Sue Weaver Dunlap lives deep in the Southern Appalachian Mountains near Walland, Tennessee, where she and her husband Raymond live and work a mountain farm. Here, among the bear, turkeys, deer, and pets, she writes poetry, fiction, and memoir. Her poems have appeared in Appalachian Journal, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Appalachian Heritage, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and Southern Poetry Anthology, among other anthologies and journals. Her poetry has won several awards. Dunlap retired from teaching in 2012 and has since taught poetry classes, done free-lance editing, and volunteered with Tennessee Mountain Writers and Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. Her chapbook entitled The Story Tender was released by Finishing Line Press in 2014 and her full collection entitled Knead in 2016 by Main Street Rag.
Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, was an AWP Award Winner for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick by Oxford American, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Her nonfiction work has been a recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for Essay, the New Southerner Award and the Orison Anthology Award for Creative Nonfiction. She has co-edited, with poet Adrian Blevins, an essay collection called Walk till the Dogs Get Mean. Wanting Radiance, her newest novel, was released in April 2020 from University Press of Kentucky. McElmurray teaches in the Low Residency Program at West Virginia Wesleyan College and as part-time Associate Professor at Gettysburg College.
KB Ballentine received her MFA in Poetry from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. She has participated in writing academies in the United States and Europe, and she holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in English.
She currently teaches high school theatre and English and adjuncts for a local college. She also conducts writing workshops throughout the United States.
Published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, KB was a finalist for the 2006 Joy Harjo Poetry Award and a 2007 finalist for the Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry. KB received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund Award in 2006 and 2007. She was an Opera Omaha finalist in 2008, a 2014 finalist for the Ron Rash Poetry Award, and received the Libba Moore Gray Poetry Prize in 2016.
Learn more about KB Ballentine at www.kbballentine.com.
Janisse Ray is an American author whose work often grapples with the beauty, intricacy, and heartbreak of the biosphere. Red Lanterns is her second book of eco-poetry. She has published five books of literary nonfiction, including the acclaimed Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and The Seed Underground. Ray lives and works in coastal Georgia.
For more information, visit www.janisseray.com
A Professor at Georgia State University and award-winning writer, Beth Gylys has published three collections of poetry (Sky Blue Enough to Drink, Spot in the Dark and Bodies that Hum) and two chapbooks (Matchbook and Balloon Heart). Recipient of a fellowship to attend the MacDowell Colony, her work has been featured on the Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and she has had poetry published in many anthologies and journals including Rattle, Barrow Street, Paris Review, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Southern Review.
Up until now, Alex Panasenko has been a slave laborer in Nazi Germany, a factory worker, a soldier in the US Army during the Korean War, a graduate student in Entomology at UC Berkeley, a science instructor at Berkeley High School, and a bartender. In only a few more years, he will be one hundred, at which point he plans to decide what to do with his life. In the meantime, he is biding his time cooking for wife Sally and dog Lucy in Portland, Oregon.
Jane Sasser was born and raised on a farm in Fairview, NC. She grew up in a family of storytellers and began writing her own stories at the age of six. Her poetry has appeared in JAMA, North American Review, The Sun, and other publications. She has published two poetry chapbooks, Recollecting the Snow and Itinerant. A retired high school English teacher, she lives in Oak Ridge, TN, with her husband and retired greyhounds.
Rita Quillen’s full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, was published in 2016 by Texas Review Press (a Texas A&M affiliation) and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. Her novel, Hiding Ezra (Little Creek Books), was a finalist for the 2005 DANA Awards. One of six semi-finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she has received three Pushcart nominations and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012.
For more information visit: www.ritasimsquillen.com.
Katherine Smith’s poems and fiction have appeared in a number of journals, among them Mezzo Cammin, Unsplendid, Measure, Fiction International, Gargoyle, Ploughshares, The Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Atlanta Review, and Appalachian Heritage. Her first book, Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House), appeared in 2003. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland where she is Poetry Editor for the Potomac Review.
Karen Head is the author of Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (a nonfiction book about issues in contemporary higher education), as well as four books of poetry (Sassing, My Paris Year, Shadow Boxes, and On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year). She also co-edited the poetry anthology Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Poetry, and has exhibited several acclaimed digital poetry projects, including her project “Monumental” (part of Antony Gormley’s One and Other Project) which was detailed in a TIME online mini-documentary. Her poetry appears in a number of national and international journals and anthologies. In 2010 she won the Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Prize.
Head has held residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts-France. She has also taught in study abroad programs in Barcelona, Spain and Oxford, England.
She serves as Editor of the international poetry journal Atlanta Review, and as secretary for the Poetry Atlanta Board of Directors. On a more unusual note, she is currently the Poet Laureate of Waffle House—a title that reflects an outreach program to bring arts awareness to rural high schools in Georgia, which has been generously sponsored by the Waffle House Foundation. She is the Associate Chair and an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she also serves as the Executive Director of the Naugle Communication Center. For fifteen years, Head has been a visiting artist and scholar at the Institute for American Studies at Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany.
Head grew up as an Army Brat—one reason she loves to travel so much—and has family in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She is a native of Atlanta, Georgia, where she lives with her very English husband, and fellow traveler, Colin Potts.