About the Contributors

Beth Alvarado is the author of four books. Her essay collection, Anxious Attachments, won the 2020 Oregon Books Award and was long-listed for the PEN Art of the Essay Award. Her recent fiction title, Jillian in the Borderlands, marries the social justice novel with magical realism to portray the humanitarian crisis at the border. “Nightmares like these” is from a collection-in-progress about places visited, remembered, and returned to by a voice that looks at the present, in all its complications, via the lessons, art, and politics of the past. Visit her at www.bethalvarado.com.Stephanie Anderson is the author of From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture (The New Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, Flyway, Hotel Amerika, Terrain.org, The Chronicle Review, Sweet, and others. Stephanie is the 2020 winner of the Margolis Award for social justice journalism and a co-editor for the University of Nebraska Press “Our Regenerative Future” book series. Her debut nonfiction book, titled One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl's Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture, won a 2020 Nautilus Award and 2019 Midwest Book Award. Stephanie holds an MFA from Florida Atlantic University, where she serves as Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction.Jeanine Eyre Bee is a Pushcart Prize nominated writer who serves as the fiction editor for Wayfare magazine. Her writing has appeared in Inscape, Dialogue, Exponent II, Irreantum, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband and four children in Utah, where pseudo swears are as ubiquitous as dirty sodas.Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus 2024), and the short-story collection, One Person Away From You (Moon City Press Award Winner 2021). His work has appeared in The ThreePenny Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Best Microfiction, and listed as notable in three editions of The Best American Essays and as a special mention in The Pushcart Prize anthology. He has an MFA from American University and more of his work is available at andrewbertaina.com.Emily Collins's work has appeared in The LA Review of Books, The Millions, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, New Orleans Review, Florida Review, The Chicago Review of Books, and others. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana where she was a teaching fellow.Debra Dean is the author of four critically acclaimed books that have been published in twenty-one languages. Her debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a #1 Booksense Pick, a Booklist Top Ten Novel, and an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. Recent essays have appeared in The Missouri Review, LitHub, Psychology Today, Image, and Southern Humanities Review. Dean is a professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. This essay is excerpted from a recently completed manuscript titled Daughterland.Claire Hansen is a writer, educator, and recovering journalist who grew up in the mountains of North Carolina and currently lives in The Bahamas, where she teaches high school English and creative writing. Claire earned an MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a bachelor's in journalism at Northwestern University. Her creative work has appeared in the Bedford Square Review and elsewhere, and her journalistic work has appeared in a number of American publications.Elizabeth Logan Harris is the recipient of the Mississippi Review Nonfiction Award and the AWP Intro Journals Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Guernica, Longreads, and New England Review. She is the co-editor of an anthology about Governors Island, NY, forthcoming from Fordham University Press.Susan Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart's Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, Agni, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in Northern California.Marianne Janack is the John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. She has a Ph.d. in philosophy and an MFA from The Rainier Writing Workshop. Her creative work has been published by Grub Street, Stone Canoe, and zone 3. She edits the philosophical literary journal Book XI. Her academic work has been published in several journals and by Penn State U Press and Stanford U Press. She was the Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Professor of Philosophy in 2017–2018.Jeanne Kay is a French-American writer living in rural Ohio. She holds graduate degrees in Postcolonial Theory and Law from University of London and Duke, and was a contributor to Dislocating Globality: Deterritorialization, Difference, and Resistance. Her writing has appeared in ThinkProgress, Foreign Policy in Focus, and TheNation.com, and her essay “In Praise of Frailty” was the runner-up for the 2024 Birdcoat Quarterly Editor's Choice Prize. “Fishbowl” is a chapter from her current project, a memoir about depression.Jerry Mathes grew up a feral child in the deserts of the American Southwest who loved to read library books and take photographs. In 2019, he was awarded a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship. He has worked as a screenwriter with Rehabilitation through the Arts, is a three-time awardee of the Norman Levan Grant, a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar alumnus, an award-winning author of four books, arts reporter, photographer, screenwriter, and librettist. Although Mathes still struggles with subject-verb agreement and where to put commas, his memoir Of Time and Punishment will be published this year. He loves his two daughters very much.Carrie Messenger lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Her work has appeared most recently in Kenyon Review, Grimoire, and Pleiades. She was a fellow at MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her short story collection, In the Amber Chamber, was published in 2018.Brad Aaron Modlin is the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska, Kearney, where he teaches undergrads and in the online master's program in CW. His essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize 2025, Brevity, River Teeth, and DIAGRAM, and his poems in Poetry Unbound, The Slowdown, orchestral scores, art exhibits, and social media viral moments. His book, Everyone at This Party Has Two Names, is available from Black Lawrence Press, and his novel seeks a home. Giving in-person readings, he remembers sensible shoes. For online readings, he's barefoot.Sibbie O'Sullivan writes in multiple genres, including poetry, fiction, essays and drama. Her memoir, “My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan Who Never Screamed,” was published in 2020 by Mad Creek Books. Her poems have been published in many journals including West Branch, The Laurel Review, Sou'Wester, Zone 3, among others. She has received three arts grants from The Maryland State Arts Council, one for her drama, “The Body,” a one-woman play starring Sarah Pleydell and performed at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post. O'Sullivan is retired from teaching at the Honors College of The University of Maryland, College Park, MD. She specializes in the history of American masculinity, how the body intersects with literature, and the modern novel. She lives in Wheaton, MD.Originally from the Midwest, Sarah Olson has her BA in English Literature from Northwestern University, her MA in English Literature from Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. She has taught literature and writing to all ages, from first-graders, to high school boarding students, to college students. Currently at work on a novel, Sarah lives in Colorado with her husband and three young children.Wendy S. Palmer is an ex-social worker who lives on an island. Her work has appeared in Rosebud, New Millennium, Nimrod, Confluence, Sixfold, Lunch Ticket, Spillwords, Martha's Vineyard Magazine, Sad Girl Diaries and various anthologies. She is working on a novel about Charlotte Perkins Gilman, nineteenth century radical feminist, described by some as a genius, by others as hysterical and overly absorbed by the woman question.Lindsey Pharr (she/her) lives and writes outside of Asheville, NC. She received her MFA from Spalding University's Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing in Louisville, KY. Her work has appeared in River Teeth, Southeast Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. A full list of her publications may be found on her website www.lindsey-pharr.com.Suzanne Roberts is the author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay), Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (North American Travel Journalists Association 2020 Bronze Award for a Travel Book), and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award and published in a new edition in 2023), as well as four collections of poems. Named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic's Traveler, Suzanne's work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women's Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, CNN, National Geographic Traveler, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, The Normal School, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno, teaches in the low residency MFA in creative writing at UNR-Tahoe, and lives with her husband in South Lake Tahoe, California. She's currently under contract for a creative writing craft book based on her Substack newsletter 52 Writing Prompts.Amy Lee Scott's essay collection, When the World Explodes (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio University Press), won the Gournay Prize and debuted earlier this year. Her work has been featured in various journals including The Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, Gulf Coast, New Letters, and Tin House Online, and has been noted in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. Adopted from South Korea as an infant, and raised in suburban Los Angeles, she now lives with her family and tabby cat in Southeast Michigan. More information can be found at amyleescott.com.