Angela Ackerman is a Canadian writing coach, international speaker, and co-author with Becca Puglisi of the Writers Helping Writers thesaurus series. Their books treat the craft of fiction as a problem-solving discipline, with reference volumes organized so a writer can look up what they need in the middle of a draft.
The Emotion Thesaurus, first published in 2012 and expanded in a 2019 second edition, covers more than 130 emotions with body language cues, internal thoughts, and visceral responses for each entry. It is widely used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists, has been translated into ten languages, and is sourced by US universities. The series has grown to eleven volumes, including the Positive Trait Thesaurus, the Negative Trait Thesaurus, the Emotional Wound Thesaurus, the Occupation Thesaurus, and others built on the same lookup-while-you-write model.
With Puglisi, Ackerman co-founded Writers Helping Writers, a long-running site full of free craft resources, and One Stop for Writers, a subscription platform that contains the entire thesaurus collection as a cross-referenced searchable database alongside character-building and worldbuilding tools. She has spoken internationally at SCBWI, RWA, and WFWA conferences, and her work has been profiled by Writer's Digest and the Writers' Guild of Alberta.
