Biographical Notes

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2018 Presenters (more bios coming soon)

RALPH ADAMO has taught at Xavier since 2007. He is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Waterblind: New & Selected Poems. He won a Louisiana Endowment for the Arts (1998), National Endowment for the Arts (2003), the first Marble Faun Prize for Poetry (1997),an Open Society Institute's Katrina Media Grant (2006). He has edited New Orleans Review (1993-99),Barataria Review (1978-80),and now Xavier Review. He graduated from University of Arkansas MFA in 1974.

JESSICA GUZMAN ALDERMAN's work appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Ecotone, Copper Nickel, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Her honors include American Literary Review’s 2017 Poetry Award and Harpur Palate's 2017 Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry. A doctoral student at the University of Southern Mississippi, she reads for Memorious.

LYNNE BARRETT’s third story collection Magpies received the Florida Book Awards fiction gold medal. Her handbook What Editors Want guides writers through the submissions process, and her recent fiction and nonfiction can be found in Necessary Fiction, Mystery Tribune, The Miami Rail, The Southern Women’s Review, Fort Lauderdale Magazine, and Just to Watch Them Die: Crime Stories Inspired by the Songs of Johnny Cash. A recipient of the Edgar Award for best mystery story, Barrett teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University and is editor of The Florida Book Review.

TAD BARTLETT is a fiction writer, essayist, and recovering poet. He was born in Ankara, Turkey; raised in Selma, Alabama; and married into New Orleans, Louisiana. Tad received his undergraduate degrees in theater and creative writing from Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama; a JD from Tulane University; and, to make up for the law degree, an MFA in fiction from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans, where he was a reader for Bayou magazine. He is now the Managing Editor of the Peauxdunque Review. His creative non-fiction has been Pushcart-nominated and named a “notable” essay by Best American Essays 2017, and has appeared in The Chautauqua Literary Journal, The Bitter Southerner, The Writing Disorder, and the online Oxford American. His fiction has been published by The Baltimore Review, Carolina Quarterly, Stockholm Review of Literature, Bird’s Thumb, and many others.

RANDY BATES's credits include a book of nonfiction, Rings: On the Life and Family of a Southern Fighter (FSG), a poetry chapbook, Dolphin Island (Finishing Line Press), and fellowships from the NEA and the Louisiana Arts Council. He has work just out or forthcoming in the Apalachee Review and the Chattahoochee Review and publications in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Grand Street, the Southern Review, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. He teaches at the University of New Orleans, where he is nonfiction editor of Bayou Magazine.

TORI BUSH is graduating from UNO with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction this spring. She recently received a Monroe Fellowship from Tulane University and is co-editing an anthology of environmental literature of the Gulf South, forthcoming from University Press of Florida.

ADAM CARTER is a former criminal defense attorney from Indiana who now lives in Tampa, Florida where he is pursuing an MFA degree at the University of South Florida. He was a co-founder of Read Herring and was recently published or has publications forthcoming in Midwestern Gothic and Rum Punch. You can follow him on Twitter @CarterInIndiana.

BROOKE CHAMPAGNE was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, and now writes and teaches in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her work appears in Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, Louisiana Literature, Full Grown People, and Bending Genre online, among other journals. She is at work on her first collection of personal essays.

CASEY CLAGUE writes poetry and creative nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of South Florida. They live in Tampa where they serve on the editorial board of Yellow Jacket Press and read poetry for Sweet: A Literary Confection. Previous work has appeared in Gravel, Drunk in a MidnightChoir, and Slipstream.

JOHN HENRY FLEMING teaches at USF and is the author of Fearsome Creatures of Florida, The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman, and stories in McSweeney’s, Quarterly Concern, North American Review, and Mississippi Review. He is advisory editor of Saw Palm.

SANDRA GILES is a professor at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia, and a graduate of Florida State University''s creative writing program. She writes creative nonfiction (memoir, true crime), fiction (literary, literary/genre), and articles on writing pedagogy. She has published in a number of journals and anthologies and enjoys conferences at beach locations.

RICHARD GOODMAN is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, The Soul of Creative Writing and A New York Memoir. His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, Ascent, River Teeth, Louisville Review and French Review, among others. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Orleans.

TANYA GRAE won the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Prize, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa. She is the author of the chapbook Little Wekiva River (Five Oaks Press, 2017), and her full-length manuscript Undoll was a finalist for the 2016 Four Way Books Intro Prize and The Brittingham and Pollack Prizes. Her poems have recently appeared in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, New South, The Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, Barrow Street, Post Road, and elsewhere. She teaches at Florida State University while pursuing her doctorate. Find out more at:tanyagrae.com

ROBERT GRAY is the author of two books of poems, DREW: Poems from Blue Water and I Wish That I Were Langston Hughes. He has taught at several universities and is currently at the University of South Alabama.

ANYA GRONER's writing has appeared in journals including Juked, Ninth Letter, Story South, and The Rumpus. She received her MFA from the University of Mississippi where she was awarded a John and Renee Grisham fellowship in fiction. Currently she lives in New Orleans and teaches at Xavier University of Louisiana.

JAMES M. HILGARTNER is a Professor of English at Huntingdon College. He has published in a number of literary journals, and has twice been awarded the Fellowship in Literature from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Since 2015 he has served as Fiction Editor of THAT Literary Review.

TOM HOLMES is the editor of Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose. He is also the author of seven collections of poems, most recently The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013 and was released in October 2014. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize seven times and Best of the Net twice, and his work has appeared a number of times on Verse Daily. His current prose writing efforts about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/.

BRENT HOUSE, a contributing editor for The Tusculum Review and, along with Jeff Newberry, an editor for The Gulf Stream: Poems of the Gulf Coast (Snake Nation Press, 2013), is a native of Necaise, Mississippi, where he raised cattle and watermelons on his family’s farm. Slash Pine Press published his first collection, The Saw Year Prophecies (2010). His poems have appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, and Third Coast. New poems are forthcoming from The Kenyon Review and elsewhere.

BARB JOHNSON teaches fiction writing in the MFA program at UNO. She is the author of More of This World or Maybe Another, winner of the ALA’s Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and recipient of AROHO’s Gift of Freedom Award. Recent work has appeared in, among others, Oxford American, Guernica, Washington Square and Glimmer Train Stories.

JAMEY JONES lives in Pensacola, FL. and is the author of several chapbooks, including “The Derby Earth” (Sub City 2003), “the notebook troubled the sleepdoor” (brown boke 2008), “Twelve Windows” (brown boke 2009), and the full-length Blue Rain Morning (Farfalla, McMillan and Parrish, 2011). His poem, “Radio Shenandoah” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015 and his work has been published in various journals such as Fell Swoop, The Otter, Zen Monster, Mundane Egg, The Brooklyn Rail, and Brooklyn Paramount. He is the editor of Rachael Pongetti’s Uncovering The Layers (crazy. silly. okay. 2016) and the current Poet Laureate of Northwest Florida. He teaches English, Literature, and Poetry at Pensacola State College.

CAROLINE KLOCKSIEM's chapbook, Circumstances of the House and Moon, is available from Dancing Girl Press, and her poems have appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review; Hayden’s Ferry Review; CutBank; The Pinch; BlazeVox; H_NGM_N; Super Arrow; and others. She is a Swarthout Award and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship recipient. She lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

JOANNA LEAKE is a professor at UNO, where she directed their MFA program for fifteen years and is the editor of Bayou magazine. Her novel, A Few Days in Weasel Creek, was a CBS television movie; she’s written several screenplays and co-authored two textbooks.

J. R. MILLER was born and raised in the blue-collar suburbs of Detroit. After a career designing and copywriting for a large advertising agency in metro Detroit, he moved to Florida where he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida. He is the author of Nobody’s Looking (ELJ Editions 2015). His work also appears in The Good Men Project, Midwestern Gothic, Palooka, Writers Tribe Review, Portland Review, Prime Number and others.

Currently pursuing an MFA at the University of South Florida, ALISON MISSLER finds her home in poetry but often dabbles in the mansion of creative non-fiction. She has help organized Blank Pages: A Creative Writing Symposium and is a co-founder of the literary improv community-based event, Read Herring. Alison is currently working on her thesis, a book-length collection of poetry based on the everyday experience—how both humor and grief take their forms, titled Three Thin Wires. She is always itching to be back in the mountains and is training for a marathon in November. Her apartment is filled with love and fur, as she resides with her Persian cat, Irish wolfhound-lab mix, and bearded boyfriend in Tampa.

JIM MURPHY teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo (AL), where he also serves as co-director of the Montevallo Literary Festival. He is the author of two poetry books, The Memphis Sun (Kent State UP) and Heaven Overland (Kennesaw State UP), and has translated poet Colombian American poet Juan Carlos Galeano's collection Amazonia from Spanish.

JEFF NEWBERRY is the author of a novel and a collection of poetry. His new book, CROSS COUNTRY, a collaboration with the poet Justin Evans, will be published by WordTech in 2019. He teaches in the writing and communication program at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia, and in the European Council Waterford, Ireland, Study Abroad Program.

TODD OSBORNE holds an MFA in poetry from Oklahoma State University, and he is currently pursuing a PhD in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi. His poetry has appeared at The Missouri Review, The Big Muddy, Juked, Gravel, Hobart, and elsewhere.

P.T. PAUL received her B.A. from the University of Montevallo in 2007 and her M.A. from the University of South Alabama in 2009. Her thesis "Southerner" represented the University of South Alabama College of Arts and Sciences in the Coastal Graduate Schools Masters Thesis Competition and won the USA College of Arts and Sciences Masters Thesis Award in 2011. "Southerner" was published as To Live & Write in Dixie by Negative Capability Press in 2010. P.T. is president of the Pensters Writing Group, which has over 100 members and is celebrating its 48th year in Fairhope.

APRIL BLEVINS PEJIC holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and teaches English at Nicholls State University. Her essay "A History We Can Live With" was noted in the Best American Essays 2015. Her work has appeared in the Cimarron Review, Green Briar Review, Arcadia Magazine, and Furious Season, among others.

MICHAEL PIAFSKY is an associate professor and the director of creative writing at Spring Hill College in Alabama. The Montreal native earned an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Missouri. A former editor of the Missouri Review, Piafsky has published fiction and nonfiction in journals such as the Jabberwock Review, Meridian, Epic, and Bar Stories, among others. His first novel, All the Happiness You Deserve was published in 2014 by Prospect Park Books.

MICHELE PARKER RANDALL is the author of Museum of Everyday Life (Aldrich Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Potomac Review, The Newport Review, and elsewhere. A portion of her current work was a recent finalist for the Peter Meinke Poetry Prize. She is a finalist for the 2017 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. Michele teaches at Stetson University.

MICHAEL RANDS is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mobile, where he teaches literature, creative writing, and composition. He holds an MA from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an MFA from Louisiana State University. He is the author of the novel Praise Routine Number Four.

RACHEL REESE: As a writer of Americana literature and short fiction, Rachel’s characters are distinct voices that move her stories forward. Regardless of whether the subject is a quadratic equation, a teenager traveling through space on shared thoughts with extra-terrestrial beings, or two old men kvetching over a cup of joe in a West Virginia coffee shop, she holds that a good story arises from something or someone with something to say.
When not taking dictation from her characters, you might find Rachel speaking in their voices at open mic venues such as Say the Word in Niceville, or performing among companionable poets and other prose-ists in the Florida Panhandle and the South.

KATHERINE RIEGEL is the author of two books of poetry: What the Mouth Was Made For and Castaway. Her book of flash cnf/prose poems, Letters to Colin Firth, won the 2015 Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at various places, most recently the University of South Florida. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Brevity, The Lascaux Review, The Offing, Orion, and The Rumpus. She is co-founder and poetry editor for Sweet: A Literary Confection.

MARY JANE RYALS has written a short story collection A Messy Job. She won the YellowJacket chapbook contest with Music in Arabic. She also has a collection of poetry, The Moving Waters, a textbook, Getting into the Intercultural Groove, and a novel, Cookie and Me, forthcoming in October, 2010. She also edited the poetry anthology North of Wakulla, and is fiction editor of Apalachee Review. She teaches Business Communication at Florida State University.

ANASTASIA STELSE is a native of southeastern Wisconsin, the former assistant editor for The Intentional, and a graduate from the MFA program at American University. She is currently pursuing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Sou’wester, New South, Fairy Tale Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.

CLAIRE STEPHENS is a cartoonist and a writer, mostly of science fiction and personal essays like Lady in Ink, a comics chapbook about tattoos and gender that was released in 2015 and published by Sweet Publications. Her MFA thesis won the 2013 Outstanding Thesis or Dissertation Award at the University of South Florida. You can find her work in places like Words Without Borders, Prick of the Spindle, and A Bad Penny Review. She currently teaches writing at the University of South Florida.

IRA SUKRUNGRUANG is the author Buddha’s Dog & other Meditations, Southside Buddhist, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, the short story collection The Melting Season, and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the coeditor of two anthologies on the topic of obesity: What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. He is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Emerging Writer Fellowship. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including Post Road, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection, and teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida.

DANIEL SUTTER is from Tampa, Florida. He currently attends the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. His work has appeared in Fiction Southeast and has also been listed a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Short Fiction Contest and the Cincinnati Review Robert Schiff Award for prose.

PATRICK TEMPLETON writes fiction and nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of South Florida. Having previously resided in Norfolk, VA and Los Angeles, CA, he now lives in Tampa, FL. He was a co-founder of Read Herring and has a Bachelors in Economics from Occidental College. You can follow him on Twitter @PattysLakeHouse.

RANDOLPH THOMAS’s collection of short stories, Dispensations, won the MVP Award from New Rivers Press and is forthcoming in October 2014. His short fiction has won the Glimmer Train Stories Family Matters contest, Blue Mesa Review fiction prize, the John Gardner Memorial Fiction Award, and the Florida Review Editors’ Prize, and has also appeared in The Hudson Review, Southwest Review, Arts and Letters, Washington Square Review, Harpur Palate, and other journals. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Witness, Quarterly West, and Greensboro Review, among others. He has received state artist grants for writers from the Arkansas Arts Council and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. He holds an MFA degree from the University of Arkansas and teaches at Louisiana State University.

MICHAEL TRAMMELL edits the Apalachee Review and teaches business writing at FSU. His chapbook Our Keen Blue House won the 2008 YellowJacket Press Chapbook Competition. In the summers he teaches for FSU at the Valencia, Spain campus. His work has appeared in New Letters, Poet Lore, Chattahoochee Review, the G.W. Review and other journals.

M.O. WALSH is the author of the story collection The Prospect of Magic, which won the Tartt's Fiction Prize, and the novel My Sunshine Away which was a New York Times Bestseller and won the Pat Conroy Book Award for Southern Fiction. He currently directs the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans.

PATTI WHITE teaches creative writing and American literature at The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa. She has two collections of poetry, Tackle Box (2002) and Yellow Jackets (2007), both from Anhinga Press. And she is co-editor of Slash Pine Press, a new press dedicated to limited-run chapbooks and offbeat poetry events (www.slashpinepress.com).

2018 Keynote Speaker

This year's keynote speaker is PHILLIPPE DIEDERICH, author of the novels “Playing for the Devil’s Fire” (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016), which was named the 2017 Best Young Adult novel by the Texas Institute of Letters and 2017 Young Adult Library Services Association Best Fiction for Young Adults; and “Sofrito” (Cinco Puntos Press, 2015).
His short fiction has been published in national literary journals including Quarterly West, Acentos Review, Burrow Press, Hobart and others. In 2017 he was awarded the PEN Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship. He is the recipient of the Chris O’Malley Prize for Fiction from the Madison Review, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Florida Department of Cultural Affairs, and a John Ringling Towers Grant in Literature from the Sarasota County Artist Alliance.
The son of Haitian exiles, Diederich was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Mexico City and Miami. During the 1990’s he worked as a photojournalist, covering news and feature assignments in the U.S. and Latin America for national publications.

Past Presenters

STEPHEN CAMPBELL is a sophomore at the University of Alabama. Currently studying film production and criticism, he's working with Slash Pine Press to explore alternate styles of narrative story telling. He has previously written for the Games Learning Society conference in Madison.

CARRIE CHAPPELL's work has previously appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Bateau Press, Buried Letter Press, DIG Baton Rouge, and The Offending Adam. She lives in New Orleans, where she is studying poetry in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. She currently serves as Associate Editor for Bayou Magazine.

JEN COLLINS, aka Ryder Collins, teaches at Auburn University. Her work is published or forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Monkeybicycle, Dogzplot, DIAGRAM, shady side review, and Juked among others. She has a chapbook, Orpheus on toast, forthcoming from Imaginary Friend Press.

MICHAEL COLONA is a graduate student at the University of West Florida, where he has received the Laurie O’Brien creative writing awards for graduate poetry, graduate fiction, and graduate nonfiction, respectively. His work has appeared in Qualia, No Cure For That, and the Troubadour. He was the 2011 recipient of the GCACWT award for graduate nonfiction. He teaches literature and composition and is working on his thesis, a novella based loosely on his experience as an infantryman in the 3rd Ranger Battalion.

Daren Dean is the author of the novel Far Beyond the Pale. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL (men’s fiction), The Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Oklahoma Review, Midwestern Gothic, Fiction Southeast, Missouri Life, Ecotone, Image, The Chattahoochee Review, StorySouth, and others. FBTP was recently reviewed in The Huffington Post. Also, see his interview on the Ploughshares blog. His story "Bring Your Sorrow Over Here" was selected as Runner-up in Yemassee's William Richey Short Fiction contest by Judge George Singleton. Another story, "Affliction," was a Finalist in the Glimmer Train Short Fiction Contest for New Writers. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. In addition, he worked in scholarly publishing in the acquisitions and marketing departments at the University of Missouri Press. He has been teaching creative writing, composition, and literature at LSU since 2012.

MATT FORSYTHE teaches at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. He received his PhD from the University of Georgia, where he spent time as the Graduate Assistant at The Georgia Review. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Mid-American Review, and scholarship is forthcoming in the collection War and Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Early Life and Writings.

KAREN HOLLINGSWORTH GARDINER is Director of the First-year Writing Program at The University of Alabama, where she teaches composition. A native Alabamian, she cut her teeth on front-porch stories. Her poem "Fool's Puzzle," about domestic abuse and her grandmother's quilts, was recently published in The Artist as Activist in Appalachia (U Press of North Georgia). Besides having a hankering for wordcraft, she is also a photography enthusiast and sees the visual as just another way to tell a story.

BLAKE GERARD teaches creative writing and literature at Auburn University at Montgomery.

Peter Huggins is the author of five collections of poetry, AUDUBON'S ENGRAVER, SOUTH, shortlisted for the International Rubery Award, NECESSARY ACTS, BLUE ANGELS, and HARD FACTS, and he has been awarded an Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. He is also the author of a picture book, TROSCLAIR AND THE ALLIGATOR, which has appeared on the PBS show BETWEEN THE LIONS, and a middle grade novel, IN THE COMPANY OF OWLS. He teaches in the English Department at Auburn University. http://www.phuggins.com/

FREDRICK BARTON directs the MFA program at UNO and is the author of the book of essays Rowing to Sweden and the novels The El Cholo Feeling Passes, Courting Pandemonium, With Extreme Prejudice and A House Divided, which won the William Faulkner Prize. His short stories have been included in the anthologies Something in Common, Above Ground and Louisiana in Words. The New Orleans Press Club has awarded him the Alex Waller Memorial Prize, its highest honor, and its first place for criticism eleven times. His other awards include a Louisiana Division of the Arts award in literature and the Stephen T. Victory Award, the Louisiana Bar Association's award for feature writing about legal issues.

KEVIN BROWN: Besides his novel, The Running Horse of Santa Teresa, Kevin Brown’s work can be found in Oxford American and the anthology Literary Austin. Heteaches at the University of Alabama, where he coordinates the Barbed Wire Reading Series, which features English department instructors.

ERIN E. CAMPBELL is an associate professor of English, Honors, and Rural Studies at Abraham Baldwin College in south Georgia. She is a native of Florida’s Gulf Coast to which she returns regularly to the delight of both her muse and her husband and children. She has published most recently in
Pegasus, Apalachee Review, and Hobble Creek Review.

STEELE CAMPBELL left his frozen Idaho mountain town for the culture and literature of the South and is completing his graduate thesis at Auburn University on the fiction of Marilynne Robinson.

P.S. DEAN is a third year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Mississippi. His poems have appeared in Palooka, Mary Journal, and Burnt Bridge. He lives in New Orleans with his wife.

ERICA DEVEER is from Mobile, Alabama. She is a graduating senior from Louisiana State University, receiving a Bachelor's degree in English (creative writing) with minors in French and history. She plans to attend an MFA program for creative writing in the fall.

MARY ANNA EVANS is a three-time Florida Book Awards bronze medalist, the recipient of the 2011 Mississippi Author Award and a 2010 writer-in-residence at The Studios of Key West. She is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University in Camden, where she will be teaching writing beginning in Fall 2014. Her Faye Longchamp mysteries have received the Benjamin Franklin Award and the Florida Literature Award. Her research interests include mathematical and science literacy. One of her current projects, a children's book for girls interested in science, ties her love of fiction, science, teaching, and kids up in a nice, neat bow.

ZACHARY J. GEORGE lives and writes in New Orleans. He has taught ESL in South Korea and Prague. His stories appeared regularly in Faiyo Magazine, and he has a story forthcoming in the fall issue of Inkwell Journal.

DIDI JACKSON's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Green Mountains Review, The Common, Café Review, and Passages North among other publications. Her manuscript,Almost Animal, was a finalist for the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize offered by Persea Books, a semi-finalist for the 2015 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Press Brittingham and Felix Pollack Prizes. Her chapbook, Slag and Fortune, was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2013. She teaches at the University of Vermont. Find out more atdidijackson.com

Gerry Wilson A seventh-generation Mississippian, Gerry grew up in the red clay hills of the north in the household with her maternal grandmother, a terrific storyteller. An only child, Gerry spent quiet hours immersed in the worlds of books and her own imagination.Gerry is the author of Crosscurrents and Other Stories (Press 53, 2015) and a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship for 2015.

C.D. MITCHELL is the author of two story collections, God's Naked Will and Alligator Stew, recently released by Southern Yellow Pine Publishing. He has an MFA in creative writing with concentrations in fiction and creative nonfiction. He resides in northeast Arkansas.

DAVID MOODY, when not seeking cursed Aztec gold, writes out of Tallahassee, FL, attends FSU for his PhD pursuit, and is assistant editor for Juked Magazine. He has also edited and worked with Florida Review, Southeast Review, and Saw Palm.

CHAD FARIES is the author of two collections of poetry, The Border Will Be Soon and The Book of Knowledge, and a memoir, Drive Me Out of My Mind. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, he lived and taught in Central Europe for many years. Currently he is an associate professor at Savannah State University, where he also hosts a radio program on WHCJ 90.3. When not in Thunderbolt, Georgia, Faries gets lost on his motorcycle whenever he can. Above all, he is a "Yooper"—a native of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

JANET NODAR: After finishing a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama and teaching English there, Janet Nodar fled the ‘adjunct trap’ in 2006 to become a freelance writer. She is now a reporter covering the maritime trade. She has published short stories in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Stories from the Blue Moon Café and elsewhere, and she is writing a novel.

BRIAN OLIOU is originally from New Jersey AND currently teaches at the University of Alabama. His collection of Tuscaloosa Missed Connections So You Know It's Me was released by Tiny Hardcore Press. His series of lyric essays about videogame boss battles, Level End, was released by Origami Zoo Press.

AMY RIDDELL is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Florida State College in Niceville, where she teaches freshman composition and serves as poetry editor for the college’s in-house literary magazine, Blackwater Review. Her chapbook, Narcissistic Injury, was recently published by Pudding House,

BETH RODGERS teaches Composition at both the University of West Florida and at Pensacola State College in Pensacola, Florida. She earned her M.A. English from UWF in 2012 where she received the Laurie O’Brien Award for both Graduate Fiction and Graduate Non-Fiction (2011). Her work has been published in The Troubadour, Emerald Coast Review, and Pensacola Downtown Crowd. Rodgers graduated from the University of Nebraska-Omaha in 1980 (B.A. English & B.S. Secondary Education) where she was selected for the Nebraska Writer’s Workshop. During her high school teaching career, she specialized in teaching both creative and academic writing to students at all levels of development and was nominated to Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers (2000, 2001, 2003). Her current writing projects include completing an e-book of instruction in the electronic method of research paper writing that she designed for her students (ENC4ENC); finishing a collection of non-fiction short stories entitled Jim Bob’s Girl; and undertaking the post-graduate Publishing and Editing certification program at Florida State University in 2014.

ROXY SEAY is a Tallahassee, Florida native currently attending the University of New Orleans MFA program with a focus in poetry. She received her bachelors in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She's an editor for the UNO journal, Ellipsis; an organizer for Gold Room, a monthly UNO MFA reading series; and is a reader for Quaint Magazine. She's a self-proclaimed, high-functioning procrastinator who spends too much time watching RuPaul's Drag Race, thinking about how huge the universe is, and hanging out in coffee shops or dive bars.

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and author of the poetry collection, A Lesson in Smallness. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as Blackbird, Blue Mesa Review, Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, Five Chapters, Hayden’s Ferry, Hunger Mountain, Kenyon Review Online, Valapariso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and an anthology of stories by women writers from Alabama, Belles’ Letters 2. She is fiction editor for DIAGRAM and an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.

VICKI HENDRICKS is the author of erotic crime novels Miami Purity, Iguana Love, Voluntary Madness, Sky Blues, and Cruel Poetry, the latter a finalist for an Edgar Award in 2008. Her short stories appear in publications ranging from The Mississippi Review to Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica 2000 to Otto Penzler’s Murder for Revenge. A complete collection of her short fiction, Florida Gothic Stories, was published in 2010. Hendricks lives in Hollywood, Florida, and teaches writing at Broward College. Her plots and settings reflect participation in adventure sports, such as skydiving and scuba, and knowledge of the Florida environment. Love of animals, apparent in her earlier novels, comes to the forefront in Fur People, her most recent novel.

BEN SHIELDS recently completed his MFA at UNO, but he landscapes and cooks dinner for his wife more than anything else. He does not have any writing accomplishments yet, or a cat. Soon he hopes he will have both.

CARRIE SPELL has published her fiction in Mississippi Review, McSweeney's, Beloit Fiction Journal, Georgetown Review, Gulf Stream, Center, and in many other magazines and journals. She's also, at various times, served as Assistant Editor or Guest Editor of Mississippi Review, Pindeldyboz, and Opium Magazine. She has her PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers, and she currently teaches writing and literature courses at Auburn University.

JENNIFER STEWART is a 2006 graduate of UNO's Low-Residency MFA in poetry. She currently works for the Low-Residency Program as the Coordinator of the Study Abroad Programs in Writing. She earned her undergraduate degree, a BA in History and English, at Emory & Henry College in 2001. Publications include Florida English, Sentence, Poets' Corner -Fieralingue, Exquisite Corpse, and Big Bridge.

JASON STUART is the editor & publisher of Burnt Bridge, an independent literary magazine and micropress (www.BurntBridge.net). His first novel, Raise a Holler (Crimedog Books), is available now. His stories and essays have recently appeared in Frontier Tales, Plots With Guns, Underground Voices, and Fried Chicken & Coffee. He also serves as the Director of Academics for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Mobile, Biloxi, & New Orleans campuses. www.JasonStuart.net

JEANIE THOMPSON has published four collections of poetry, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, How to Enter the River, and her most recent: The Seasons Bear Us. Jeanie holds the MFA from the University of Alabama, where she was founding editor of the literary journal Black Warrior Review. Jeanie has twice been awarded an Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Since 1993, Jeanie has directed the award-winning Alabama Writers' Forum, a statewide literary arts organization in Montgomery. She also teaches part-time in the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Writing Program in Louisville, KY.

CHRIS TUSA holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Florida. His debut novel, Dirty Little Angels, was published by The University of West Alabama in March of 2009. His debut collection of poems, Haunted Bones, was published by Louisiana Literature Press in 2006.

LAURA VALERI is the author of The Kind of Things Saints Do (U of Iowa Press) winner of the John Simmons and John Gardner Fiction Awards. Her stories, poems and essays appear in Glimmer Train, Creative Nonfiction, Night Train, Adirondack Review, Big Bridge, Fiction Writers Review and others. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.

BARBARA WIEDERMANN, professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Auburn University Montgomery, is the author of a critical study entitled Josephine Herbst’s Short Fiction: A Window to Her Life and Times (Susquehanna University Press). Her poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope, Blueline, Kerf, Feminist Studies, Paper Street, Acorn, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks: Half-Life of Love (2008) and Sometime in October (2010), both published by Finishing Line Press. In the spring of 2010, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

P.J. WILLIAMS taught high school English in North Carolina for three years before moving to Tuscaloosa, where he is now enrolled in the MFA program at The University of Alabama. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Salamander, Crab Creek Review, Four Way Review, Nashville Review, and others. He is lead editor and co-founder of Utter.