Elizabeth Miki Brina is the author of the memoir, Speak, Okinawa, published by Knopf in February of 2021 and one of NPR’s best books of the year. She lives in New Orleans and teaches writing at the University of New Orleans.
Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer with work appearing in publications as diverse as Seventeen Magazine and Anglican Theological Review. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, recently published in Burning Word, Rock and Sling, Little Patuxent Review, and The Windhover. She is the author of Speaking Our Faith (Church Publishing, 2018). She lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog.
Brooke Champagne is the author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy, forthcoming with the Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press in 2024. Her essays have been selected as Notables in several editions of Best American Essays and have been honored with various awards, including the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay for her piece “Exercises.” She won the 2022 March Faxness National Championship Essay Tournament with her essay on Aimee Mann’s cover of the song “One.” She is also the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose. She lives in Tuscaloosa, where she teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama.
Henrietta Goodman’s fourth collection of poetry, Antillia, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in spring of 2024. She is the author of three previous books: All That Held Us (BkMk Press, 2018), Hungry Moon (Colorado State University, 2013), and Take What You Want (Alice James Books, 2007). She has published poems and essays in The New England Review, New Ohio Review, Terrain, Bennington Review, and other journals. She lives in Missoula, Montana and teaches in the English department at Rocky Mountain College.
Megan Harlan is the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction and the 2021 Independent Book Publishers Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her essays have been cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018, 2019, and 2021, awarded the Arts & Letters Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and published in journals that include AGNI, River Teeth, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, and Cincinnati Review. She has an essay exemplifying the “Enumerated” form forthcoming in The Essay Form(s), a craft book edited by Jill Talbot and published by Columbia University Press in 2024. Her poetry collection, Mapmaking (BkMk Press-UMKC), won the John Ciardi Prize, and her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, Los Angeles Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She works as a writer, editor, and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Sonya Huber is the author of eight books, including the essay collection Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook as well as the writing guide, Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, and an award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. Her other books include Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir in a Day, Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program.
Laura Johnsrude began writing creative nonfiction after retiring from practicing pediatrics and moving with her family to Louisville, Kentucky. Her essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Bellevue Literary Review, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, The Spectacle, Please See Me, Minerva Rising, Under the Gum Tree, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Drunk Monkeys, The Examined Life Journal, Swing, The Boom Project anthology, and on Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog. Laura’s book reviews have been published in Good River Review. Her essay, “Drawing Blood,” received Bellevue Literary Review’s Honorable Mention for the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction in the spring of 2018, and her piece, “Brown Barrette in My Hair,” was winner of Sweet’s 2022 Creative Nonfiction Flash Essay contest.
Shannon McCarthy is a writer and educator living in South County, Rhode Island. She received her MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, where she served as an editorial assistant for The Lindenwood Review. She is a founder and co-facilitator of the South County Writers Group, a community writing group for writers of all ages, disciplines, and experience levels. Her work has previously appeared in the Onion River Review.
Tierney Oberhammer is a writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in swamp pink, The Adroit Journal, Cincinnati Review, and Aster(ix). She graduated from the MFA program at Randolph College and was awarded a Blackburn Fellowship. In 2023, she received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in fiction to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and was named an Anthony Veasna So Scholar in Fiction. Tierney is a member of the Wildcat Writing Group and is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Jon Parrish Peede is the visiting writer in residence at Mississippi Valley State University. He previously served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review, and director of literature grants at the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published fiction, poetry, interviews, and criticism, and is the co-editor of an essay collection, Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction.
Justin St. Germain is the author of the book-length essay Bookmarked: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and the memoir Son of a Gun. His writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies. This essay is from a collection-in-progress about the rural working class.
