nonfiction

Abigail Thomas, the daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. She is the author of six previous books, including the memoir A Three Dog Life, which was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. She teaches writing and lives in Woodstock.

Amy Stonestrom is an MFA candidate in Bay Path University's creative nonfiction program. She is also part of the year-long Memoir Writer's Project intensive at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Her essays are published or forthcoming in Brevity, Storm Cellar, Jenny, Wanderlust Journal, and Montana Mouthful. Amy lives on the Minnesconsin border with her husband, son and springer spaniel.

Clinton Crockett Peters is the author of the essay collection Pandora’s Garden: Kudzu, Cockroaches, and Other Misfits of Ecology from the University of Georgia Press. He has been awarded literary prizes from Shenandoah, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Columbia Journal. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of North Texas. His work also appears in Orion, Southern Review, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, Catapult, and elsewhere. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Berry College.

David Lazar was a Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction for 2015-16. His books include I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms from the University of Nebraska Press, Who's Afraid of Helen of Troy, After Montaigne, Occasional Desire: Essays, The Body of Brooklyn, Truth in Nonfiction, Essaying the Essay, Powder Town, Michael Powell: Interviews, and Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher. Nine of his essays have been “Notable Essays of the Year” according to Best American Essays. He is professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago. Lazar is founding editor of Hotel Amerika, now in its eighteenth year, and series co-editor of 21st Century Essays at Ohio State University Press.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Judy Bolton-Fasman has completed a memoir entitled Asylum. She has published in many literary venues and has an essay in the anthology The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation and Vermont Studio Center. She was most recently the Erin Donovan Fellow in Non-Fiction at the Mineral School in Mineral, Washington. She lives outside of Boston with her husband and their two children. 

Julie Gard's prose poetry collections include Home Studies (New Rivers Press), which was a finalist for the 2016 Minnesota Book Award; Scrap: On Louise Nevelson (Ravenna Press); and the chapbooks Obscura: The Daguerreotype Series (Finishing Line Press) and Russia in 17 Objects (Tiger's Eye Press). Julie's essays, poems, and stories have appeared in Gertrude, Fourth River, Clackamas Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ekphrasis, and Blackbox Manifold, among other journals and anthologies. A former Fulbright Graduate Fellow in Vladivostok, Russia, she lives in Duluth, Minnesota and is associate professor of writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

Kristine Langley Mahler is a memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska. Her work received the Rafael Torch Award from Crab Orchard Review and has been recently published in The Normal School, New Delta Review, Quarter After Eight, The Collagist, Gigantic Sequins, and The Rumpus.

Suzanne Roberts’ books include the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books) as well as four collections of poetry. Her work has been recently published in The Rumpus, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, Litro, 1966, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the El Dorado County Poet Laureate and lives in South Lake Tahoe, California.

Toti O'Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. She was born in Rome then moved to Los Angeles, where she makes a living as a self-employed artist, performing musician and professional dancer. Her work has most recently appeared in Culture Cult, Remembered Arts, Cloud Women, and Dr. Eckleburg.