About Herta Feely FOLLOW

Herta B. Feely is the author of the novel, Saving Phoebe Murrow, a story of mothers, daughters, and the devastating potential of social media. Her numerous short stories and memoir have been published in literary journals and anthologies. She received two fellowships for a novel in progress – the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and an Artist in Literature from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities – and an American Independent Writing Prize in Personal Essay (about immigration).

She is the co-editor and publisher of an anthology of 22 authors’ short stories and memoir, titled Confessions: Fact or Fiction?, in which she explores the blurred line between true stories and fictional ones.

Now an editor, writing coach and ghostwriter at Chrysalis Editorial, a company she founded, Herta has worked with hundreds of writers helping them to perfect their writing and find agents and publishers for their work. She has ghostwritten two memoirs, both of which have been published. She also reviews books for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

​Herta was born in Yugoslavia (when there was such a place), grew up in southern Germany, then St. Louis, and finally California. She received a degree in Latin American history at UC Berkeley, and also completed her studies at the university’s graduate journalism program. From Johns Hopkins University she received a Master of Arts in Writing.
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She has worked for a variety of causes, ranging from human rights to alternative energy to childhood injury prevention. In 1988, she co-founded the National Safe Kids Campaign (now Safe Kids Worldwide) with pediatric trauma surgeon, Martin Eichelberger, MD.
The mother of two sons, she lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, where she reads and writes, and tends to her cats and many orchids.