Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over thirty books. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission, a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, and a member of the peer review panel for Fulbright grants, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a 2024 Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, a 2024 Civita Institute Fellowship, and ten juried residencies at the American Academy in Rome. Currently a faculty member at The Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, she has taught at Yale University, the American University in Rome, Stanford University, where she leads a workshop in professional empowerment through their Continuing Studies Division, the New School, San Diego State University, where she has served as Editor-in-Residence in partnership with Poetry International on three occasions, and in Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European M.F.A. Program. A prolific public speaker with the Ovation Agency, Dr. Darling has also lectured at the historic Betsy Hotel in South Beach, Miami, the United States Embassy in Togo, The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and Webster University’s Geneva, Switzerland campus, where she leads a biannual writing workshop for diplomats. Dr. Darling serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between Greece, Rome, and the Amalfi Coast.
Jess T. Dugan is an artist and writer whose work explores the complexities of personhood, relationships, desire, love, and family. While their practice is centered around photography, it also includes writing, video, sound, drawing, and installation. Their work is regularly exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of over 60 museums. Over the past fifteen years, they have built a sustainable career as a visual artist and have extensive experience working with museums, galleries, universities and nonprofit organizations, publishers, and press outlets. In addition to their own creative work, they are passionate about sharing the professional knowledge they’ve acquired throughout their career with other artists.
Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lambda Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, the Black Mountain Institute, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, and Vogue. Febos is a full professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.
Kelle Groom's newest book is How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays (Tupelo Press, October 2023). Her memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster 2011 / pb 2012), is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir, Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Month, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor's Pick. Her four poetry collections are Spill, (Anhinga Press), Five Kingdoms (Anhinga), Luckily (Anhinga), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida). Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, New England Review, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and her nonfiction and photography will be featured in Virginia Quarterly Review’s “True Story” this Fall. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction, and two-time Florida Book Award winner in Poetry, Groom's honors also include fellowships from Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada-Las Vegas in partnership with the Library of Congress, Civitella Ranieri, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, James Merrill House, Millay Colony for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, American Antiquarian Society, and Ucross Foundation, as well as two Florida Book Awards, a State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs grant, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant. Groom was previously Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of Humanities at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe. She has also served as Nonfiction Editor for AGNI Magazine and Poetry Editor of The Florida Review.
Ann Hood is the author of over a dozen novels, including the bestsellers The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer, and The Book That Matters Most. Her debut novel, the bestseller Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, has been in print since 1987. She has also written five memoirs, including Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which is the story of her five-year-old daughter Grace who died from a virulent form of strep in 2002. The book was a NYT Editors’ Choice and was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly.
Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Food and Wine, Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, The Paris Review, and many more.
She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing awards, a Best American Travel Writing award, and a Best American Spiritual Writing award,
Hood’s most recent book is her memoir, Fly Girl, which is about her eight years as a TWA flight attendant from the late 70s to the mid-80s, spanning the Golden Age of Flying through deregulation and the beginning of vast system wide changes.
Ann Hood splits her time between Providence, Rhode Island and New York City with her husband, the food writer Michael Ruhlman.
Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, The New Yorker, and Oxford American among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, The Slow Down with Tracy K. Smith, and Together in Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches creative writing. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist.
Joan Kwon Glass is a Korean diasporic poet, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize for her book DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS and NIGHT SWIM, winner of the Diode Book Prize. Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in POETRY, The Slowdown, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Terrain, Ninth Letter, Rattle, AAWW (The Margins), Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander and elsewhere. She teaches and lives near New Haven, CT.
Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection, The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her latest collection is Life On Earth. And, her latest resource book is Finger Exercises for Poets, a book of concise craft essays and exercises for poets was released in July 2024.
Carl Phillips is the author, most recently, of Scattered Snows, to the North (FSG, 2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (FSG, 2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Phillips’s other honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Library of Congress. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). After over thirty years teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, Phillips lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Ruben Quesada’s latest poetry collection, Brutal Companion, winner of the Barrow Street Press Editors Prize, was published in October 2024. He edited the anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, which won an Independent Publisher Book Award in 2023. Quesada’s work appears in The Believer, American Poetry Review, the Best American Poetry series, Harvard Review, and The New York Times Magazine. Quesada has received fellowships from the Jentel Foundation and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He lives in Chicago.
Susanna Sonnenberg is the author of two memoirs, Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships, both New York Times bestsellers. She has been on the summer faculty of the Fine Arts Work Center since 2017. She lives in Missoula, Montana, where she teaches online and hikes with her dog Mazie.