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K.A. Hays’ most recent book is Anthropocene Lullaby (February 2022, Carnegie Mellon). She is the author of three prior books of poetry: Windthrow (2017), Early Creatures, Native Gods (2012) and Dear Apocalypse (2009). Her poems appear widely in journals and have been selected for two editions of Best American Poetry. Born in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, she earned an MFA from Brown University. She teaches Creative Writing at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA, and directs the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, a 3-week all-expenses paid summer writing retreat and conference for undergraduate poets from any university or college in the United States.
Fiction
Karan Mahajan is the author of Family Planning, a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Association of Small Bombs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Award, won the 2017 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s '10 Best Books of 2016.' In 2017, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His reporting and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker Online, and other venues. He teaches at Brown University.
Fiction
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, and the forthcoming collection of short stories The Souvenir Museum. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and others. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places.
Fiction
Christian McKay Heidicker reads and writes and drinks tea. His cat, Lucifer Morningstar, keeps the demons out of his apartment, while his other cat, Rorschach, keeps dragging them back in. Christian is the author of the Newbery Honor-winning Scary Stories for Young Foxes and its companion SSFYF: The City, as well as the Thieves of Weirdwood trilogy, Cure for the Common Universe, and Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower. He lives by a graveyard in Salt Lake City, Utah. Visit his spirit at cmheidicker.com. (Photo cred: Kay Patino)
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.
Jimmy Baca is an American poet, memoirist, and screenwriter from New Mexico. While serving a five-year sentence in a maximum security prison, he learned to read and began to turn his life around, eventually emerging as a prolific artist of the spoken and written word.
Lance Larsen has published five poetry collections, most recently What the Body Knows (Tampa 2018). Former poet laureate of Utah, he has received a number of awards, including a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship, and the Southwest Writers Award. His nonfiction has appeared in Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Brevity, Brief Encounters (a Norton anthology), and elsewhere. He plays a scrappy game of basketball, loves Skagen watches, and grows hostas with exotic names like Blue Angel and Fire and Ice. He often fools around with aphorisms: “A woman needs a man the way a manatee needs a glockenspiel.” Sometimes he juggles.
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.
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.
The Paxman Student Reading features readings from three current graduate students in BYU's creative writing MFA.
Frank X. Gaspar is the author of five collections of poetry and two novels. Among his many awards are multiple inclusions in Best American Poetry, four Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and a California Arts Council Fellowship in poetry. His debut novel, Leaving Pico, was a Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize winner, a recipient of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book. His second novel, Stealing Fatima, was a MassBook of the Year in Fiction (Massachusetts Foundation for the Book). His work has appeared widely in serial publications, including The Nation, The New Yorker, The Harvard Review, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, and others. His latest book, a fusion of genres, is The Poems of Renata Ferreira.
Abraham Smith is the author of numerous poetry collections—most recently, the chapbook Bear Lite Inn (New Michigan Press, 2020), the full-length Destruction of Man (Third Man Books, 2018), and the forthcoming Dear Weirdo (Propeller Books, 2021). Away from his desk, he improvises poems inside songs with the Snarlin’ Yarns; their debut record Break Your Heart was released on Dial Back Sound in Fall 2020. He lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is associate professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at Weber State.
Born on Oahu, Derek N. Otsuji is the author of The Kitchen of Small Hours (SIU Press 2021), which won the Crab Orchard Poetry Series Open Competition. He is a 2019 Tennessee Williams Scholar (Sewanee Writers’ Conference) and has received awards from Bread Loaf and the Kenyon Review. His poems are widely published in local and national journals, including Bamboo Ridge, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Pleiades, Rattle, The Southern Review, and The Threepenny Review. A 2000 graduate of BYU’s Masters Program in English, he has studied with poets Leslie Norris, Susan Elizabeth Howe, and Lance Larsen.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and six books of poetry, including Nightingale and Appropriate: A Provocation. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. She teaches at the University of Utah and is Utah’s Poet Laureate.
Fiction
Kevin Wilson is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels Nothing to See Here and The Family Fang, as well as Perfect Little World, and two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine. He lives in Sewanee, TN, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and two sons, and teaches creative writing at the University of the South.
Fiction
Martine Leavitt has published ten novels for young adults, most recently Calvin, which won the Governor General’s Award of Canada. My Book of Life by Angel was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book of the Year. Other titles by Leavitt include Keturah and Lord Death, a finalist for the National Book Award, Tom Finder, winner of the Mr. Christie Award, and Heck Superhero, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Her novels have been published in China, Japan, Korea, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands. Currently she teaches creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, a short-residency MFA program. She lives in High River, Alberta.
Fiction
Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator, as well as the author of the novels Observatory Mansions and Alva and Irva: the Twins Who Saved a City, and of the YA Iremonger Trilogy, which have all been translated into many different languages and all of which he illustrated. His novel Little, which took him a ridiculous fifteen years to finish, has been published in 20 countries. His most recent novel is The Swallowed Man, which is set inside the belly of an enormous sea beast.
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.
Three graduate student readers—Dallin Hunt for fiction, Kalli Abbott for creative nonfiction, and Danny Daw for poetry—share their creative work.
Fiction
Emily Ruskovich grew up on Hoodoo Mountain in the Idaho Panhandle. She is the author of the novel IDAHO, which won the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Idaho Book Award. She is also the recipient of an O. Henry Award for her short fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Zoetrope: All Story, One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lithub, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Boise with her husband and her two small daughters, but will be joining the faculty at the University of Montana in Fall of 2021.
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder (Milkweed Editions), which won the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her second collection, Redmouth, was published with Tinderbox Editions in 2019. A 2020 McKnight Writing Fellow, her poems have most recently appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Good River Review, Washington Square Review, Blackbird, Descant, Image, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, RHINO, and have appeared on the Academy of American Poets Poem- a-Day series. She lives and teaches in the Twin Cities.
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.
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has published three volumes of poetry: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), and Chord (2015). Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Thom Gunn Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published in 2020.
Fiction
Paul Harding is the author of two novels, Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Enon. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, MA, and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The Michener Center for Writers, and Harvard University. He is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing and Literature program at Stony Brook University. His third novel, This Other Eden, will be published by Random House in 2021.
Fiction
Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the 2020 Booker Prize. It was a finalist for the National Book award, for the Kirkus Prize, and is to be translated into over twenty- four languages. His short stories, Found Wanting, and The Englishman, were published in The New Yorker magazine. His essay, Poverty, Anxiety, and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature was published by Lit Hub. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he has an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and since 2000 he has lived and worked in New York City.
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.
Laura Stott is the author of two collections of poetry, Blue Nude Migration (Lynx House Press, 2020) and In the Museum of Coming and Going (New Issues, 2014). Laura holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and a BA in English Literature from BYU. She is an Instructor of English at Weber State University and lives with her husband and daughters in northern Utah.
Three MFA students—Thew Curtis (poetry), Madalyn McRae (fiction), and Rachelle Larsen (nonfiction)—share their own creative work.
Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Adirondack Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sou’wester and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press 2019), and winner of New Ohio Review’s inaugural NORward Poetry Prize. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three young sons.
Mike White is the author of the collections How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in journals including The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, Rattle, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, and Kenyon Review Online. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he now lives in Salt Lake City and teaches at the University of Utah.
Fiction
Kristen Chandler is the author of Thief of Happy Endings and the award-winning Girls Don’t Fly and Wolves, Boys, and Other Things That Might Kill Me. She was nominated for the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award. She thrives on making readers laugh, cry, and worry about what will happen next, so she isn't the nicest person in the world. She teaches Creative Writing and Composition at Brigham Young University.
Fiction
Yamile (sha-MEE-lay) Saied Méndez is a fútbol-obsessed Argentine-American who loves meteor showers, summer, astrology, and pizza. She lives in Utah with her Puerto Rican husband and their five kids, two adorable dogs, and one majestic cat. An inaugural Walter Dean Myers Grant recipient, she’s also a graduate of Voices of Our Nations (VONA) and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Writing for Children’s and Young Adult program. She’s a PB, MG, and YA author. Yamile is also part of Las Musas, the first collective of women and nonbinary Latinx MG and YA authors. She’s represented by Linda Camacho at Gallt & Zacker Literary.
Fiction
Jack Harrell grew up in southeastern Illinois and moved west to Utah in 1981, where he joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at age 21. His first book, Vernal Promises, won the Marilyn Brown Novel Award. He is the author of A Sense of Order and Other Stories, and Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism. His latest book is the novel Caldera Ridge.
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.
Kathryn Cowles is the author of Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World and Eleanor, Eleanor, Not Your Real Name, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. Her poems and poem-photograph hybrids have been published in the Georgia Review, New American Writing, Best American Experimental Writing, Verse, Free Verse, Colorado Review, Diagram, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-day, and elsewhere. She earned her doctorate from the University of Utah and is an associate professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Fiction
Allison K. Hymas received both her Bachelors of Arts in English and her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from BYU. She writes poems and short stories that have been published in Rivet, FLARE, Sassafras and Dark Matter. She has also published two middle grade novels with Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, Under Locker and Key and Arts and Thefts, both about a 12-year-old boy who works as a retrieval specialist at his middle school, returning what others steal. Her next novel, The Explorer’s Code, a puzzle story about three kids who solve the mystery of an old manor house, will be released in September with Imprint/Macmillan. When she’s not writing, Allison enjoys reading, cooking, and running long distances.
Fiction
Matt Mendez is the author of Barely Missing Everything, his YA debut novel, and the short story collection Twitching Heart. Barely Missing Everything has been called a “searing portrait of two Mexican-American families” by Publishers Weekly and “accessible and artful” in a starred review by Kirkus. The New York Times says “has an uncanny ability to capture the aimless bluster of young boys posturing at confidence.” He earned his MFA from the University of Arizona and lives with his wife and two daughters in Tucson, Arizona. You can visit him at mattmendez.com.
Darlene Young writes poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction. Her poetry collection, Homespun and Angel Feathers, was published in 2019 by BCC Press. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart prize and noted in Best American Essays. She has served as poetry editor for Dialogue and Segullah journals, and as secretary for the Association for Mormon Letters. She loves teaching Creative Writing at Brigham Young University. She lives in South Jordan with her husband and sons.
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.
Fiction
Kirstin Chen‘s second novel, Bury What We Cannot Take, was named a best book of the year by Entropy, Popsugar, and Book Bub, and a top pick of the season by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners, an Amazon bestseller. She has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Toji Cultural Foundation, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. Her writing has appeared in Real Simple, Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, Manrepeller, Zyzzyva, and the Best New Singaporean Short Stories. She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and in Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA Program.
Fiction
Courtney Craggett holds a PhD in English with specializations in creative writing and multi-ethnic American literature from the University of North Texas, where she taught English and served as the American Literary Review’s Assistant Fiction Editor. Her short stories appear in The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Washington Square Review, Booth, Juked, Word Riot, and Monkeybicycle, among others, and were featured on Ploughshares’ blog. Her reviews appear in American Microreviews and Interviews. Twice nominated for a Pushcart, Courtney is the editors’ choice winner of the 2014 Sherwood Anderson Award and the winner of The Pinch’s Spring 2017 Featured Contributor Award. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Weber State University.
Kara van de Graaf is the author of Spitting Image, winner of the Crab Orchard First Book Prize in Poetry (SIU Press, 2018). Individual poems appear widely in national literary journals, including The Southern Review, AGNI, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the anthology Best New Poets. Other honors include the Hoepfner Award from Southern Humanities Review, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from Sewanee Writers Conference. Kara is co-founder and editor of Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for poetry in the classroom (www.lightboxpoetry.com). She serves as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Utah Valley University and live in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Fiction
Peter Turchi is the author of six books and the co-editor of three anthologies. His books include the New York Times bestseller A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic; Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; and The Girls Next Door. His work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Colorado Review, among others. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Houston Chronicle has called him “One of the country’s foremost thinkers on the art of writing.” Born in Baltimore, Turchi earned his BA at Washington College in Cherstertown, Maryland, and his MFA at the University of Arizona. He currently teaches fiction in Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. His wife, Laura, is a professor of Teacher Education; their son is the musician Reed Turchi.
Maurice Manning is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Common Man, a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, winner of the 2000 Yale Younger Poetry Series Award, selected by W.S. Merwin. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, he currently teaches at Transylvania University and is on the permanent faculty of Warren Wilson College.
Fiction
John Bennion is a fifth-generation native of Utah’s western desert. He has published a collection of short fiction, Breeding Leah and other Stories (1991), and three novels—Falling Toward Heaven (2000), An Unarmed Woman (2019), and Ezekiel’s Third Wife (2019). He has published short stories and essays in Hotel Amerika, Southwest Review, Hobart, Utah Historical Quarterly, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Best of the West II, Journal of Mormon History, High Country News, English Journal, and others. He is an associate professor in the English Department at Brigham Young University, where he teaches creative writing.
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.
Fiction
Tony Earley is the Samuel Milton Fleming Chair in English at Vanderbilt. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and has taught at Vanderbilt since 1997. He has been named one of the 'twenty best young fiction writers in America' by The New Yorker and one of the 'Best of Young American Novelists' by Granta. His books include a collection of short stores, Here We Are in Paradise: Stories (1994); a novel, Jim the Boy (2002); and a collection of personal essays, Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True (2001). His stories have also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Best American Short Stores. His work has been widely anthologized as well as translated into a number of different languages.
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.
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky’s poetry has been published in Terrain.org, Pilgrimage, Sugar House Review, Salt Front, Cave Wall, Contrary Magazine, and Quill&Parchment. She is the author of the chapbook “Ruin and LIght” selected by Anabiosis Press and a limited edition art book “Invisible Shores” published through Redd Butte Press. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing and Southern Utah University where she directs an Ecopoetry and Place writing conference. Danielle has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, a two-time recipient of the Utah ARts Council first place award in poetry, and is currently the director of the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values at Southern Utah University. Danielle grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, but has lived the last 20 years in southern Utah.
Michael Lavers is the author of After Earth, published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Best New Poets 2015, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize, and the Michigan Quarterly Review Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets. Together with his wife, the writer and artist Claire Åkebrand, and their two children, he lives in Provo, Utah, and teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.
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.
RYAN RIDGE is the author of four chapbooks as well as four full-lengths, including the hybrid novel, American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2015). His next story collection, New Bad News, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2020. Past work has appeared in American Book Review, The Collagist, DIAGRAM, Los Angeles Review, Lumina, Passages North, Salt Hill, Santa Monica Review, and elsewhere. In 2016, he received the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction judged by Jonathan Lethem. An assistant professor at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, he co-directs the Creative Writing Program. In addition to his work as a writer and teacher, he edits the literary magazine, Juked. He lives in Salt Lake City with the writer Ashley Farmer.
Jackie Osherow was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received a BA from Harvard University in 1978 and a PhD in English from Princeton University in 1990. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Ultimatum from Paradise, Whitethorn, and Looking for Angels in New York. Her poems are known for their frequent exploration of Jewish tradition and their post-Holocaust consciousness. Osherow has received the Witter Bynner Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She serves as a distinguished professor of English and creative writing at the University of Utah. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Fiction
Spencer Hyde worked at a therapeutic boarding school before earning his MFA at Brigham Young University and his PhD at University of North Texas. He wrote his debut novel, Waiting for Fitz, while working as a Teaching Fellow in Denton, Texas. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Bellevue Literary Review, Five Points, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of Fiction at Brigham Young University. Spencer and his wife, Brittany, are the parents of four children.
Fiction
Victor Lodato is a playwright and the author of two critically acclaimed novels. Edgar and Lucy was called “a riveting and exuberant ride” by the New York Times, and his novel Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN USA Award, was hailed as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel.” Victor’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Best American Short Stories. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. Born and raised in New Jersey, Victor currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona.
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.
Greg Brownderville’s third book, a collection of poems entitled A Horse with Holes in It, was released by LSU Press in November of 2016. His first book, Gust (2011), made the Poetry Foundation’s Best-Seller List. In 2012 he published Deep Down in the Delta, a collection of folkloristic poems based on fieldwork he conducted in and around his home community of Pumpkin Bend, Arkansas. Collaborating with composer Jacob Cooper, Brownderville wrote the words to “Jar” (Silver Threads, Nonesuch Records, 2014) and Ripple the Sky, which premiered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2016. Brownderville has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, New Millennium Writings, and the Porter Fund. An associate professor of English and the director of Creative Writing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Brownderville edits the Southwest Review.
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)
Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné (Navajo), is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People). She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize, Morning Star Creative Writing Award, and the Philip Freund Prize. She holds bachelor’s degrees from Brigham Young University and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Crab Orchard Review, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, New Poets of Native Nations, and other publications. Her first book is Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press, 2018).
Fiction
Caitlin Sangster grew up in the back woods of California and would rather go hiking, running, swimming, or general outdoorsing than just about anything else. If there aren’t any mountains, it doesn’t count as a real place. At eighteen, she moved to XinJiang, and at twenty-one it was Taiwan. She did eventually buckle down and graduate from Brigham Young University with a BA in Asian Studies and is now that person you avoid at parties because she’ll probably start talking about Shang dynasty oracle bones. Caitlin has been writing since middle school. She always thought of it as a silly sort of compulsive habit until she realized that people like reading stories and she liked writing them and there wasn’t much silly about that. She currently lives in Utah with her husband and four children. (photo credit: Sherri Sangster)
Fiction
Ann Dee Ellis is the author of three young adult titles including This is What I Did:, Everything is Fine, and The End or Something Like That. Her middle grade debut, You May Already Be a Winner, was released July 2017. Her books have received starred reviews and been featured on multiple lists. She teaches as an adjunct creative writing instructor at Brigham Young University and has taught at various writing conferences. She lives in the foothills of Utah and when she’s not writing, she’s hanging around with her husband and five energetic children.
Meg Day is the 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street 2014), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Lancaster, PA.www.megday.com
Fiction
Francisco Stork was born in Monterrey, Mexico and came to El Paso, Texas with his mother and adoptive father when he was nine-years old. He has an M.A from Harvard University and a J.D from Columbia University. He worked as an attorney until his retirement in 2015. Francisco is the author of seven novels, including Marcelo in the Real World, recipient of the Schneider Award; The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, recipient of the Elizabeth Walden Award; The Memory of Light, recipient of the Tomás Rivera Award. His latest novel Disappeared, is a 2018 Walter Dean Myers Award Honor
David Wanczyk grew up a Red Sox fan and once gave up twenty-seven runs in an inning before realizing he’d never make it to Fenway Park—or varsity. He’s coped with that by writing on novel sports for Slate, Boston Globe Magazine, Texas Monthly, and other venues. His book, Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind was published by Swallow Press in March, and he has also placed poetry, essays, and criticism in magazines such as Brevity, Pank, and Woolf Studies Annual. He is the editor of New Ohio Review, an instructor at Ohio University, and the father of two young kids.
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)
Fiction
Steven L. Peck (BYU Biology) is the two-time winner of the Association of Mormon Letters Novel Award (The Scholar of Moab, 2011; Gilda Trillim, 2017), and once for short story (Two-Dog Dose, 2014). His upcoming novel (2019) King Leere: Goatherd of the La Sals was a semi-finalist in Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize. In addition to his collection Incorrect Astronomy, his poetry has appeared in New Myths, Pedestal Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Red Rock Review, and numerous other places. Short stories and essays are found in several anthologies and journals, including, Analog, Daily Science Fiction, Dialogue, Nature Futures. He is a blogger at https://bycommonconsent.com/ and writes often on science/faith issues.
Brock Jones is an assistant professor of English at Utah Valley University and the author of Cenotaph (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), a finalist in the 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the Iowa Review, Lunch Ticket, Ninth Letter online, Poetry Daily, Raleigh Review, Sugar House Review, War Literature and the Arts, and others. Brock is a veteran of the U.S. Army and served three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. He lives in Spanish Fork with his wife and daughter.
Three student readers will share their own creative work--one in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Students may be graduate or undergraduate.