Advisory Board

Advisory Board

Marcia Aldrich teaches creative writing at Michigan State University. Her free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, was selected as a Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series. Since then, her personal essays have been published in places such as Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Witness, Arts and Letters, Northwest Review, Brevity, and The Seneca Review among others. She was the senior editor of Fourth Genre, Explorations in Nonfiction. In spring of 2010, she held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in Claremont, California. In the same year, she was the recipient of the Distinguished Professor of the Year Award of Michigan. Companion to an Untold Story was selected by Susan Orlean for the 2011 AWP Award in Nonfiction and published by the University of Georgia Press in September of 2012. “The Art of Being Born” was selected by Cheryl Strayed for The Best American Essays, 2013. In December of 2016, Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, a collection Marcia Aldrich edited, will be published by the University of Georgia Press. You can visit her website at MarciaAldrich.com.

Mel Livatino’s essays have appeared numerous times in Under the Sun, The Sewanee Review, Notre Dame Magazine, Portland Magazine, Writing on the Edge, River Teeth, and elsewhere. In the last dozen years nine of his essays, including three from Under the Sun, have been named Notable Essays of the Year by Robert Atwan’s The Best American Essays annual. He lives in Evanston, IL, and is retired from teaching English for thirty-six years in the City Colleges of Chicago. He is nearing completion of a book about his wife’s eleven-year descent into Alzheimer’s, her death, and the grief of losing her twice. The book will be called Long Journey into Winter: The Days and Nights.

Lisa Ohlen Harris is the author of The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law’s Memoir of Caregiving (2013) and the Middle East memoir, Through the Veil (2010). Her nonfiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, Brevity, and elsewhere. She teaches online for Creative Nonfiction Magazine and mentors
                                            writers independently through her editing and
                                            critique business at LisaOhlenHarris.com.

Michael O’Rourke’s essays have appeared in North American Review, Gettysburg Review, ISLE, Capitalism Nature Socialism, and other journals, and four have been cited as “Notable” by the editors of Best American Essays. His book is Paul Bunyan Lives! and Other Tales from the Natural World.

Adrienne Ross Scanlan’s is the author of Turning Homeward: Restoring Hope and Nature in the Urban Wild (Washington State Book Award 2017 Finalist). Her nature writing, personal essays, and other creative nonfiction have been published in anthologies, print, and online magazines. She has received a Seattle Arts Commission award, an Artist Trust Literature Fellowship, and her essay “Salvage” was recognized as “notable” in the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002. From 2012 to 2017 Adrienne was nonfiction editor of The Blue Lyra Review–A Literary Magazine of Diverse Voices. You can learn more about her work at Adrienne-Ross-Scanlan.com or write her at Adrienne@Adrienne-Ross-Scanlan.com.

Tom Saya was educated at Indiana University and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. He has published poems and creative nonfiction in a variety of literary journals and is currently a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, TN.