A Novelist and Poet
Maria Ostrowski is an award-winning writer of atmospheric fiction.
In 2023, her recently completed manuscript, THE BONES OF HOPE, won two Claymore awards at Killer Nashville: Best Supernatural and 1st Runner Up for Best Unpublished Manuscript!
THE BONES OF HOPE is a speculative, New England Gothic about 36-year-old mechanical engineer, Maya Delamare, who unearths a book of myths and the secret lives of her seafaring women ancestors as she races to save her ancestral home before climate change sweeps it into the sea. Through alternating timelines, THE BONES OF HOPE, weaves the tales of three women across a century, grappling with fertility, independence, and destiny, and explores how a past left unhealed threatens to wound the living.
In 2019, her manuscript, Yet From Those Flames No Light, was a finalist for The Daphne du Maurier Award for excellence in mystery and suspense.
Her creative nonfiction and poetry appears in Ovunque Siamo, Poetica Review, HerStry, 34th Parallel Magazine, and The Book Smuggler’s Den, as well as the anthologies, (HER)oics: Women’s lived experiences during the coronavirus pandemic and Letting Go: An Anthology of Attempts. https://linktr.ee/MariaOstrowski
While studying for her degree in English from the University of Connecticut, she interned at Curbstone Press and volunteered as a mentor for the Connecticut Youth Poetry Slam Team. She started her career at LIMRA as a copyeditor for MarketFacts magazine and later, worked in marketing — managing the company’s online marketing team.
After taking an independent fiction tutorial through NYU’s School of Professional Studies, she attended The Peripatetic Writers Workshops in Woodstock, NY and Kent, England. Pre-pandemic, Maria loved being a teaching artist for The Bushnell’s Partner’s in Arts and Education Program, leading poetry workshops in schools within the Greater Hartford area.
Follow her writing life on Instagram: @the_roughdraft
