Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (Soft Skull Press, 2022) and the poetry collections House Is An Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013). The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Seneca Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Shenandoah. She currently serves as an editor of Screen Door Review.
Rachel Cline’s fourth novel, Near Mystic, will be published by Heliotrope Books in 2026. Her nonfiction work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Tin House, Mister Beller’s Neighborhood, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and other publications.
Shannon Cram teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. Her first book, Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility, won the Ludwik Fleck Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book award. Her work has appeared in River Teeth, Moss, Fugue, Public Culture, and elsewhere. She lives with her partner in the Snoqualmie Valley.
Jim Daniels’ first book of nonfiction, Ignorance of Trees, has recently been published by Cornerstone Press. His new chapbook of poems, Ars Poetica Chemistra, was also published this year by WPA Press. His latest fiction book, The Luck of the Fall, and his most recent edited anthology RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music were both published by Michigan State University Press. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
Chelsea B. DesAutels is the author of the poetry collection, A Dangerous Place (Sarabande Books), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her work appears in Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and has been featured on The Slowdown podcast. Recently, Chelsea’s work has been supported by fellowships to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Yaddo. She is the founder of Freshwater Writing and lives with her family in Minneapolis.
Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W. Norton) which was an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. Her seventh book, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs is forthcoming from Norton in 2026. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Esquire and other outlets, she lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, MS. Read more at www.bethannfennelly.com.
Allison Field Bell is a multi-genre writer from northern California. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. Her debut poetry collection, All That Blue, is forthcoming in 2026. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Without Woman or Body (Finishing Line Press) and Edge of the Sea (CutBank Books). Allison’s prose appears in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.
Gary Fincke’s essay collection, The Darkness Call, won the Robert C. Jones Prize (Pleaides Press, 2018). Individual essays have been reprinted in The Pushcart Prize XXV and Best American Essays 2020. His next nonfiction book, After Arson: New and Selected Essays, will be published by Madville Press in October.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, translator, and visual artist. Her most recent poetry collections are I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada (Editorial Yaugurú, Uruguay, 2023). Her essays and graphic essays have won awards from New Letters and the New Ohio Review, and have appeared in Guerica, the New England Review, Ploughshares, the Sewanee Review, Fourth Genre, the Los Angeles Review, Image, the Chicago Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She is also the author of the memoir, Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and the graphic memoir, French Girl (Fieldmouse Press, 2024) named by the Washington Post as one of the Best Graphic Novels of 2024.
L.C. Killingsworth is a writer, former middle school teacher, and current co-host of Seersucker Live, a literary reading series that doesn’t take itself too seriously. She lives in Savannah, Georgia with her husband and two children, and she is currently at work on her first memoir.
Asena McKeown is a Turkish-American writer who lives in California with her husband, her daughter, and her mother. She received her MFA from Vermont School of Fine Arts, and this is her first published essay.
Jenny Molberg’s third poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, she is Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College, where she serves as Editor-in-Chief for Ploughshares.
Phong Nguyen is the author of five books, most recently the novel Bronze Drum, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year for 2022, a Book of the Month Club selection for August 2022, and was featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and many more newspapers and magazines. His other books include Roundabout; Adventures of Joe Harper, winner of the Prairie Heritage Award; Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History; and Memory Sickness and Other Stories, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award. He is co-editor of Nancy Hale: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master. He is co-editor of Best Peace Fiction: A Social Justice Anthology. He currently serves as the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri.
Lynda Rushing is a former pathologist turned labor attorney who now writes. During her time as a pathologist, she coauthored a book on abnormal Pap smears and published papers in peer-reviewed journals on the topics of GYN and surgical pathology. Her creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, Saranac Review, Solstice Magazine, and elsewhere. Formerly from Honolulu, Hawaii, she currently resides in northern Massachusetts with her husband and mother. She gratefully acknowledges support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Corrie Williamson is the author of three books of poems, most recently Your Mother’s Bear Gun (River River Books 2025), as well as The River Where You Forgot My Name, a Montana Book Award finalist, and Sweet Husk, winner of the Perugia Press Prize. She is co-editor of A Literary Field Guide to the Rocky Mountains, forthcoming from Mountaineers Books in 2027. She was the recipient of the 2020 Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, and spent 7.5 months living off-grid along a remote section of the Rogue River in southwestern Oregon. Her work has appeared in anthologies such as Cascadia Guide and Attached to the Living World, as well as journals such as AGNI, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and many others. She lives in Montana.
