Non-Fiction

George Handley teaches and writes about the environmental humanities at BYU. His publications include the environmental memoir, Home Waters; a novel, American Fork; and two recent collections of essays, If Truth Were A Child and The Hope of Nature. He is a founding member of LDS Earth Stewardship, Conserve Utah Valley, and Mormon Scholars in the Humanities. He currently serves on the board of Trustees for the Nature Conservancy of Utah and on the Provo City Council.

Amy Leach grew up in Texas and earned her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and numerous other publications, including Granta, A Public Space, Orion, Tin House, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Her books are Things That Are and The Everybody Ensemble. Leach lives in Bozeman and teaches creative writing at MSU.

NICOLE WALKER is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, Sustainability: A Love Story, Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. She edits the Crux series at University of Georgia press, is nonfiction editor at Diagram, and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

Hasanthika Sirisena’s work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021).

Phyllis Barber is the author of ten books—two novels (THE DESERT BETWEEN US and AND THE DESERT SHALL BLOSSOM), three memoirs, three collections of short stories and essays, and young adult fiction. A once-upon-a-time student at BYU, she has been cited as notable in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2011 and BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2011, and her memoir, HOW I GOT CULTURED, was the winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. The Smith-Pettit Foundation and the Association for Mormon Letters have also awarded her for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters, and she has been inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

For two decades Brevity Magazine (brevitymag.com) has been the premier online home for innovative and thought-provoking micro-essays of 750 words or less. To celebrate the recent publication of the journal’s anthology, The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction, we’ve invited editors Dinty W. Moore and Zoë Bossiere, along with a handful of anthology contributors, to join us for a special flash nonfiction reading. In addition to sharing their work, our guests will hold a live panel discussion on the ins and outs of crafting and publishing flash nonfiction.

Jerald Walker is the author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult; Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption; and, How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award.He has published in magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, The Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, River Teeth, Mother Jones, The Iowa Review, and The Oxford American, and he has been widely anthologized, including five times in The Best American Essays anthology. Walker is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College.

A native of Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is the author of The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Split/Lip Press) and No God in This Room (Argus House Press). Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Athena’s work has appeared in various publications including GAY Magazine and Narratively. She is founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal and is the co-host of the New Books in Poetry Podcast via the New Books Network. She resides in Philadelphia. Learn more about the author at www.athenadixon.com.

Patrick Madden is the author of three essay collections, Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), and co-editor of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (2015). He curates www.quotidiana.org, co-edits the journal Fourth Genre with Joey Franklin, and, with David Lazar, co-edits the 21st Century Essays series at the Ohio State University Press. He has taught English at BYU since 2004.

Ashley Mae Hoiland is the author of One Hundred Birds Taught me to Fly and A New Constellation, both of which were nominated for various awards. She received a BFA in painting and an MFA in poetry, both at BYU. She teaches online writing classes through her platform, Mine To Tell and is currently working on writing and illustrating her next book. She lives in Provo with her husband and three children.

Jennifer Sinor is the author of several books, including Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe and the memoir Ordinary Trauma. Her forthcoming essay collection, Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World, will appear in the fall of 2020 from the University of Nebraska Press, and her essays have been published in many literary journals including The American Scholar, Utne, Creative Nonfiction, and Gulf Coast. The recipient of the Stipend in American Modernism as well as nominations for the National Magazine Award and the Pushcart Prize, Jennifer teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English. She lives in Logan with her husband, poet Michael Sowder, and her two sons.

Joey Franklin is the author of Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays (Nebraska, 2020) and My Wife Wants You to Know I'm Happily Married (Nebraska, 2015). His essays and articles have appeared in Poets & Writers, Gettysburg Review, The Norton Reader, and elsewhere. He currently serves as co-editor of the literary magazine Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, and coordinates the MFA program at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. His active projects include a memoir about the saints and scoundrels in his family tree, and a practical guide to professionalization in creative writing.

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019, and her lyric essay chapbook Devotional was published by Red Bird in 2017. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, listed as notable in The Best American Essays, and appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. Currently she is editing an anthology of lyric essays forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, and she is the founding editor of the online literary journal After the Art.

Clinton Crockett Peters is an assistant professor of creative writing at Berry College. He is the author of Pandora’s Garden: Kudzu, Cockroaches, and Other Misfits of Ecology (2018) and The Divine Coming of the Light: Essays (forthcoming 2021), both from the University of Georgia Press. He has been awarded literary prizes from The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Columbia Journal, and the Society for Professional Journalists. He has been noted four times in The Best American series. He holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow, and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of North Texas. His work also appears in Orion, Southern Review, Utne Reader, Catapult, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. In previous lives, he was an English teacher in Kosuge Village, Japan (population: 900), an outdoor wilderness guide, and a radio DJ.

Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel is the author of the essay collection Fear Icons, winner of the inaugural Gournay Prize. Her essays have appeared in Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast and the anthology Marry a Monster. A graduate of the University of Montana's Environmental Studies Program and the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, she is an Assistant Professor at Whitman College.

Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. graduated with both a creative nonfiction writing and a literary translation MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous press and Don’t Come Back, from Mad Creek Books, as well as the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Great American Essay. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation work has been featured in various journals including The Bellingham Review, The Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers and the Sunday Rumpus, among others. She’s been the recipient of the Best of the Net award and the Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices award, she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus to Chicago, where she works as an assistant professor for the University of Chicago.

A. Kendra Greene is an essayist and book artist. She began her museum career in Chicago, became an essayist during a Fulbright in South Korea, learned both letterpress printing and how to costume a giant ground sloth during her MFA in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa, convinced the Dallas Museum of Art they needed a Writer in Residence, and then took up an interest in poisonous wallpaper as a Library Innovation Lab Fellow at Harvard. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, Associate Editor for the Southwest Review, and a Visiting Artist at the Nasher Sculpture Center. The Reading Room recently hosted her first solo exhibition. Her debut collection of essays--about Icelandic museums--is forthcoming from Penguin in June 2020.

Julia Corbett is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah. She authored one of the first texts in environmental communication, Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages. Her second book, Seven Summers: A Naturalist Homesteads in the Modern West, is a memoir about building a cabin and living in the woods in western Wyoming. Her third book, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday examines the products, practices, and phrases we take for granted in our everyday encounters with nature and encourages us to reimagine our relationship with it. Her environmental nonfiction essays have been published in venues such as Orion, High Country News, and OnEarth magazine. She has been a reporter, a park ranger, a naturalist, a natural resources information officer, and a press secretary.