Signe Hammer

Teaches at Ideasmyth at The Writers Room

Signe Hammer’s memoir, By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide’s Daughter, was described as “fascinating and disturbing,” with “an ironic distance worthy of Jane Austen,” in the New York Times Book Review, which named it a Notable Book. Hammer is also the author of Daughters and Mothers: Mothers and Daughters, an Alternate Selection of both the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club and a best-seller and feminist classic in Germany; and Passionate Attachments: Fathers and Daughters in America Today. She is the editor of Women: Body and Culture: Essays on the Sexuality of Women in a Changing Society.

Her short stories have appeared in Playgirl and the anthologies Pleasures: Women Write Erotica and Erotic Interludes: Tales Told by Women. Her articles have appeared in Travel/Holiday, Harper’s Bazaar, McCall’s, Parade Science Digest, Health, Mademoiselle, The Ladies’ Home Journal, Working Woman, Ms., The San Francisco Examiner and The Village Voice. Her poems have been published in Fiction, New England Review, and On Barcelona.

She has received fellowships to The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center. She is a long-time member of The Writers Room.

She has read her work at Nuyorican Poets Café, The Knitting Factory, Dixon Place, Cornelia St. Café, WOW Cafe, The Writers Room, NYU Programs in Creative Writing; Women’s Ink; Women’s Salon, St. Adrian’s and Dr. Generosity’s. As a dance-theater performer, she was a founding member of Meredith Monk/The House.

She has been an editor at both a major book publisher, Harper & Row, and a national magazine, the Hearst publication Science Digest. She taught writing to adults for 12 years as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, where she received an Award for Teaching Excellence, and as a Lecturer in the Science and Environmental Reporting Program, NYU Graduate School of Journalism. She currently teaches winter writing workshops in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.