Nonfiction

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.

Former Utah poet laureate KATE COLES is the author of several collections of poetry, including Fault, Utah Book Award winner The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension, and The One Right Touch. She is also the author of the novels Fire Season and The Measurable World (1995). Coles has received numerous honors for her work, including both a fellowship and a New Forms Project grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a PEN New Writer’s Award, an Antarctic Artists and Writers Grant from the National Science Foundation, and grants from the Utah Arts Council and the Salt Lake City Arts Council. At the University of Utah, Coles has directed the Creative Writing Program; co-directed the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, and served as series editor for the University of Utah Press’s Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Book Award as well as the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. She lives in Salt Lake City.

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.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine and listed as Notable several times in Best American Essays. Her story, “Railroad Blues,” was the Most Read in Little Fiction in 2018. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas. (photo credit: Lisa Vining)

José Orduña was born in Córdoba, Veracruz and immigrated to Chicago when he was two years old. His work explores the ways power has determined his and others’ existence as racialized subjects of the United States. His first book, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement was published in 2016 by Beacon Press. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. (Photo credit: Lauren Fantauzzo)

David LazarNon-Fiction

Sarah VirenNon-Fiction

Colin RaffertyNon-Fiction

Sonya HuberNon-Fiction

Elena PassarelloNon-Fiction

A Celebration of Brian DoyleNon-Fiction

Jennifer SinorNonfiction