Nonfiction

Alison Condie Jaenicke teaches writing at Penn State University, where she also serves as assistant director of the creative writing program. Alison’s essays, poems, and stories have appeared in such places as Brain, Child; Literary Mama; and Gargoyle Magazine, and her writing has earned prizes from the Knoxville Writers’ Guild and the National League of American Pen Women. A native of Washington, DC, Alison earned her BA and MA in English from the University of Virginia and currently lives in State College, PA, with her husband and two children.

Allison Wilkins is the assistant director for Writing Workshops in Greece. She is the author of Girl Who. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming with Sierra, Hayden's Ferry Review, Superstition Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly and others.

Elizabeth Arnold is a graduate of the MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her work has previously appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Whitefish Review, The Boiler Journal, and the anthology Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and been listed as notable in The Best American Essays. She lives on a working farm in Central Pennsylvania with her husband, horses, chickens and dogs.

Gabrielle Burton is a writer and filmmaker. She won the Thomas A. Wilhelmus award from Southern Indiana Review for best non-fiction essay “East of East” about the giant turtles of Malaysia. She also won 2013 Ohio Arts Council's Individual Excellence Award. Gabrielle has a poem in the current Los Angeles Review and three in “The Burden of Light.” After Harvard and Berklee, she won a Rotary to study film in France, then founded FIVE SISTERS PRODUCTIONS with her sisters (www.fivesisters.com). Burton’s current film is a documentary on drag. She recently gave a TedxTalk on gender (http://youtu.be/YOkyc91eY90).

John Michael Flynn also writes as Basil Rosa. His second short story collection, Dreaming Rodin, was published in November, 2013 by Publerati (www.publerati.com).

Kelle Groom's memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Library Journal Best Memoir, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor's Pick. The author of three poetry collections, most recently, Five Kingdoms (Anhinga), her work has appeared in Agni, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry. A 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose, Groom is on faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe.

Rebecca Meacham is the author the flash fiction collection Morbid Curiosities, which won the 2013 New Delta Review chapbook contest. Her story collection, Let’s Do, won University of North Texas Press’s 2004 Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and the book was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. Meacham’s prose has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Necessary Fiction, Paper Darts, Wigleaf, West Branch, The Collagist, Monkeybicycle, and other journals, and she’s currently a blogger for Ploughshares. She’s an Associate Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she directs the creative writing program.

Rori Leigh Hoatlin is a third-year graduate student at Georgia College & State University studying creative nonfiction. Rori is a Teaching Fellow at GCSU and a Summer 2013 Teaching Consultant with The Lake Michigan Writing Project in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has previously appeared in Young Scholars in Writing, Prick of the Spindle and is forthcoming in Steel Toe Review.

Sean Prentiss is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Finding Abbey: a Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave. Prentiss is also the co-editor of The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, a creative nonfiction craft anthology. He lives on a small lake in northern Vermont and serves as an assistant professor at Norwich University.

Along with two books of travel essays--Guatemalan Journey (University of Texas Press) and Green Dreams: Travels in Central America (Lonely Planet)--Stephen Benz has published essays in Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, TriQuarterly, and other journals. One of his essays was selected for Best American Travel Writing, 2003. Formerly a writer for Tropic, the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald, he now teaches professional writing at the University of New Mexico. He is on the faculty of the Taos Summer Writers' Conference.