About the Contributors

Pamela Alexander's Left won the Beloit Poetry Journal's 2024 Chad Walsh chapbook competition. She is the author of four previous full-length collections of poems, including Slow Fire (Ausable/Copper Canyon). Earlier books won the Yale Younger Poet and Iowa Poetry Prizes. On the writing faculty at M.I.T. and Oberlin College for many years, she then spent five years traveling the continent in an RV with her cat. On the editorial board of FIELD, she was co-editor of the 2020 book about Wendy Battin in the Unsung Masters series from Gulf Coast/ Pleiades/CopperNickel. Her essays have appeared in Cimarron Review and Denver Quarterly and her poems in many periodicals. She also writes mystery novels under the pen name Pam Fox. She lives in Maine.Adele Barker is a writer and academic living in Tucson, Arizona. In addition to her scholarly writing, she is the author of Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka (Beacon Press, 2010). She is currently studying with the Tucson branch of The Writers Studio.Shea Burchill (she/her) is a divorce lawyer living on the Front Range of Colorado with her husband, three dogs and an ancient cat. She has two adult daughters. She continues to write about trans/nonbinary issues, specifically interested in the place where personal experience, relational dynamics and the wider political world we live in all braid together.Cameron Carr is a writer from Ohio. His essays appear or are forthcoming in The American Scholar, Longreads, The Missouri Review, Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music: The March Xness Anthology, and other publications.Mandy Len Catron is the author of How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays, which was listed for the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize and the Kobo Emerging Writing Award. Her writing can be found in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Walrus, Orion, and many other magazines and anthologies. Her essays and talks have been translated into more than thirty languages. She teaches in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.Sherrie Flick's recent awards include a 2023 Creative Development Grant from The Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. She is the author of three story collections: I Have Not Considered Consequences, Thank Your Lucky Stars, and Whiskey, Etc., all published by Autumn House Press. Her debut essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist was published by University of Nebraska Press. The essay “All in the Family: Waldo and His Ghosts,” was listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2023. She is co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018, and is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. She served as the 2025 McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College and recently joined the fiction faculty for West Virginia Wesleyan's low-res MFA program. She lives in Pittsburgh.Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (PEN Award), Just beneath My Skin (essays), Girl from Soldier Creek (SFA Novel Award), Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter, and the editor of four anthologies, including Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. After an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Foster was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for 25 years. She's published over 130 essays and stories, has been awarded the Hall-Waters Prize for Distinguished Southern Writing, a Pushcart Prize, a Clarence Cason Award, a Dean's Scholar Award, a Carl Klaus Teaching Award and will be awarded the Truman Capote Prize for literary nonfiction in 2026. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Fairmont State University, a Breeden Scholar-in-Residence at Auburn University, and an exchange professor at Paul Valery University in Montpelier, France.John Gallagher is a veteran journalist, author, and authority on urban affairs, particularly relating to Rust Belt cities. Educated at DePaul University in Chicago and Columbia University in New York, he joined the Detroit Free Press in 1987 as an urban affairs writer and continued reporting there for thirty-two years. A resident of Detroit, Gallagher continues to work as a public speaker, author, and freelance journalist.Brenda Lin is a writer, literary translator, and educator based in Taipei, Taiwan. Her writing has appeared in Fourth Genre, WSQ, Asymptote, Gulf Coast Journal, The Kenyon Review, and others. Brenda writes about family, language, and the intersection between text and textile.Rob Marks is a writer. For many years, he wrote and edited publications about HIV- and LGBTQ+-related mental health, and more recently, has written about art, aesthetic philosophy, and culture. He is completing a memoir/narrative adventure—a meditation on embodiment, trauma, identity, empathy, and wonder—a book whose working title is Survival Skills: The Autobiography of ! . He has adapted Survival Skills chapters as essays in the North American Review (2024), Philosophy of Final Words (Mongrel Matter, 2025), and now Fourth Genre, and as a solo performance that he presented at The Marsh Theater in San Francisco/Berkeley in November and December 2025. He was a finalist for the Fourth Genre's 2025 Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize and Creative Research. He was a Fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in September 2024.Mike Nagel is the author of Duplex and Culdesac, both from Autofocus Books. His essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Passages North, D Magazine, and The Paris Review Daily. Find selected nonsense at www.beefham.com.Mikaela Osler has an MFA from the University of New Mexico. She lives in Albuquerque, works as a backpacking guide and ski patroller, and is finishing a memoir. Her work has appeared in Archetype, Hippocampus, Trail Runner, and elsewhere. She has hiked over ten thousand miles.Lee Reilly is a former care worker whose writing focuses on women, family, and care. Her work has won recognition from Hunger Mountain, Florida Review, Barbara Deming Fund, Ragdale, Phare, and other arts organizations, and her flash has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, London Independent Story Prize, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She's the author of two nonfiction books, Women Living Single (Faber & Faber), and Teaching Maggie (Ruminator). She lives in Maine, where she runs Shannaghe, a writer's residency.Ralph James Savarese has authored two books of creative nonfiction and twice received “notable essay” distinction from the Best American Essays series. His work has appeared in Brevity, Fourth Genre, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Salon.com. He lives in Iowa.Evan Silver aka Tiresias is a hybrid writer, director, and performance artist based in Brooklyn. Their essays have been published in Epiphany, Eclectica, Artists Book House, The Mays, HowlRound, and The Audacity, and their work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Magazine, and The New Yorker. They have received residencies and fellowships from Ucross, MacDowell, The Fulbright Program, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, among others.Julija Šukys is the author of Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives (2025), Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter's Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007). She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.