Ruiyan Xu was the recipient of the inaugural Hochstadt Award. Born in Shanghai, Ruiyan lives in New York City where she works as an interactive producer at P.O.V., the independent documentary series on PBS. She is currently revising the novel she began at Hedgebrook in 2004.

Linda Mabry, the recipient of the 2005 Hochstadt Award, was born in New York City and raised in Brussels, Belgium and Harlem. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College and later earned her law degree from Georgetown University in International Law. Linda’s greatest passion was as a writer, most notably her memoir, ‘Falling Up to Grace’. She devoted her last years working as a non-profit affordable housing administrator in Palo Alto, California. Ms. Mabry died April 4, 2007 of the pancreatic cancer she had fought since 2002. She was 54. Linda was a courageous woman and generous friend to all who knew her.

Manjushree Thapa, the 2006 Hochstadt Award winner, was born in Kathmandu. Since leaving Hedgebrook last year, Manjushree Thapa has published a collection of short stories, Tilled Earth, with Penguin India. She is currently finishing the novel she was working on at Hedgebrook and working on a nonfiction book about the history of the environmental movement of Nepal. She lives in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Janet Campbell Hale, recipient of the 2007 Hochstadt Award, was born in Riverside, CA. Her father was a full blood Coeurd’Alene and her mother was Kootenay/Cree/Irish. Ms. Hale attended City College of San Francisco for a year before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley. She later returned to graduate school at the University of California at Davis where her M.A. thesis in English was the Pultizer nominated novel The Jailing of Cecelia Capture. Ms. Hale has held faculty positions at colleges and universities across the country.

Bishakha Datta, 2008 Hochstadt winner, is a non-fiction writer and documentary filmmaker from Mumbai, India with an abiding interest in gender, sexuality, and invisible points of view. Bishakha, who has a master’s in communication from Stanford University, is the founder-director of Point of View, a Mumbai-based not for profit organization that promotes the points of view of women through media, art and culture. Her first book And Who Will Make the Chapatis, focused on rural women entering politics. Her last documentary film, In The Flesh, explored the lives of two women and a transgender person in prostitution - from their own perspectives. She is currently working on Selling Sex, a book that chronicles the lives and struggles of women in sex work and will be published by Penguin India next year.