EVERY BEAUTIFUL THING

Sonya Lea is a screenwriter, memoirist, and essayist. She has received three screenwriting awards, including being named a Nicholl Fellowship finalist. Lea wrote, directed, and produced her first film, EVERY BEAUTIFUL THING (2015,) which has shown at festivals, and won several awards. Seattle’s festival of women’s films named her Emerging Director, and Lea also won Judge’s Awards for Direction in the Pacific Northwest and Canada, and nabbed three recognitions for score. Lea’s cast, crew and donors were seventy percent women.
Lea’s memoir, Wondering Who You Are, (Tin House, 2015,) is about her husband losing the memory of their life. The memoir garnered praise in Oprah Magazine, People, NPR’s Weekend Edition, Booklist, and the BBC, who named it a “top ten book.” The memoir won an international memoir prize and an Artist Trust Award.
Her essays have appeared in Salon, The Southern Review, Brevity, Guernica, The Prentice Hall College Reader, Good Housekeeping, The Los Angeles Book Review, The Rumpus and The Butter. Lea teaches writing privately, at Hugo House in Seattle, and she specializes in mentoring trauma survivors, as well as those who heal the suffering of others. Lea led a pilot project to teach writing to women veterans through Tom Skerritt’s Red Badge Project. She is a keynote speaker to brain injury groups internationally, and she speaks at universities, conferences and other events, including the Association of Writer’s Programs, Cork (Ireland) Writer’s Festival, and more. A sixth-generation Kentuckian, she lives in Seattle.