nonfiction

Alice Lowe lives in San Diego, California, where she reads and writes about life and literature, food and family. Her personal essays have appeared in more than sixty literary journals including, this past year: Baltimore Review, Stonecoast Review, Citron Review, Eclectica, Room, and Pilcrow & Dagger. Her work is cited among the Notable Essays in the 2016 Best American Essays and was nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. Alice is the author of numerous essays and reviews on Virginia Woolf’s life and work, including two monographs published by Cecil Woolf Publishers in London.

Ben Kessler is the current Co-Editor-in-Chief of Portland Review. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

Bryn Gribben is an instructor of English at Seattle University, teaching literature, creative non-fiction, and composition. A Victorianist by training, Bryn was the assistant editor of fiction for The Laurel Review from 2006-2008 before leaving her tenure-track job to be back in the city she loves. Her essay “Divorce Closet” is part of a larger manuscript, entitled Amplified Heart: An Emotional Discography, a series of essays on intimacy and music. Recent poems and non-fiction essays can be found in The Rappahannock Review, 3Elements Review, and upcoming issues of River River, and great weather for MEDIA.

DJ Lee is a Regents Professor of English at Washington State University. She is an author/editor of seven books spanning environmental history, oral history, and British Romantic poetry. Her edited collection The Land Speaks was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Her creative essays and reviews have appeared in Terrain, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vela, and Narrative, among other journals and anthologies. She is currently completing a memoir about walking the Greenland Ice Sheet and a collection of personal essays that weave 19th-century poetry and environmental themes.

Kathleen Buckley is a writer and designer living outside Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus and Paper Darts and her stories have been selected for inclusion in the Chicago Listen to Your Mother and Expressing Motherhood Shows. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Roosevelt University and is working on a collection of essays about (dis)belief, motherhood, and the troublesome intersection of the two.

Laurie Blauner is the author of five novels, eight books of poetry, and a forthcoming creative non-fiction book. She won PANK’s 2020 Creative Non-fiction Book Contest and her book, called I Was One of My Memories, will be available in 2022. A new novel called Out of Which Came Nothing is currently available from Spuyten Duyvil Press. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Field, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, The Collagist, The Best Small Fictions 2016 and many other magazines.

Mark Dostert was a volunteer counselor at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago where he later became a full-time Children’s Attendant. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ascent, Cimarron Review, The Dallas Morning News, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hayden’s Ferry Review Online Content, Punctuate., and Southern Indiana Review, and been cited as Notable in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011 and The Best American Essays 2013. He is the author of Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side, excerpted in Salon and featured at the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest.

Mary Lewis has published about 21 stories and 8 essays in journals including The Woven Tale Press, r.kv.r.y. quarterly, Persimmon Tree, Superstition Review, The Spadina Literary Review, Toasted Cheese, Lost Lake Folk Opera Magazine, Trapeze, Valley Voice, Wapsipinicon Almanac, and a story collection, Frank Walsh’s Kitchen and other Stories. She has an MFA in writing from Augsburg University. As an ecologist, and grown up kid, she's deeply concerned about planet earth, and wishes we humans could stop messing things up.

Megan J. Arlett was born in the UK, grew up in Spain, and now lives in New Mexico. The recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes, her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2019, Best New British and Irish Poets, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Passages North, and Prairie Schooner, among others.

Tayo Basquiat recently gave up tenure as a philosophy professor to pursue creative writing. He is in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Wyoming where he also teaches communication for the School of Energy and still teaches philosophy and religion as an online adjunct instructor for Bismarck State College. Tayo’s work has appeared in On Second Thought, Northern Plains Ethics Journal, the Cheat River Review, and as producer of Wyoming Public Media’s “Spoken Words” podcast.