Addie Tsai

Addie Tsai (she/they) is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color, and teaches courses in literature, creative writing, dance, and humanities at Houston Community College. She also teaches in Goddard College's MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Regis University's Mile High MFA program in Creative Writing. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Addie is the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin, which made the 2021 Rainbow Book List, and received press in Autostraddle, Bustle, Barnes & Noble Teen Blog, the Montreal Review of Books, Lambda Literary Review, OutSmart Magazine, Shondaland, and others. Their writing has been published in Honey Literary, Foglifter, VIDA Lit, the Texas Review, Banango Street, The Offing, The Collagist, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut., and elsewhere. Addie is the Fiction Co-Editor at Anomaly, Staff Writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy. You can follow her on Twitter (@addiebrook) or Instagram (@bluejuniper). Her website is http://www.addietsai.com.

Amie Whittemore

Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. As part of her laureateship, she has founded Dream Geographies: An Arts Collaborative and Write with Pride, a series of writing workshops for LGBT+ teens in middle Tennessee. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.

ANn Fisher Wirth

Ann Fisher Wirth’s sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books, 2019). Mississippi, her fifth, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay (Wings Press, 2018). With Laura-Gray Street, Ann coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology(Trinity UP, 3rd printing 2020). A senior fellow of The Black Earth Institute, she was 2017 Poet in Residence at Randolph College, and has had residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, The Mesa Refuge, and CAMAC/France, as well as Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden. A Professor of English, she directs the Environmental Studies program at the University of Mississippi.

Brad Richard

Brad Richard is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Parasite Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Tenth Gate Prize from The Word Works. His chapbook In Place was selected for the 2021 Robin Becker Series from Seven Kitchens Press. His poems and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in many journals, including The Cortland Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Nervous Breakdown, New Orleans Review, and The Southern Review. He is an instructor for the Kenyon Review’s Writers Workshop for Teachers and for New Orleans Writers Workshop. He also serves on the editorial board of The Word Works (where he is series editor for the Hilary Tham Capitol Collection) and is Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. More at his website, bradrichard.org.

Brody Parrish Craig

Originally from Louisiana, Brody Parrish Craig is a creator & educator based in Arkansas. Their chapbook Boyish won the 2019 Omnidawn Chapbook Contest & is forthcoming in April 2021 from Omnidawn Press. BPC is the editor of TWANG Anthology, a collection of creative arts from transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming folks throughout the South & Midwest US. Find more on the project at twanganthology.org.

Chibuihe Obi Achimba

Chibuihe Obi Achimba grew up in Southeastern Nigeria. He was Harvard University 2019-2020 Scholar-at-Risk Fellow and Summer Visiting Artist at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research. His writings have been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Review, Guernica Magazine, Arrowsmith Press, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at Brown University.

ER Anderson & Sarah Luce Look

ER Anderson (he or they) is the Executive Director of Charis Circle, the non-profit programming arm of Charis Books and More. E.R. manages the programming, fiscal, and daily operations of Charis Circle, and is always interested in the ways our communities can share skills and resources. A native Atlantan, E.R. came to Charis as one of the founding members of the Young Writer's Group in 1997, and has enjoyed helping build connections between communities of activists, artists, and academics in Atlanta ever since. When not working at Charis, E.R. is at work on a novel.

Sara Luce Look (she/her) is co-owner and book buyer at Charis Books & More, Georgia’s only independent feminist bookstore, where she has been a bookseller since 1994. Sara graduated from Emory University in 1992, with an undergraduate degree in Women's Studies and Creative Writing. Originally from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, she came South for college and stayed.

Erin Elizabeth Smith

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard, and Mid-American. Smith is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee.

Hooper Schultz

Hooper Schultz is a PhD student in History and research assistant at the Southern Oral History Program. His work in oral history began at the University of Mississippi, where he received his MA and MFA from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He helped to begin the Mississippi Queer Oral History Project, and in the summer of 2019 worked collecting oral histories in Alabama as the Invisible Histories Project LGBTQ+ History Fellow. His current project looks at social movements on college campuses in the South by focusing on gay liberation movement organizing in the 1970s.

Jaime Harker

Jaime Harker is professor of English and the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches American literature, LGBTQ literature, and gender studies. She has published essays on Japanese translation, popular women writers of the interwar period, Oprah’s book club, William Faulkner, Cold War gay literature, and women’s liberation and gay liberation literature. She is the author of America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars and Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, and the co-editor of The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage, This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics,and Faulkner and Print Culture. Her third monograph, The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon, was released in the fall of 2018 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Jane V. Blunschi

Jane V. Blunschi holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Arkansas. A 2014 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellow, her collection of stories, Understand Me, Sugar, was published in 2017 by Yellow Flag Press. Jane's Pushcart Prize-nominated work has appeared in Cactus Heart, Paper Darts, SmokeLong Quarterly, MUTHA Magazine, and Foglifter, among others. She is the Assistant Director of the University of Arkansas MFA Program in Creative Writing and Translation.

John W. Bateman

John W. Bateman was the first person in his family to leave the fly-over states in more than 200 years. It didn't last. John writes and looks for stories in the Deep South. His work has appeared in places like The New Southern Fugitives, Electric Literature, The Santa Fe Writer’s Project Quarterly, Glitterwolf Magazine, Huffington Post, and on the silver screen. He has a secret addiction to glitter and, contrary to his southern roots, does NOT like sweet tea. His first novel, Who Killed Buster Sparkle? (Unsolicited Press) was a 2020 Nominee in Fiction by the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters and recipient of the 2019 Screencraft Cinematic Book Award.

Julia Koets

Julia Koets is the author of PINE, The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays, and Hold Like Owls. Julia's essays and poems have been published in literary journals including Creative Nonfiction, Indiana Review, Nimrod, and The Los Angeles Review. She earned her M.F.A. at the University of South Carolina and her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati. She is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Julie R. Enszer

Julie R. Enszer, PhD, is a scholar and a poet. She edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal and teaches in the Gender Studies Program at the University of Mississippi. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

Leona Sevick

Leona Sevick is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her recent work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, and Spillway. Her work also appears in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Sevick was named a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow for the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She serves as poetry reader for Los Angeles Review, is advisory board member of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center, and is professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature.

M Shelly Conner

M Shelly Conner, PhD is a writer and assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Her debut novel everyman is currently available for pre-order at all retailers and will be released July 20.

Maigen SUllivan

Maigen Sullivan is co-founder and Director of Research & Development for the Invisible Histories Project, a nonprofit that collects, preserves, and researches the rich and diverse histories of the LGBTQ South. Maigen earned her BA in History and her MA in Women’s Studies from The University of Alabama. She is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Education in Studies of Diverse Populations. Maigen is also Women & Gender Studies adjunct faculty at UAB. Maigen was named a 2020 National Association for Multicultural Education Emerging Scholar, the 2020 Society for American Archivists Innovator Award, and has been nominated for the 2021 Visionary Award by Central Alabama Pride.

Megan Clark

Megan Clark earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Georgia State University where she worked as the fiction editor for New South. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in Deep South Magazine, the Masters Review, New Southerner, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from the Ozark foothills, she now resides in Atlanta.

Nickole Brown

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. The audiobook of that collection became available in 2017. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. A chapbook called To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and a long sequence called The Donkey Elegies was published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with her wife, and they regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative.

Pip Gordon

Phillip “Pip” Gordon is an associate professor of English and Gay Studies Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. He’s published essay on LGBTQ+ YA literature, Alice Walker, AIDS narratives, and EthnoHeteroNationalism in the Age of Trump. His book, Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2020. He is currently working on trans studies approaches to the works of William Faulkner.

Robert W. Fieseler

Robert W. Fieseler is a National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association "Journalist of the Year" and the acclaimed debut author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation (Liveright 2018) – winner of the Edgar Award and the Louisiana Literary Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Andrew Holleran reviewed Tinderbox as "far more than just a history of gay rights," and Blanche Wiesen Cook praised it as "a call for our ongoing struggle to build movements for love and dignity." Fieseler is presently working on his second queer history book, which received a Silvers Foundation work-in-progress grant. He graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and now lives with his husband and two kittens in New Orleans.

SARA ELIZABETH GROSSMAN

Sara Elizabeth Grossman is a writer, advocate, and communications specialist living in Denver, CO. She runs CODE-mktg, a LGBTQ+ focused digital marketing firm, sits on the board of The Dru Project, and is a fellow with Everytown for Gun Safety. She's been published in Narrative Magazine, Blunderbuss Magazine, The Florida Review, The Advocate, SELF, OUT, and has a chapbook called Violet Prose coming out in April 2021 with Storm of Blue Press. When she isn't advocating against gun violence or in favor of LGBTQ+ youth, she enjoys music and drag entertainment. Sara lives with her girlfriend Emma and their dogs Baxter and Finley.

SARAH HEYING

Sarah Heying is a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Mississippi, where she researches lesbian and trans aesthetics in periodicals, comix, and genre fiction from the 1970s to now, with a particular focus on literature written in or about the South and the Midwest. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and a BA in Cultural Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her journalism and creative writing have appeared in Lambda Literary, Bitch, Sinister Wisdom, Broken Pencil, Ellipsis, and elsewhere, and her short story, "The Chairkickers' Tale," won the 2019 Robert Watson Fiction Award from The Greensboro Review. For two years, Sarah was President of OUTGrads, the graduate and professional LGBTQ organization on campus. She is currently serving on the board for Glitterary: A Southern Queer Literary Festival.

SARAH SHEPPECK

Sarah Sheppeck is a graduate of U.C. Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Rochester and her Master’s in Secondary Education and Curriculum from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Born and raised in upstate New York, with stints in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, she now lives in the woods of northern Maine, where she pays the bills by ghostwriting for motivational speakers.

STACEY BALKUN

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter (Sundress 2022) & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest as well as Terrain.org’s 10th Annual Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2018, Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches creative writing online at The Poetry Barn & The Loft. Visit her online at http://www.staceybalkun.com.

STEPHANIE ANDREA ALLEN

Stephanie Andrea Allen, Ph.D. is a Black lesbian writer, southerner, scholar, and educator. She is currently Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University. She is also Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at BLF Press, and co-editor of Serendipity Literary Magazine. Her work can be found in various online and print publications, including Star*Line, Inkwell Black, Big Echo: Critical Science Fiction Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, Black From the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing, and in her collection of essays and short fiction, A Failure to Communicate. Her collection of speculative short fiction, How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions, was released on March 2, 2021.