Contributors
Authors
Having received her MFA in poetry from Vermont College, Jillian Barnet was first a poet and now also writes creative nonfiction. She has taught writing and literature at Pennsylvania State University and Chatham College. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Bellingham Review and has appeared in a variety of anthologies and literary journals, such as New Letters, North American Review, Nimrod, and Image. One of her essays will be included in the 2023 Best American Essays. Her chapbook, Falling Bodies, is available from Finishing Line Press and through Amazon. Currently at work on a memoir, she lives on a tiny farm in the Finger Lakes with her husband and a growing array of opinionated animals.
Teresa Barnett is a writer who works largely in the essay form. She has published in the journals Hotel Amerika and Lake Effect, in an anthology on collecting titled Acts of Possession, published by Rutgers University Press, and in another anthology titled Hunger and Thirst: Food Literature, published by San Diego’s City Works Press.
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 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 The Florida Review, and have been 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.
Steven Church is the author of six books of creative nonfiction, most recently the essay collection I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: on Work, Fear, and Fatherhood. His essays have been published widely and anthologized in The Best American Essays, The Best of Brevity and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of the literary journal, The Normal School, and teaches in the MFA Program at
Fresno State.
Debra Coleman is a writer and former architect who earned a Masters at Yale University. She is co-editor of the essay anthology Architecture and Feminism (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). Currently, she is an editorial assistant for Under the Gum Tree. Debra enjoys shunpiking on cross-country road trips between California, where she was raised, and Connecticut, where she puts her disability to use, advocating in her community for access and inclusion.
Wendy Fontaine’s work has appeared in dozens of literary journals and magazines, including Hippocampus, Longridge Review, Pithead Chapel, River Teeth and Sweet Lit, as well as Creative Nonfiction‘s Sunday Short Reads. She’s received nonfiction prizes from Hunger Mountain and Tiferet Journal and nominations to the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies. A native New Englander, she currently resides in southern California. You can follow her on Twitter at @wendymfontaine or at wendyfontaine.com.
Shayla Frandsen (she/her) is an MFA student studying fiction at BYU. She previously earned an MA in English literature at The City College of New York. Her writing has been published or will be published in Blood Orange Review, JAKE, Wayfare, Dialogue Journal, Beaver Magazine, and others. She can sometimes be found on Twitter @shayla_who.
Gail Folkins often writes about her deep roots in the American West. She is the author of the memoir Light in the Trees, named a 2016 Foreword INDIES nature finalist, and Texas Dance Halls: A Two-Step Circuit, named a 2007 INDIES popular culture finalist. She teaches at Hugo House in Seattle.
Ren Cedar Fuller facilitates parent support groups with Trans Families, an online hub for families with gender diverse children. She taught public school in California, Oregon, and Washington before opening a non-profit preschool in the Seattle area. She now works as a parent educator and is passionate about helping families support their children’s unique paths. Ren was a finalist in the 2022 Terry Tempest Williams Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus and North American Review.
Ben Harris is primarily a playwright. However, he has been dabbling in creative nonfiction since the late 1990s. He intends to share characters he’s encountered over the years. He staged his one-act play DAD at Hawaii University’s Last Frontier Theater Conference in 2003, and stage read it at Atlanta’s Essential Theatre in 2018. Also, he staged his play GLORIE at Savannah State University in 2004. Ben is a native of Savannah, Georgia. His writing reflects the culture of the low country along the Georgia and Carolina coasts. He has been writing since his high school years.
Steffan Hruby is from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in English literature and has an MFA from Ohio State University where he was the nonfiction editor at The Journal. His work has appeared in the Antioch Review, Southwest Review, Massachusetts Review, Boulevard , and Hotel Amerika. He received a Notable Essay citation in Best American Essays 2015.
Catherine Jagoe is a translator, essayist and poet. Her most recent books include Bloodroot (poetry) and Voice & Shadow: New & Selected Poems by Luis Bravo (poetry in translation). Her nonfiction has appeared in journals such as Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Ninth Letter, American Athenaeum, Best of Belt Magazine, and Water~Stone Review. She won a 2015 Pushcart prize for nonfiction and received notable mention in the 2019
Best American Essays. To read more of
her work, please visit her website,
www.catherinejagoe.com.
Daniel Kleifgen is a writer who has taught in inner city San Antonio and the United Arab Emirates. For the past few years, he has been traveling with his fiancée in Latin America, Europe, and Southeast Asia while working on a novel and collection of short stories. He has recently moved to Shanghai, where he teaches in a private school.
Wes Lee is an incarcerated veteran who splits his time between sewing the uniforms he once wore, writing science fiction and essays about the absurdities of the federal prison system, and helping those around him learn that, through the written word, they have the power to grow and transcend their mistakes rather than be them.
Mark Liebenow writes about nature, grief, and wisdom of fools. The author of four books, his essays, poems, and critical reviews have been published in numerous literary journals. His work has been named a notable by Best American Essays and nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. Mark has won the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Award, and the Chautuqua and Literal Latte’s essay prizes. He studied English and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and creative nonfiction at Bradley University. markliebenow.com
During the last 19 years Mel Livatino’s essays have been published multiple times in the following magazines: Under the Sun (13), the Sewanee Review (9), Notre Dame Magazine (7), Writing on the Edge (3), Portland Magazine (1), and River Teeth (1). Twelve of these essays were named Notable Essays of the Year by Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays annual (2005, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2022). More than thirty of his essays have been recorded for Recorded Recreational Reading for the Blind in Sun City, AZ. Mel is currently at work scouting out book publishers for several collections of essays: Long Cry of Goodbye (about the loss of his wife to Alzheimer’s and then to death), Going Home Again (about all the ways we are always going home without knowing we are doing so), and A Girl in Summer (another collection of essays about going home again).
Kathleen Melin is a Best of the Net 2023 nominee in CNF and the author of By Heart: A Mother’s Story of Children and Learning at Home (Clover Valley Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in national and international publications, including Brain & Life Magazine, Split Rock Review, Baltimore Review, Essay Daily, Poets & Writers, and others. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She writes and teaches from her farm in Wisconsin where she cultivates creativity and a garden.
Jean McDonough is an elementary school librarian with a BFA in photography and a MFA in poetry writing from the University of Michigan. She is currently working on a collection of essays inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Her creative nonfiction was chosen as a finalist for Ruminate’s 2022 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize and her most recent publication is in Water~Stone Review. Jean lives in Illinois with her husband and daughter.
Peter Newall was born in Sydney, Australia, where he worked variously in a Navy dockyard, as a musician, and as a lawyer. Later he lived in Kyoto, Japan, and then Odesa, Ukraine, where before the war he sang for a local R’n’B band, the Newall Band. His stories have been published in England, the EU, India, Hong Kong, Australia and the USA.
Elaine Fowler Palencia is the moderator of the Red Herring Prose Workshop, the oldest writing workshop in Champaign-Urbana, IL. She has often written about life with her son Andrew, including two chapbooks of poetry and essays in River Styx, Literary Mama, and Bluestem. She is also the author of two collections of Appalachian short stories and On Rising Ground: The Life and Civil War Letters of John M.
Douthit, 52nd Georgia Volunteer
Infantry Regiment.
Samantha M. Sorenson is originally from Oroville, California. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Brigham Young University and working as the Assistant Managing Editor for FourthGenre: Explorations in Nonfiction.
Ana Maria Spagna is the author, most recently, of Pushed: Miners, a Merchant and (Maybe) a Massacre forthcoming from Torrey House Press. Her previous books on nature, work, community, and civil and indigenous rights include Uplake, Potluck, Reclaimers, and Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus. She teaches in the MFA programs at Antioch and Western Colorado Universities and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at St. Lawrence University.
Jenna Devany Waters is a queer writer, teacher, single mother, and list-maker extraordinaire. After twelve years of deadlifting strollers down subway staircases in Manhattan, she has recently relocated to a 120-year-old farmhouse in Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest where her nearest neighbors are cows, corvids, and coyotes. Her essays are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review and Orion Magazine, and have recently appeared in The Citron Review, JMWW and MUTHA Magazine. When she is not writing, she can be found kayaking, hiking, pocketing wild seeds, or dragging her children along on yet another camping adventure.
Lauren Woods lives in Washington, D. C., with her husband and children. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Normal School, Fiction Southeast, Moon City Review, Literary Hub, and elsewhere.
Artists
Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary world. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums, Flip Days, and Brownwood. As a filmmaker, he created a series of literary documentaries for the NEA’s “Big Read” initiative, which include profiles of Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Tobias. Wolff, and Cynthia Ozick. His photographs have appeared in the Las Laguna Art Gallery 2020, Humana Obscura, Wanderlust, a Travel Journal, the London Photo Festival, and displayed in the ENSO Art Gallery, Malibu, California.
Anthony Afairo Nze is a digital artist/graphic designer living in Indianapolis. His art works have appeared in journals such as Abstract Elephant, Roadrunner Review, Drunk Monkeys, and more. He spends his days learning and practicing skills of all Adobe programs. For more of his artwork visit him @afairosgallery and @afairoworld on Instagram.
Graham Tobin is a retired Geosciences professor and amateur photographer, living in Tampa, FL. His photos appear in Southeastern Geographer, Ariel’s Dream, and elsewhere.
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