Artists

Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024) is a New York Times Bestseller. His previous book, A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2024 was named a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School. 
 

Jill McCorkle is the author of seven novels and five story collections; her latest novel Hieroglyphics was published in 2020 and her new collection, Old Crimes, was published in January 2024. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals and four of her short stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories. She has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, NC State and in the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She lives in Hillsborough, NC with her photographer husband, Tom Rankin. 

Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish, his first, published in 1998, and Extraordinary Adventures, in 2017. In 2003 Big Fish was adapted and released as a movie by Tim Burton and then in 2013 as a Broadway musical. His stories and novels have been translated into many languages, and his illustrations have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Garden & Gun, and many other venues. His children’s book, for which he did both the words and the pictures, is called The Cat’s Pajamas, and it is absolutely adorable. His most recent book, a memoir entitled This Isn't Going to End Well, was published by Algonquin books in April 2023. A book of flash fiction is forthcoming from Bull City Press.  

Crystal Wilkinson, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is the award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence, Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. Named Kentucky’s Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2023, she was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2025. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, and Oxford American. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky, where she is Bush-Holbrook Professor in Creative Writing. 

Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023), which was awarded the 2024 Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction. She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her PhD in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. 

Nic Brown is a writer and musician from South Carolina. He’s the author of four books, including the memoir Bang Bang Crash, as well as the novels In Every Way, Doubles, and Floodmarkers, which was selected as an Editors' Choice by The New York Times Book Review. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, and the Harvard Review, among many other publications. A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has served as the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi and is now an associate professor of creative writing at Clemson University. 

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, and the author of two collections of poems, including, most recently, Promises of Gold—which was long listed for the 2023 National Book Awards. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. Along with Felicia Rose Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. Alongside Antonio Salazar, he published the hybrid book, Por Siempre in 2023. He lives in Jersey City, NJ. 

Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts (FSG 2018), a New York Times Editors' Choice; Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best book of the year by Southern Living, Refinery29, Amazon Editors', and The New York Post.  The Red Grove (FSG 2024), her debut novel, was named a best book by Amazon Editors’ and People Magazine and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Other writing can be found in Outside, The New York Times, Glamour, AGNI, The Believer, People, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, and more. Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa teaches in Warren Wilson's MFA program and runs the Accountability Workshops with writer and pal Annie Hartnett. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her daughter, goofy dog and sassy cat.

Tita Ramírez grew up in Miami, the daughter of a Cuban exile and a Kentucky native. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in LitHub, The Normal School, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband and their two sons, and teaches creative writing at Elon University. Tell It to Me Singing is her debut novel. 

Darius Stewart is the author of the poetry collection Intimacies in Borrowed Light (2022) and the lyrical memoir Be Not Afraid of My Body (2024). He holds MFAs in poetry and creative nonfiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2021, he received the inaugural Emerging Writer Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. He is a Lulu “Merle” Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa. He lives in Iowa City with his dog, Gizmo. 
 

Victoria Wlosok is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying English and Business Administration. When not researching methods of murder for future books, she enjoys spending time with her extended family in the Czech Republic and enthusiastically consuming iced coffee despite her probable lactose intolerance. She invites you to follow her on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram @xvictoriawrites. How to Find a Missing Girl is her debut novel. 
 

Wes Browne lives within the Kentucky River Basin in Madison County, Kentucky. He has practiced law as a criminal defense attorney, prosecutor, and public defender in Appalachia for over 24 years. He also helps run his family's pizza shops. He's the author of two novels: Hillbilly Hustle and They All Fall the Same.

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Pushcart Prize-nominee Donna Glee Williams graduated from Tulane, then earned an MFA & PhD from LSU. Her 2023 ecofable The Night Field, winner of the Manly Wade Wellman Award, is the product of her Fulbright Senior Environmental Leadership Fellowship on pesticide use among small cotton farmers in India. Her short speculative fiction has received finalist status multiple times in Writers of the Future, Honorable Mention in Gardner Dozois’s Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology, & performance onstage in Hollywood as a finalist in SCI Fest LA. She has worked as a registered nurse, educator, & editor. 

Diane C. McPhail, an acclaimed, award-winning author, holds an M.F.A., an M.A., and a D.Min. She has studied with a range of renowned, highly awarded authors and is a regular repeat at Yale Writers’ Workshop. Diane is a member of the Historical Novel Society, at whose national conference she has presented, and the North Carolina Writers' Network. She appeared on LiveTalks LA with Jane Smiley, at the Mississippi Book Festival, and the National Women's Book Association Bibliofeast, among numerous others. Her historical novels, The Abolitionist’s Daughter, The Seamstress of New Orleans, and Follow the Stars Home, all focus on important, little-known history. She is currently at work on a fourth, dealing with a chilling history of France and the early settlement of Louisiana. She lives in an old grist mill in Highlands, NC, with her husband Ray. 

Mildred Kiconco Barya  is a Ugandan poet, prose writer, and associate professor at UNC-Asheville.  She’s the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently The Animals of My Earth School released by Terrapin Books, 2023.  Her prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, Tin House, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.  She’s now working on a collection of creative nonfiction, and her essay, “Being Here in This Body”, won the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award and was published in the North Carolina Literary Review.  She coordinates the Poetrio Reading events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café