Biographical Notes

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2020 Presenters

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.

ASHLEA ADAMS is a freelance writer and graduate student at the University of West Florida. She was born in Hopkinsville, KY, and spent her childhood persuading others that there was (and is) in fact a dragon on the moon. This love for the fantastic has led to her passion for Speculative Fiction today. When she’s not staying up too late writing or reading, she is usually chasing down her two sons. Her latest short story “Poppies” is available in "MCSI: Magical Crime Scene Investigation." You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @ashleanadams.

LYNNE BARRETT's anthology Making Good Time: True Stories of How We Do, and Don't, Get Around in South Florida has just been published by Jai-Alai Books. Her story collection Magpies received the Florida Book Awards fiction gold medal, and her handbook What Editors Want guides writers through the submissions process.  Her recent fiction and nonfiction can be found in New Flash Fiction Review, River Teeth's Beautiful Things, Necessary Fiction, Mystery Tribune, The Miami Rail, The Southern Women’s Review, Flash! Writing the Very Short Story, 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 at Florida International University and is editor of The Florida Book Review.

SARAH BASIL is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction at the University of South Florida. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Fourth River, Electric Literature, Water~Stone Review, and others. She is the founding nonfiction editor for Every Pigeon, an online literary journal, and currently serves as a Guest Editor for The Florida Review's upcoming feature on erasure works. Right now, Sarah is finishing her first book, a fragmented memoir.

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.

JESSICA BORSI is an MFA Candidate in Fiction at Florida International University and normally lives in the Panhandle with a donkey. She writes reviews for Florida Book Review, and her lyric essay on science fiction can be found in So To Speak.

JONATHAN FINK is the author of two poetry collections: The Crossing (Dzanc, 2015) and Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad (Dzanc, 2016). His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Slate, The Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He has received the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Jonathan is Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of West Florida, where he also edits Panhandler Magazine and Panhandler Books.

KRISTIN GARTH is a Pushcart, Best of the Net & Rhysling nominated sonnet stalker. Her sonnets have stalked journals like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Luna Luna and more. She is the author of fifteen books of poetry including Pink Plastic House, Shut Your Eyes, Succubi (Maverick Duck Press), Candy Cigarette Womanchild Noir (The Hedgehog Poetry Press), Flutter: Southern Gothic Fever Dream (TwistiT Press) and The Meadow (APEP Publications).  She is the founder of Pink Plastic House a tiny journal and co-founder of Performance Anxiety, an online poetry reading series. Follow her on Twitter:  (@lolaandjolie) and her website kristingarth.com 

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.

JESSE MILLNER’s poems and prose have appeared most recently in Manzano Mountain Review, Steam Ticket, The Split Rock Review, The Comstock Review, The South Florida Poetry Journal, and The West Texas Literary Review. His latest book, Memory’s Blue Sedan, is forthcoming from Hysterical Press. Jesse teaches writing courses at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Florida.

LYN MILLNER is the author of The Allure of Immortality: An American Cult, a Florida Swamp, and a Renegade Prophet. The work of narrative journalism tells the story of Cyrus Teed and his followers who, in 1894, moved from Chicago to a mosquito-infested jungle in Florida to build the city of their dreams, where they believed they would live forever. "Brilliantly written and strangely moving,” wrote Steve Almond, author of God Bless America: Stories. “Millner resurrected the lost history of a cult devoted to a utopian vision as pure as it was outlandish." She has written and produced stories for NPR's Morning Edition, the New York Times, USA Today, Oxford American, and others. She is a professor of journalism at Florida Gulf Coast University.

CHARLOTTE PENCE Director of Creative Writing at University of South Alabama

ADAM PRINCE is  the Stokes Visiting Writer at University of South Alabama.

KATHERINE RIEGEL's newest collection of poetry, Love Songs from the End of the World, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing in summer or fall 2019. She is also 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 colleges, most recently the University of South Florida. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Brevity, The Offing, Orion, Poets.org, Tin House, and The Rumpus. She is co-founder and poetry editor for Sweet Lit. Currently she teaches online classes in poetry and creative nonfiction and lives in Memphis.

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MARY JANE RYALS is Poet Laureate of the Big Bend of Florida. She's currently working on a Photography and Poetry Exhibition of Tallahassee Women over 70 years of age. She has published six books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including a Florida Arts Council winner in Fiction. She has two recent chapbooks out and is working on a longer second collection of poetry.  She's been an Apalachee Review fiction and poetry editor since 1999, and is now an Anhinga Press Board member. She's also working on a book of her own photographs and shorter poems

MICHAEL TRAMMELL's novel Rad Sick Record is forthcoming this year from Hysterical Books Press. He's currently the Advisory & Managing Editor of the Apalachee Review and teaches business writing and speech delivery at Florida State University. Additionally, he's taught in England, Spain, and Italy for FSU's International Programs.

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).

2019 Presenters

CARLYN BYRD studies music performance at the University of North Florida and is a part of the Neuroscience club. Carlyn graduated from Tarpon Springs High School in 2017, Magna Cum Laude. She is the recipient of the Helen Ellis Memorial Scholarship for music. She has received superior ratings at county and state level Music Performance Assessments. Byrd also participated in Pinellas Youth Symphony from 2011-2017. She has an interest in how music affects the brain. She has worked with children who have had chronic illnesses as part of Music for Medicine. Carlyn has played with Pinellas Park Civic Orchestra, South Shores Symphony Orchestra, and the Florida Orchestra.

GREG BYRD is the winner of the 2018 Robert Phillips Chapbook prize from the Texas Review Press. That chapbook, The Name of the God Who Speaks, comes out May 2019. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals such as Tampa Review, Cortland Review and Poeteka (Albania, in translation). He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination and an Individual Artist Grant from Creative Pinellas. A chapter from his WWI flying novel manuscript, Where Shadow Meets Water, appears in the current issue of Apalachee Review. Greg teaches writing and literature at St. Petersburg College.

CASEY CLAGUE is an MFA student at the University of South Florida and Assistant Poetry Editor for Sweet: A Literary Confection. Critical and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Action, Spectacle; Flock; Permafrost; Gravel; and elsewhere.

SKYE JACKSON was born and raised in New Orleans. She holds an English degree from LSU and a degree in law from Mississippi College School of Law. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop where she works with Bayou Magazine. She also serves as co-editor for the upcoming edition of The Portable Boog Reader. Her work has appeared in the Delta Literary Journal and Thought Catalog. Her debut chapbook is forthcoming in May 2019 from Antenna.

SWISS MCCALL is a first year graduate student at the University of New Orleans, pursuing her Master’s of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry. She has been writing poetry since age 8 and performing her pieces since the age of 14, but spent her college years being trained in business and logistics. After working two years at The Boeing Company, she decided to change the trajectory of her career and pursue her passion for writing. Swiss won an NAACP award in the category of original oratory, and has also performed her spoken word several times at the Apollo theatre in Harlem, NY. She aspires to teach literature and creative writing on a collegiate level, and to create as many literary works as her imagination will allow.

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. 

Both poet and visual artist, ALLAN PETERSON is the author of five previous poetry collections and is a recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the State of Florida. His second book, All the Lavish in Common, won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts. His third, Fragile Acts, from McSweeney’s, was a finalist for both The National Book Critics Circle and Oregon Book Awards.

MICHAEL PIAFSKY is the Chair of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Spring Hill College, in Mobile, AL. He is the author of the novel, All The Happiness You Deserve and has been published in The Missouri Review, Normal School, Echo, Jabberwock Review and elsewhere.

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.

CARMIN WONG is a Guyanese-born poet and playwright, currently studying Creative Writing Poetry at the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. Wong is a May 2018 graduate of Howard University, where she earned her B.A. in English and Playwriting; therefore, she urges that language must be understood as both communication and warfare. Often incorporating heavy dialect, she aims to toy with variations of English vernacular. Wong has competed in numerous poetry slams at Lincoln Center, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and performed in venues like Scholastic Auditorium and The Apollo Theater. Her monologue, “3 Generations,” was staged in the 2018 Women’s Voices Theater Festival and her poetry can be found minimally printed elsewhere.

2018 Presenters

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/.

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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.

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.  

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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.

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.

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.

2020 Keynote Speaker: Carolyn Haines

 Carolyn Haines has received the Harper Lee Award for distinguished Alabama writer of the year (2010), the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence (2009), and in 2019 the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alabama Library Asscoation.  This March she will be inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame.  She is the best-selling author of the  Sarah Booth Delaney series of mystery novels (20 and counting, all with Bones in the title), the Pluto's Snitch series, centering on detective partners in Northern Mississippi who specialize in hauntings, possessions and the occult, and many other books. Her short stories and essays have appeared in many anthologies including Growing Up in Mississippi, Florida Heat Wave, and Christmas in the South, and she edited the anthology Delta Blues. Haines grew up in Mississippi, began her career as a journalist, and taught at the University of South Alabama. Learn more here.

Past Keynote Speakers

The 2019 Keynote was presented by YOLANDA J. FRANKLIN, author of Blood Vinyls, her debut collection of poetry that Roxane Gay insists is a “must-must-must read.” Franklin is two-time Fulbright Scholar Award Finalist, a Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, and a recipient of a 2016-17 McKnight Dissertation Fellowship and a Kingsbury writing award. Franklin is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the 2017 Forbes Magazine #1 ranked HBCU, Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University where she teaches Writing Across the Curriculum certified courses and has been nominated for a Teaching Innovation Award. Her poems appear in the current issue or are forthcoming in the following journals: Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, and The Apalachee Review. Her poetry also appears in the recent anthology It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip-Hop and is a two-time recipient of a J.M. Shaw Academy of American Poets Award. Franklin is a third generation Floridian, born in the state’s capital— Tallahassee.  

PHILLIPPE DIEDERICH is the 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.

Terri Carrión was conceived in Venezuela and born in New York to a Galician mother and Cuban father. She earned her MFA from Florida International University. Her poetry, fiction, non-fiction and photography have been published in various countries in many print magazines as well as online, including The Cream City Review, Hanging Loose, Pearl, Penumbra, Exquisite Corpse, Mangrove, Kick Ass Review, Exquisite Corpse, Jack, Mipoesia, Dead Drunk Dublin, and Physik Garden among others. Her chapbook Lazy Tongue was published by D Press in the summer of 2007. Her translation projects include the translation with Carmen Gloria Berrios, of the project “Poetry in Transit”, a citywide, visual poetry exhibit in public spaces in Santiago, Chile.

Michael Rothenberg's most recent books of poetry include Sapodilla (Editions du Cygne, Paris, France) and Drawing The Shade (Dos Madres Press). A bi-lingual edition of Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story and the journal collection Tally Ho and the Cowboy Dream/The Real and False Journals: Book 5 will be published by Varasek Ediciones (Madrid, Spain) in 2017. An Arabic edition of Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story is due out from Sefsafa Publishing House.

Some of our earlier Keynote Speakers include: Michael Martone, Lola Haskins, Connie May Fowler,  and Sterling Watson.