Panelists
Stephanie Andrea Allen (she/her)
Stephanie Andrea Allen, Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, creative writer, small press publisher, and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her research centers Black lesbian cultural histories and Black feminisms through various expressions, including literature, film, and other print and visual media. Her current book project examines how Black lesbian literature and film reflects the material realities of Black lesbian lived experiences, as well as how it responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that contribute to the invisibility of Black lesbians in popular and literary culture. Dr. Allen is also Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at BLF Press, and co-editor of Serendipity Literary Magazine. Her creative work can be found in various online and print publications, including Mom Egg Review, Star*Line, Inkwell Black, Big Echo: Critical Science Fiction Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and in her two short story collections, A Failure to Communicate and How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions.
StACEY BAULKEN (SHE/HER)
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. Winner of a 2021 PEN America grant, Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches creative writing online at The Poetry Barn & The Loft.
S. BEAR BERGMAN (he/him)
S. Bear Bergman is the author of nine books, founder of Flamingo Rampant press, and frequent consultant in equity and inclusion to business and government. Bear began his work in equity at the age of 15, as a founding member of the first ever Gay/Straight Alliance and has continued to help organizations and institutions move further along the pathways to justice ever since. Bear’s work in equity education has brought him to sporting arenas, field offices in actual fields, code-named government buildings in unplottable locations, and many unremarkable boardrooms in which great and lasting change has begun and continued. These days Bear spends his time making trans cultural competency interventions however he can and trying to avoid stepping on his children’s Lego.
WO CHAN (THEY/THEM)
Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of TOGETHERNESS (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, and The Margins. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts and elsewhere. Follow their work at @theillustriouspearl
ANGELA CHEN (she/her)
Angela Chen is a senior editor at Wired Magazine, where she oversees the ideas section. Previously, she was a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, Vox Media's The Verge, and MIT Technology Review. She is the author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR, Electric Literature, and Them. Her reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Aeon Magazine, Paris Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Lapham's Quarterly, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and more.
M SHELLY CONNER (she/her)
M Shelly Conner, PhD is a writer, assistant professor of creative writing and Interim Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Central Arkansas. She is a multi-genre writer whose essays examine the intersections of race, gender, queer culture and sustainable living. Her comedy webisode Quare Life was an official selection at 2018 Outfest in Los Angeles and New Fest: NY's LGBTQ Film Fest. Her debut novel everyman is available from booksellers in hardcover, ebook and audiobook and has been featured in Ms. Magazine, Travel + Leisure, Parade, and Entertainment Weekly.
JULIE ENszER (She/Her)
Julie R. Enszer, PhD, is the author of four poetry collections, including Avowed, and the editor of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems by Lynn Lonidier, The Complete Works of Pat Parker, and Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989. Enszer edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.
Tyler friend (THEY/THEM)
Tyler Friend was grown—and is still growing—in Tennessee, and they received their MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Tyler is the author of Him or Her or Whatever (Alternating Current Press, 2022) and the chapbook BUNKER, which is available in Third Man's "Literarium" book vending machine. Their poems have also shown up in Tin House, Hobart, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. They edit Francis House, design for Eulalia Books, teach at a private high school and a community college, work in the circulation department of a public library, and befriend all the cats.
KELSEY FOX (She/Her)
Kelsey Fox is a third-year PhD student in the English Department at the University of Mississippi. She received her B.A. in English and Spanish from Brescia University and her M.A. in English from Western Kentucky University. Her master’s thesis explores the intersections of southern sexualities and the Plantationocene in modernist literature. Her current work involves examining the convergence of critical prison studies, fugitivity, and queer ecology in contemporary American literature. She has been teaching writing and literature for five years.
LAUREN HOUGH (She/Her)
Lauren Hough is the New York Times bestselling author of Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing. She was born in Germany and raised in seven countries and West Texas. She’s been an airman in the U.S. Air Force, a green-aproned barista, a bartender, a delivery driver, and, for a time, a cable guy. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Guardian, and HuffPost. She lives in Austin.
Max Hunt (He/Him)
Max Hunt is a queer, trans, and neurodivergent writer native to Mississippi. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in One Teen Story, Polyphony Lit, Otherwise Engaged, Outcast Magazine, and others. In his free time, Max likes to draw, play guitar, and collect unusual items that range from a Renaissance lute to rare lichens. Max attends the University of Mississippi as an undergraduate.
Kim Kotel (She/Her)
Kim Kotel is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Mississippi with a graduate minor in gender studies. She has an MA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. Both of her master’s theses explore sexuality, the former investigating the relationship between sexuality and genre play/hybridity, and the latter constructing a web of character relationships that elude straightforward categorization. Her current interests involve tracing asexual impulses and the effects of compulsory sexuality in late Victorian and modernist literature.
Kacee McKinney (she/Her)
Kacee McKinney is a third-year PhD student in the English Department at the University of Mississippi. She received her bachelor’s degree from Oklahoma Baptist University and her master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She’s been teaching for over five years and tutoring for ten. She studies literary depictions of animals and queerness in southern literature from the last century. She lives in Oxford, MS with her fiancé, her two dogs, and the love of her life–her cat.
Joshua Nguyen (He/Him)
Joshua Nguyen is the author of American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021) and Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is a bubble tea connoisseur, loves a good pun, and is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.
Xan Phillips (they/Them)
Xan Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of a Whiting Award, Lambda Literary Award, and The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xan is the author of HULL (Nightboat Books 2019) and Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. They have received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Xan’s poetry is featured in Berlin Quarterly Review, Bomb Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
Ruben Quesada (he/Him)
Ruben Quesada, Ph.D. is editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, author of Revelations, Next Extinct Mammal, and translator of Exiled from the Throne of Night: Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda. His writing appears in Harvard Review, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He has served as an editor and coordinator for The Rumpus, Kenyon Review. AGNI, Pleiades, Publishing Triangle Awards, and PEN America Literary Awards. He serves on the board of Foglifter Press and the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Chicago.
Douglas Ray (He/HIm)
Douglas Ray earned his B.A. in Classics and English and M.F.A. in creative writing from The University of Mississippi. He was a Klingenstein Fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University, and studied in the doctor of education program at Northeastern University. He is author of a collection of poems, He Will Laugh (Lethe 2012), and editor of The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South (Sibling Rivalry Press 2014), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and named Top 10 LGBTQ Book by the American Libary Association. A 2020 Ohio Arts Council Individual Arts Grant recipient, he has received fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Oxford American. Since moving from Oxford in 2010, he has worked in independent boarding schools in Alabama and Ohio and served as a consultant to schools and families in the U.S., UK, Canada, and China. Currently, he is Principal of Yungu High School, an innovative private school founded and funded by Jack Ma and Alibaba Partners. He lives in Hangzhou, China.
Kara Russell (She/Her)
Kara Russell is a PhD candidate in English and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she researches lesbian attachments to modernity, the U.S. South, and queer ecologies. She has presented at conferences such as SEWSA, SAMLA, NeMLA, and others.
C.T. Salazar (He/They)
C. T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. He's the author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books). He's the author of three chapbooks, most recently American Cavewall Sonnets (Bull City Press), and the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in The Rumpus, West Branch, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Denver Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. C. T. is currently a tenure track librarian at Delta State University.
Nick White (He/HIm)
Nick White is the author of the novel How to Survive a Summer and the story collection Sweet and Low. He is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University's MFA Program in Creative Writing. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in a variety of places, including The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Catapult, The Hopkins Review, Indiana Review,The Literary Review, and Lit Hub.
