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Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is a New York Times bestseller and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His previous book, A Little Devil in America, was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal … Continued

Alice Austen won the John Cassavetes Award for her debut film Give Me Liberty (writer/producer). She is a past resident of the Royal Court Theatre and her internationally produced plays include Animal Farm (Steppenwolf Theatre), Water, Cherry Orchard Massacre, and Girls in the Boat. She studied creative writing under Seamus Heaney at Harvard, where she … Continued

Devreaux Baker is the first poet laureate of Mendocino County, California, and a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award for her book Red Willow People. Her poetry collections include Hungry Ghosts, Red Willow People, Out of the Bones of Earth, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight, and Light at the Edge. She has facilitated … Continued

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter and coeditor of Fiolet & Wing. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, and several other anthologies and journals. She holds a PhD from the University of Mississippi and an MFA from Fresno State. She lives in New Orleans and teaches online at The … Continued

Rebecca earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in Southern Studies, both from the University of Mississippi. She is the Communications Specialist at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and each fall, she teaches a FASTrack section of EDHE 105: The Freshman Year Experience, designed to help first-year students adjust … Continued