Victoria Sottosanti holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of New Hampshire, where she won the 2017 Nonfiction Prize. She is a writer, dancer, fine arts instructor, designer, and mixed-media artist. Her prose has been published in The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Victoria was a writer-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC), the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her writing has been awarded grants from VSC, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and others. Her first memoir, a poetic prose chapbook What Happened (a Montage), was selected as the second runner-up in The Master’s Review 2022 Chapbook Open Contest, and is currently a top 1% finalist in their 2026 New Narratives Prize.

Victoria is the founder and artistic director of eleVe | the studio where story lives, the Upper Valley’s premier redemptive arts business. She enjoys life with her husband and son in the woods and along the White River of Vermont. As a survivor of abuse, addiction, childhood trauma, and most recently, breast cancer, Victoria is most compelled by the darkest of plots and their potential impact of redemption and hope on our society.

Over the past ten years, Victoria has been hard at work on a site-specific memoir based in a town called Freedom, New Hampshire, and the surrounding White Mountains, entitled Where Light Hits the Bones. The narrative revolves around the complex effects of a lifetime of suffering and survival, viewed through the lens of the story’s setting and the symbolism embedded in places and people. Her memoir tells the true and harsh story beneath the billboards of the Northeast’s most famous destination land, exploring themes of generational abandonment, stewardship, tourism, and our need for transportation and transformation. The book explores geographical territories as metaphors for our bodies and the vast landscapes of pain we carry as we move through space and instinctively hunt for change. After a decade of revisions driven by place-based research, her writing now reflects deeply on the mystical impact that place has on our identities, and vice versa: the immense influence we as characters have on the spaces we inhabit.

The story’s spine is an episodic tight line of tension woven around humanity’s inherent freedom to choose between good and evil—teetering between leaning into our stewardship’s vast potential or falling into the tragically easy pit of “abandoning ship,” which ultimately casts hope or spreads grief into the bones of our bodies and the skeletal forces that structure our societies.