Tim Bascom’s newest book, Climbing Lessons, is a collection of 40 brief personal narratives about fathers and sons in his own Midwestern clan. Bascom is also the author of a novel, a collection of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs: Running to the Fire (University of Iowa Press) and Chameleon Days (Houghton Mifflin). His fiction has appeared in Fiction Southeast, Mainstreet Rag, and Lalitamba. His essays have won prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review, being selected for the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing. Bascom, who helped to develop the Creative Writing Program at Waldorf University, received his MFA degree from the University of Iowa.
Wendy Bilen usually has a few productive hours in the middle of the day, in her office, or in a coffee shop, anywhere but home, where her two middle schoolers and her pug can do nothing without her. Sometimes she writes. Her biography-memoir, Finding Josie, won a Next Generation Indie Book Award and a Midwest Independent Publishers Association Book Award, and her shorter prose has appeared in The Laurel Review, Relief, Sweet, and The Washington Post. During the school year, you can find her teaching at the women’s college of Trinity Washington University in the District of Columbia. She loves her work but not the traffic.
James Ellenberger was born and raised in Chicora, a small town in western Pennsylvania. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sou’Wester, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Third Coast, Passages North, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. He holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati.
Kelly Fordon’s work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review (KRO), Rattle, and various other journals. She is the author of a short story collection, I Have the Answer, Wayne State University Press 2020; a poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House, Kattywompus Press 2019; and Garden for the Blind, a novel-in-stories, WSUP 2015. She is also the author of three poetry chapbooks. www.kellyfordon.com.
Camellia Freeman is an essayist living in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Image, Indiana Review, Portland Review, and elsewhere.
Nicole Graev Lipson’s essays and journalism have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Hudson Review, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe Magazine, among other publications. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and is working on a collection of essays about motherhood.
Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection). She’s also had stories appear in a number of journals, including The New Yorker, South Carolina Review, and Greensboro Review; and flash pieces in places like Helen, The Citron Review, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on a dystopian novel about oldsters. She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University.
Kelle Groom is the author of a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Groom’s four poetry collections include Spill, Five Kingdoms, and Luckily from Anhinga Press, and Underwater City (University Press of Florida). Her poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Groom’s honors include an NEA Literature Fellowship in Prose. She is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada University, Lake Tahoe, and director of education programs at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Kevin Honold was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of Men as Trees Walking, a book of poems. His poetry and essays have appeared in The Hudson Review, Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, Poetry East, Image, Vallum, Fourth Genre, and Yale Review. He is currently a New Mexico History and Special Education teacher at Santa Fe Public Schools.
Phillip Hurst currently lives and writes in Oregon. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Reed Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, Cimarron Review, The Briar Cliff Review, and The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, amongst other venues. Over the years, he’s worked as a bartender and a teacher throughout the American West.
Rebecca McClanahan’s eleventh book, In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in September 2020. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Brevity, The Sun, River Teeth, and in anthologies published by Simon & Schuster, Beacon, Norton, and Bedford/St. Martin, among others. Recipient of two Pushcart prizes, the Glasgow Award in Nonfiction, the Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine, (twice) the Carter Prize for the Essay, and the N.C. Governor’s Award for Excellence in Education, she teaches in the MFA programs of Rainier Writing Workshop and Queens University and in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She can be reached at RebeccaMcClanahanWriter.com.
Liz Prato’s most recent book, Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai‘i (Overcup Press, 2019), is an Oregon Book Award finalist. She is also the author of Baby’s on Fire: Stories (Press 53), and editor of The Night, and the Rain, and the River (Forest Avenue Press). Her work was named a Notable selection in Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing, 2018. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Carolina Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hawai‘i Review, Salon, and Subtropics. She is Editor at Large for Forest Avenue Press, and believes in independent bookstores, community, grace, and palm trees. She is currently working on an essay collection about Gen X.
