Erin Block works as a librarian and freelance writer. She is the author of The View from Coal Creek (Whitefish Press) and By a Thread (Whitefish Press), and her work has been published in The Rumpus, The Columbia Review, Guernica, and Gray’s Sporting Journal, among others. She lives in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where she hunts, fishes, forages, and gardens.
Michael Dinkel studied art and creative writing at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota and at the University of Alaska in Anchorage where he lives. His work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Orion Magazine, About Place Journal, The Lower Stump Lake Review, and other publications.
J. Malcolm Garcia is the author of The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul (Beacon 2009); What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and Forgotten (University of Missouri Press 2014); Without A Country: The Untold Story of America’s Deported Veterans (Skyhorse Press 2017); Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron’s Ghost: A Memoir of Friendship, Family and a Life Writing Stories (Skyhorse Press 2018); and The Fruit Of All My Grief: Lives In the Shadows of the American Dream (Seven Stories Press 2019). Garcia is a recipient of the Studs Terkel Prize for writing about the working classes and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism. His work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Best American Essays.
Megan Harlan is the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, winner of the 2019 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and published by the University of Georgia Press in Fall 2020. Her essays have appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, and Cincinnati Review, among other journals, and have been cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018 and 2019. Mapmaking, her first book, won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry (BkMk Press/New Letters). She works as a writer and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ren Jones earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the College of Charleston. She received an honorable mention for the 2020 AWP Intro Journals Prize. This is her first publication.
Emma Kaiser is the winner of the Norton Writers Prize. Her work has appeared in Great River Review, Rock & Sling, and Stoneboat, among other places, and she is the author of two nonfiction books for children. She is currently a creative nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota.
Brenda Miller teaches in the MFA program at Western Washington University, and Julie Marie Wade teaches in the MFA program at Florida
International University. Their collaborative essays have previously appeared in Rappahannock Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, River Teeth, Punctuate, Phoebe, Tupelo Quarterly, and Kenyon Review. They have also been reprinted in the anthologies The Spirit of Disruption: Landmark Essays from The Normal School (Outpost 19, 2018) and They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Their first co-written collection, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, won the 2019 Cleveland State University Press Nonfiction Book Award, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib, and is forthcoming from Cleveland State University Press in 2021.
Micah Perks is the author of a short story collection, a memoir and two novels. The most recent novel, What Becomes Us, was a winner of an Independent Publisher’s Book Award and named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian. Micah lives with her family in Santa Cruz where she directs the creative writing program at UCSC.
Molly Rideout is a Midwestern writer whose work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Mississippi Review, Tampa Review, and Bluestem. Her chapbook Transient was published in 2019 by Antenna::Paper Machine. She has received grants or other recognition for her interdisciplinary writing installations in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Ohio, from Poets & Writers, Iowa Public Radio, the Ohio State University Center for Folklore, and the Wormfarm Institute. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University and currently works at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA. Learn more at mollyrideout.com.
Susan Jackson Rodgers is the author of a novel, This Must Be the Place, and two story collections, The Trouble With You Is and Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Agni, Poets & Writers, New England Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, Beloit Fiction Journal, Brevity, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches at Oregon State University.
Allie Spikes served as managing editor of Bellingham Review from 2019-2020 and currently serves as prose/poetry editor at Psaltery & Lyre. Her essays have been shortlisted at Creative Nonfiction, at Fourth Genre for the 2020 Steinberg Essay Contest, and for The Pinch Nonfiction Literary Award in 2019. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Dialogue, and Bellingham Review.
Jonathan Starke is a former bodybuilder and boxer. He’s ventured to sixty countries, harvested seaweed in Ireland, given free hugs in Spain, and flipped pancakes in Denmark. He loves riding trains and wondering about the lives unfolding outside the window. His debut novel, You’ve Got Something Coming, received the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction. He’s the founding editor of Palooka, and his writing has appeared in The Sun, Missouri Review, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, and others. You might find him making homemade soap in the evenings or studying French. You might not.
