestations.”
Sue William Silverman, author of Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul
Essays
Selected by Sue William Silverman as the 2022
Under the Sun Summer Writing Contest Winner
My father could look at a loose metal bolt and say if it was a three-eighths or a five-sixteenths, but he could not name his four daughters unless we were lined up by height. He taught my sisters and me to eat corn on the cob left to right, two even rows at a time, like little typewriters. He walked as though his head were tied to an overhead cable. When my mother asked my father if he remembered her friend, Marjorie, he asked, "The one with symmetrical moles?"
Writers Book Club podcast about "Naming My Father"
Checklist For a Sign-Making Party
Hippocampus Magazine
“Can I have people over to make signs on Saturday?” Indigo called from the staircase. Saturday was the Seattle Women’s March of 2017.
“Of course,” I said, putting down my laptop and rising from the daybed. “Does that mean you’re going without me and Dad?”
“You can come,” they said. Indigo is nonbinary. That day, their head was shaved on one side with long wavy hair on the other, colored its natural brown.
My high schooler turned away, willing to march but not chitchat with me.
Events
September 21, 2024
Kindergarten Readiness Workshop
Bellevue Discovery Preschool
April 26, 2025
Raising Our Children to Walk Through the Door
Show Your Love Celebration
Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery
