Ed Falco

Ed Falco's latest book is Toughs, a novel based in part on historical events in the life of gangster Vince Coll. His previous novel was The Family Corleone, which was developed from a screenplay by Mario Puzo. His most recent short story collection is Burning Man (SMU, 2011). His previous short story collections are Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories (Unbridled Books, 2005), Acid (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), and Plato at Scratch Daniel's and Other Stories (University of Arkansas Press, 1990). He is also the author of four novels: Saint John of the Five Boroughs (Unbridled Books, 2009), Wolf Point (Unbridled Books, 2005), A Dream with Demons (Eastgate Systems, 1997), and Winter in Florida (Soho, 1990), as well as a collection of literary and experimental short fictions, In the Park of Culture (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), and a collection of hypertext short fictions, Sea Island (Eastgate Systems, 1995). Ed's plays--The Center, Possum Dreams, Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha, and others--have mostly been produced and read in and around Blacksburg, Virginia, where he teaches in Virginia Tech's MFA program, and he edits The New River, an online journal of new media writing.

http://www.edfalco.us/

Jeff Mann

Jeff Mann grew up in Covington, Virginia, and Hinton, West Virginia, receiving degrees in English and forestry from West Virginia University. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in many publications, including Arts and Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Willow Springs, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Crab Orchard Review, and Appalachian Heritage. He has published three award-winning poetry chapbooks, Bliss, Mountain Fireflies, and Flint Shards from Sussex; five full-length books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine, On the Tongue, Ash: Poems from Norse Mythology, A Romantic Mann, and Rebels; two collections of personal essays, Edge: Travels of an Appalachian Leather Bear and Binding the God: Ursine Essays from the Mountain South; three novellas, Devoured, included in Masters of Midnight: Erotic Tales of the Vampire,Camp Allegheny, included in History’s Passion: Stories of Sex Before Stonewall, and The Saga of Einar and Gisli, included in On the Run: Tales of Gay Pursuit and Passion; four novels, Fog: A Novel of Desire and Reprisal, which won the Pauline Réage Novel Award, Purgatory: A Novel of the Civil War, which won a Rainbow Award, Cub, and Salvation: A Novel of the Civil War; a book of poetry and memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men; and two volumes of short fiction, Desire and Devour: Stories of Blood and Sweat and A History of Barbed Wire, which won a Lambda Literary Award. In 2013, he was inducted into the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival Hall of Fame. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

http://www.jeffmannauthor.com/

Lucinda Roy

Lucinda Roy is Alumni Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech where she teaches creative writing in the graduate and undergraduate programs. A 2005 recipient of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award, Professor Roy’s publications include the poetry collections Wailing the Dead to Sleep and The Humming Birds (winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize); and the novels Lady Moses (a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection), and The Hotel Alleluia. Her memoir-critique entitled No Right to Remain Silent: What We’ve Learned from the Tragedy at Virginia Tech, was published by Three Rivers/Random House. Professor Roy was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Richmond in 2000, and she was selected by the Virginia Press Women’s Association as Newsmaker of the Year in 2009. At Virginia Tech, she has served as Chair of English, Director/Co-Director of Creative Writing, and Associate Dean for Curriculum, Outreach, and Diversity. She has been a guest on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, The Today Show, Sunday Morning, Oprah, NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show, Sky News, Al Jazeera, and many TV and radio shows. She has also been a featured guest on PBS and BBC documentaries. Her poetry, fiction, and commentaries have appeared in numerous publications including North American Review, American Poetry Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, the New York Times, Newsweek’s College Guide, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Guardian, Inside Higher Education, and USA Today. Professor Roy is currently at work on another poetry collection, articles and commentaries on school safety and gun violence, a young adult novel series, and a series of oil paintings depicting the Middle Passage.

http://www.lucindaroy.net/

Matthew Vollmer

Matthew Vollmer is the author of Future Missionaries of America (published by MacAdam Cage and Salt Modern Fiction), a collection of stories, and inscriptions for headstones, a collection of essays. A second story collection, titled Gateway to Paradise, was published by Persea Books in 2015. With David Shields, he is the co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (forthcoming from W. W. Norton). To read samples from this work, and to browse a collection of literary artifacts, visit literaryartifacts.tumblr.com. His work has appeared in Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Tin House, The Oxford American, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Ecotone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Antioch Review, Willow Springs, DIAGRAM, Portland Review, Tampa Review, Passages North, PANK, New England Review, The Normal School, Confrontation, Salt Hill, Fugue, PRISM International, and New Letters. Vollmer is the recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts grant, as well as the Sturm Award for Creative Arts at Virginia Tech. His work has been short-listed three times for the Best American Short Stories series, and appears in Best American Essays 2013. He also edits the 21st Century Prose Series for the University of Michigan Press.Vollmer holds a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. in English from North Carolina State University, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As an Assistant Professor, he is a member of the MFA Faculty in the English Department at Virginia Tech, where he directs the undergraduate creative writing program.

http://matthewvollmer.com/

Evan Lavender-Smith

Evan Lavender-Smith is the author of a hybrid-genre work, From Old Notebooks, which was a NewPages Noteworthy Book, a Small Press Distribution Recommended Book, a finalist for the Fence Modern Poets Series, and named a best book of the year by Biblioklept, HTMLGiant, Dzanc Books, 32 Poems and others. He is also the author of Avatar, a short novel, which was a Small Press Distribution Bestseller. His writing has been published by Arts & Letters, BOMB, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Fence, Glimmer Train, Harvard Review and many other magazines. His co-translation of Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha’s “Canto del macho anciano” was recently included in Pinholes from the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America. He is the founding editor of Noemi Press, the former editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, and a contributor at HTMLGiant. Recently he was named a finalist for the Creative Capital Award and he served as an ArtWorks grant panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.

http://el-s.net/

Sophia Terazawa

Sophia Terazawa is the author of Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021) and Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), along with two chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press), a winner of the 2015 Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest, and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize.

Additional honors include the Bill Waller Award for Creative Nonfiction, LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Award, Monique Wittig Writer's Scholarship, along with nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and CLMP's 2022 Firecracker Award. Terazawa's work appears widely in journals and magazines, such as, The Offing, New Delta Review, The Iowa Review, and The Rumpus. She's a graduate of the University of Arizona's MFA program, where she also served as Poetry Editor of Sonora Review. Her favorite color is purple.

http://www.sophiaterazawa.com

Khadijah Queen

Khadijah Queen is a multidisciplinary writer and visual artist. Queen is the author of six books, most recently Anodyne (Tin House 2020), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her fifth book, I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017), was praised in O Magazine, The New Yorker, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere as “quietly devastating” and “a portrait of defiance that turns the male gaze inside out.” Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women's Performance Writing. The award included a full production at Theaterlab in New York City, directed by Fiona Templeton and performed by The Relationship theater company. A hybrid essay about the pandemic, “False Dawn,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine, was named a Notable Essay of 2020 in Best American Essays (HarperCollins 2021), and reprinted in the anthology Bigger Than Bravery (2023). Individual poems, interviews, and essays appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, The Believer, Orion, Fence, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Offing, The Poetry Review (UK), and widely elsewhere. In 2022, she was awarded a Disability Futures fellowship from United States Artists. A Cave Canem alum, she holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver and teaches creative writing, literature and poetics. A book of criticism is forthcoming in 2024.

http://www.khadijahqueen.com