“Our present-tense human experience is like a living tree growing by a river. The current in the river is the passing of time. Our individual pasts are like the same tree fallen in the river, drowned now, and disintegrating with surprising speed. We resist time’s flow with our memories and language, with our stories ”
~ David James Duncan
Issue 26.2
Featuring the writing of Megan Baxter, Will Bridges, Janet Burroway, Roger Conant Cranse, Hope Henderson, Catherine Humikowski, Katherine Larson, Lucy McBee, Mariana Penãloza Morales, Sharman Apt Russell, Margot Singer, and Michael Wiley.
River Teeth is a biannual journal combining the best of creative nonfiction, including narrative reportage, essays, and memoir, with critical essays that explore the impact of nonfiction narrative on the lives of its writers, subjects, and readers.
Autobiography on the Eve of My Thirtieth Birthday
By Melanie Ritzenthaler
I think about God a lot because I think all ex-Catholics do. That means I think a lot about sin, and also about death...
My Sister Teaches Me How to Dice an Onion
By Jessica Franken
What on earth are you doing? she says, (my mistake was cutting the ends off first...
He Comes Back for the Curtains
By Jill Currie
After all that, he comes back for the curtains. The blackout curtains that helped him sleep in on so many school days—past the alarms I begged him to set, past all my fruitless shouting, past noon...
Latest News …
Hannah Hindley Wins River Teeth’s 2024 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize
By Megan Lutes
We are delighted to announce that Hannah Hindley has won the 2024 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. Her manuscript, Love and Also Fish, will be published by the University of New Mexico Press in Spring 2026. Hindley will also receive a $1,000 honorarium. All entries were screened by the editors, and our guest judge, Beth Nguyen, chose a winner from among the finalists. All of us at River Teeth are grateful to the many writers who submitted their books to the competition this year and to Beth Nguyen for sharing her time and expertise to choose the winning manuscript.
River Teeth Goes to L.A. for AWP 2025
We our packing our bags and our boxes of goodies as we prepare to make our way to AWP in Los Angeles this March 26-29 in Los Angeles.
Brooke Champagne Joins the River Teeth Team
Hello from the confluence of River Teeth here at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, on the kind of gorgeous fall day that makes a person want to leash up the dog and head out into the fields and woods–but not so fast because submissions opened on September 1st and we’ve got a lot of reading to do. Happily, we love to read.