Lori Ambacher passed away unexpectedly after a preventative surgery in June, 2023. The 2023-24 and 2024-25 Princemere Writers Series were dedicated to Lori and feature writers who knew and worked with her.
Lori was born in Ohio and raised in Kowloon, Hong Kong by missionary parents. She attended Wheaton College in Illinois and completed a Master’s in English and Creative Writing at SUNY Binghamton. She taught a variety of Creative Writing and English Literature courses at Gordon, from The Great Conversation to Fiction Writing to Nobel Literature. Her literary interests were global and range from Szymborska to Joyce and Nabokov, and from Gao and Ishiguro to Babel, Chekhov and Colette. In addition to teaching at Gordon College, she also taught English as a Second Language for many years at Salem State University. She published memoir, creative nonfiction, poetry, short stories, interviews and opinion pieces. Her interview with the writer Andre Dubus is part of a larger collection of essays about Dubus, Conversations with Andre Dubus (edited by Olivia Carr Edenfield).
She lived in Lynn, Massachusetts, with a tortoise, a spice finch, and a wildly energetic brown puppy named Lucy. She attended a small, friendly Baptist church in Lynn. Her guilty pleasures included reading mystery novels by Louise Penny and hanging out with friends in cafes. Reading was a lifelong vice and she was known to read three to five books in a weekend.
Ars Creative Writing 