‘The Several Sins of Heidi Spencer’

Summer Hammond grew up in rural Iowa and Missouri, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her writing appears in New Letters, Moon City Review, and Tahoma Review, among others. She won the 2023 New Letters Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction and her essay was selected for Best American Essays 2025. Her debut novel, The Impossible Why, is forthcoming from Apprentice House Press in 2026.