Nonfiction

Amanda Fields work has been published in Indiana Review, Brevity, and The Compact Reader: Short Essays by Method and Theme. She earned an MFA from The University of Minnesota and an MA in English from Iowa State University, and she is pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at The University of Arizona. From 2006-2010, she taught writing at The American University in Cairo, Egypt, and she co-authors the blog When in Cairo.

Brenda Miller’s most recent book is A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form. She is the author of five more essay collections, including An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir, and she is the recipient of six Pushcart Prizes. Her book of collaborative essays with Julie Marie Wade, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, received the Cleveland Poetry Center Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her poetry chapbook, The Daughters of Elderly Women, received the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. She coauthored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, now in its third edition from McGraw-Hill.

Kim Chernin's extensive body of work spans many genres, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Crossing the Border, written at the intersection of memoir and fiction, explores life on a Kibbutz in Israel; it concerns itself with memory, experience, and the inevitable dissimilarity between them. In My Mother's House tells the stories of four generations of Jewish women in Chernin's family. The Flame Bearers describes an ancient sect of Jewish women who inherit the necessity to pass on a sacred women's knowledge from generation to generation. Chernin's most recent novel is The Girl Who Went and Saw and Came Back. She lives in Northern California with her life companion, Renate Stendhal.

Elane Johnsons nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, Sonora Review, The Indianapolis Star, Indistar.com, The GNU and The East County Gazette; one of her scholarly papers was selected for The AWP Pedagogy Papers 2010. Elane, an adjunct instructor in Georgia, holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and suffers daily teeth gnashing and hair loss over her current project, a nonfiction chapbook.

Madeleine Blais is a professor of Journalism at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Previously, she worked for the Boston Globe, the Trenton Times, and Tropic Magazine of the Miami Herald from 1979-87 where she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She is the author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1995), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction and named one of the Top 100 sports books of the 20th Century by ESPN; The Heart Is an Instrument; Portraits in Journalism (1992); and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a Family (2001).

Elizabeth Bernays grew up in Australia, then studied agricultural pests in developing countries. After serving as professor of entomology at the University of California Berkeley and Regents professor at the University of Arizona, she also obtained an MFA in creative writing. She has published twenty-five essays in a variety of literary journals and has won several awards including the X.J. Kennedy prize for nonfiction. 

Gretchen Dietz earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has been published in CALYX Journal and The Sun Magazine. She lives in Seattle. Washington with her partner Ann and their blogging dog, Rubin. Gretchen owns a dog-walking business, Wags n Words, as well as working at Wellsprings K9, a water and massage therapy pool for dogs. She is currently working on a collection of essays for her book, To Walk with Dog. Her essay "Let Go, Let Dog" is the first in the series.

Ira Sukrungruang's essays have appeared in Post Road, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, and other literary journals. Many of his essays have been Notables in Best American Essays. Sukrungruang is the author of the memoir, Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, and currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of South Florida.

Colorado State University English professor John Calderazzo's stories, essays and poems have appeared in Audubon, Brevity, Georgia Review, L.A. Review, North American Review, Orion, and elsewhere. His last book was Rising Fire: Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives, essays which explore how volcanoes around the world have affected human culture. He has won a CSU Best Teacher Award and has been cited in Best American Essays and Best American Stories. He is co-founder of an innovative teaching-climate-change-across-the-curriculum program and has been funded by the National Science Foundation to produce YouTube and iTunesU videos for climate change classroom teaching. 

Karen Salyer McElmurrays newest novel is The Motel of the Stars (2008 Sarabande Books). The novel has been nominated for The Weatherford Prize in Fiction, was a Lit Life Novel of the Year and was named Editors Pick by Oxford American. She is also the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mothers Journey, recipient of the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction, as well as Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Georgia College and State University, McElmurray is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Arts and Letters: A Journal of Contemporary Culture.

Katherine Cottle's memoir, Halfway: A Journal through Pregnancy, is due for release in Fall 2010 by Apprentice House (Loyola University Maryland). She is also the author of My Father's Speech: Poems (Apprentice House, 2008). Her recent essays, fiction, and poetry appear in The Pinch, The Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Poetry East, The Chesapeake Reader, and The Broome Review. She is currently completing her doctoral residency in Language and Professional Writing at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland.

From Peace Corps in Kenya to teaching English in Mauritania, Kelly Cunnane gleans her writing, emphasizing the challenging, heartwarming, and curious connections between cultures. Cunnane has published work in anthologies and magazines, gaining a PEN New Writer award for nonfiction and The Maine Lupine Award and The Ezra Jack Keats Award for her children's book, For You Are a Kenyan Child (Simon & Schuster). Her new children's book, Chirchir is Singing arrives this year. Cunnane teaches abroad and in Maine, and runs Creative Cultural Workshops for Kids & Communities.

Lori Jakiela is the author of two memoirs – The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious (C&R Press 2013) and Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette 2006) – as well as a poetry collection, Spot the Terrorist! (Turning Point 2012). Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Brevity, Hobart, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and more. She teaches in the writing programs at Pitt-Greensburg and Chatham University.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and two forthcoming books: The Burning House (novel, 2011) and Unbuilt Projects (short prose pieces, 2012). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Five Points, The Seattle Review, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, Story Quarterly, Lo-Ball, and other magazines and anthologies. He's taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches at NYU and in the low residency MFA Program at Fairfield University. He lives in New York City.

Sally Shivnans short fiction and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, Rosebud, and other journals. Her travel essays have been featured in anthologies including The Best American Travel Writing 2006, as well as in The Washington Post, Miami Herald, The Nature Conservancy Magazine, Washingtonian, and many other publications and websites. She teaches creative writing at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), and is currently at work on a historical novel set in the sublime swampwoods of western Florida in the War of 1812.

Tricia Louvar is a writer, book editor, and visual artist. Her work has appeared in Best of the Web 2009, Hanging by Threads, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, Los Angeles Times, Orion online, Zyzzyva, Brevity, Smokelong Quarterly, Vestal Review, Word Riot, among other places. She has interviewed award-winning poets and writers for a newspaper, reviewed restaurants and bars, ghostwritten books for Olympic athletes, rehabilitated wildlife, edited more than 50 books for publishers, and showcased photography in New York. She is working on many creative projects, one of which includes developing a course to teach photography to children in Los Angeles.

Daniel Nester is a journalist, essayist, poet, editor, and teacher. His new book, How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction, is just out from Soft Skull Press. Nesters first two books, God Save My Queen: A Tribute (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On (2004), are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His third, The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2006), is a collection of poems. As a journalist and essayist, his work has appeared in a variety of places, such as Poets & Writers, The Morning News, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, The Rumpus, Bloomsbury Review, McSweeneys Internet Tendency, and Bookslut.

Robin Behn is the author of five volumes of poetry including, most recently, The Yellow House, Naked Writing, and Horizon Note. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama and for Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work in this issue is from a series of pieces inspired by traditional fiddle tunes—in this case, a tune also called "The Star Above the Garter." Sample Robin's band Waxwing at her website.

Tim Hedges holds degrees from Cornell University, The Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan where he received a Hopwood Award. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the The Gettysburg Review, Harpur Palate, Sycamore Review, Summerset Review, and other journals. He teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, and he lives near Detroit with his wife and son.