2026 Gateless Tuscany Retreat Writers

Kristin Cassidy: Hi! I’m Kristin from Southern Vermont. My mission is to be a beacon of love in the world. Also I am a Kripalu Certified Yoga Teacher with 20 years of experience. In addition I have worked as a Herbalist, Biofeedback Therapist, and Stress Management Consultant.

I work now as a professionally trained Transformational Life Coach, and yoga instructor. I cannot remember how I originally found Gateless – but was on email list for years!!! A couple years ago I found myself writing an unexpected memoir and was looking for writing support . Of course the right zoom class was offered in an email that I hopped on and was immediately drawn to study with Suzanne -this is my second year in the Gateless academy.

* She doesn’t always say “trucking”.

Erin Chrisman: I live in Charleston SC and have been a professional photographer for more than 20 years. Before that, I was a newspaper reporter/writer. I found out about Gateless from Emily Pereira, who was the first luminary call last summer during the Gateless application period. Emily is a former bride of ours, and I’ve read her memoir. She posted about her luminary call on Instagram, and I felt that first flicker of a calling that I needed to hear what this was all about!

Bianca Connolly: I am from Palm Beach Florida. I’m working on my first novel and will be starting to write my second novel at this retreat! I’m also a copywriter and prompt engineer, and I dabble in the wellness space.

Elizabeth Swanson: Hello, I am rom Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I live with my husband Mike and rescue dog Millie. I am also mother to Marcelle, who is 28 and living her best life in Boston. I am a writer, professor, and human rights advocate and I became part of the Gateless community last year on a retreat in Costa Rica. Since then I have been working with a Gateless instructor on my memoir, which is what I am bringing to work on in Tuscany. I am so looking forward to meeting all the scribes in this transformational experience.

Daniela Terrizzi: Hello I’m from Chicago! I am retired nurse researcher. 

Judith Ugelow Blak: A 73-year old woman emigrated from the US to Denmark in 2009, I started writing maybe ten years ago and finished the Stanford Online 2-year Novel-Writing Program in 2021. I’ve taken many other courses–dialog, scene vs summary, writing the other, synesthesia, short story, poetry, and so on. I have a comfortable portfolio of work in first draft and have had two essays published in anthologies on older parenting and gray love, respectively. I grew up on Long Island, retired from teaching economics and chemistry at an international high school in 2021, and found out about Gateless because my sister Linda Ugelow is sold on your process.

Monique Barry: Hi! I live in Los Angeles California and learned about Gateless through a dear friend that worked with Suzanne and developed a best selling book from it. I just finished my first book, a memoir about my mother and the mother daughter relationship, No Wonder He Dumpa You, Life lessons from an irreverent Chinese mother. I’m currently working on my substack and toying with a YA novel on the middle school experience of an awkward girl

Jennifer Barrett is Managing Director and Head of Content and Communications at J.P. Morgan Wealth Management and author of “Think Like a Breadwinner,” a wealth-building guide for women published by Penguin Random House in 2021. A #1 release on Amazon, the book has since been published in the U.K., Australia and South Africa.

Before joining J.P. Morgan Chase in 2024, Jennifer was Head of Content at Fidelity Investments and, before that, Chief Education Officer at the financial startup Acorns. Over her career, she’s held a range of management roles, including General Manager at Hearst Digital, Personal Finance Editor at CNBC Digital, and SVP and Editor in Chief at DailyWorth, a financial media company targeting women.

Jennifer has written for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, where she was a writer and editor. She’s also co-authored two other personal finance books. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. Read more at jenniferbarrett.com.

Andrea Lippke: I am a cultural critic, journalist and fiction writer and have been a columnist for the New York Times, an editor at Phaidon Press and a guest critic and lecturer at Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts and Yale University. I’ve written several books about design and visual culture and have been a fiction fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a nonfiction fellow at Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes, France. I live in Lisbon, Portugal, with my photographer husband and two children, and am currently working on novel. I heard about Gateless through a friend of a friend and am in Gateless Academy, enjoying every minute.

Katie Spring: I live in Chicago and am in the process of moving to Boston with my husband. We have five grown children in their 20s. I work fulltime and will be changing jobs soon after this retreat, so it’s a wonderful little escape for me. I learned about this program from my friend, Daniela Defrino, who I’ve known for nearly 20 years. I write a lot for my job but it’s mostly business related. I studied English and creative writing but it hasn’t been part of my life for a long time.

Stefanie Grassley: Hi! I’m Stefanie. I’m originally from the U.S. and have lived in Utah, Florida, Hawaii, NYC, and Copenhagen. For the past 8 years I’ve lived in a castle in Tuscany with my husband and our two children where we host retreats and weddings. I’m looking forward to being a retreat guest instead of running around behind the scenes.

I met Suzanne in New York last year at Book to Brand and am so excited to be part of the Gateless magic and supportive community!

I’m currently working on a memoir about surviving a near-death experience and what happens when getting everything you wanted suddenly becomes something you have to rebuild and you have to find the strength to choose life again.

Suzanne Kingsbury is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed author whose work has been translated widely abroad and optioned for film.

After studying novel writing with Frank Conroy, the late director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she went on to graduate from the Masters in Fine Arts in Writing and the Literary Arts at Bennington College. In 2008, Suzanne founded Gateless Writing, a global literary arts organization whose unique methodology combines brain science, ancient Zen techniques, and therapeutic nurturing to develop writers’ unique talent and singular genius, enabling them to move through residual blocks and create domain-changing prose.

Suzanne is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and the Oxford Town Fiction Award and her work has been profiled in Rolling Stone Magazine (European edition), The Guardian, The L.A. Times, O Magazine, BuzzFeed, Bustle, Ms Magazine, Thrive Global (named Gateless the Top Writing Retreat of 2017), NPR syndicates, and more.

Suzanne is also trained in Reiki and certified in Thai head massage and can “read” a writer through touch. She began working as a scribe channel while she was leading her first Gateless Teacher Training in 2014, receiving messages from a divine source of unconditional love that helped writers find clarity and power in their words. As a writing intuit, she uses the sacred spirit of the word to understand deep patterning and repeated archetypes in a writer’s work, that leads to profound alchemy in their lives.

Through retreats, workshops, one-on-one intensives, and career training programs, Suzanne has helped countless writers on their way to landing top agents, signing lucrative book deals and winning prestigious literary awards. Her writers have also been profiled in some of the world’s top media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, USA Today, The Jane Pauley Show, the Today Show, CBS, NBC, ABC and more. She believes if you are a writer, you have been tapped by the divine to be a conduit for a message only you can tell and that writers can move a crowd with the power of their story.

Elizabeth Farren was born and raised in New York City and has been a resident in Rome, Italy, for almost two decades. She received her BA in English from Columbia University in NY and her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has been published in 7 Stories from Rome {Anthology}, Prick of a Spindle, The 13th Warrior Review, Verso, and The Columbia Review. She was chosen by Mary Gaitskill as a finalist for the Summer Literary Seminars, and her novel, Don’t Tell Them You’re American, was a finalist in the Evening House Press Grassic Short Novel Prize. Her latest short story, “Tattletale” was published in the Spring 2025 issue of the South Carolina Review. 

Professor Farren began teaching at John Cabot University in Rome in January 2022. Prior to John Cabot, she taught literature, composition, and creative writing at Keiser University, where she also headed their online writing lab. She is deeply passionate about reading, music, art, imagination, human rights, feminism, equal justice, and integrity. This is her second year in the Gateless Academy, where she is at work on her novel. This is her third year co-leading the Gateless Retreat in Tuscany. She has recently been accepted into the 2026 Gateless Teacher Training program.