Meet the Writers
Sam Slupski (they/them), is a Midwest-based writer and creator with experience in writing, digital content creation, and community organizing. They are passionate about redefining conversations about wellness to make them more accessible and inclusive, continuing the destigmatization of mental health in a nuanced, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist way, and empowering queer people to find clothing and personal style in comfortable and euphoric ways for them.
Sam was a finalist for the 2019 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, headlined the Melbourne Spoken Word Poetry Festival in 2018, and has toured across the US and Canada. Their book of poems and essays, Until Tender, is forthcoming with Game Over Books in August 2023.
When they are not writing, they are cooking soup and nurturing their inner child. The hill they will die on is that a Midwest sunset is superior to all sunsets.
Jane V. Blunschi holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Arkansas. She was a 2014 Lambda Literary Emerging Voices fellow, and her collection of stories, Understand Me, Sugar, was published in 2017 by Yellow Flag Press. Her forthcoming novella, Mon Dieu, Love, was awarded the 2022 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize and will be released by Texas Review Press in Spring 2023. Jane's work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Feels Blind Literary, Bayou Magazine, Cream City Review, Paper Darts, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Foglifter, among others. Originally from Louisiana, Jane lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books, 2023), and Nest of Matches (Autumn House, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University, where she directs MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program.
Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and the author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, winner of the Noemi Press Book Award for Prose (2021), Bright Archive, a collection of visual essays (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated, selected by Joseph Harrington (Essay Press, 2016).
Minor is the recipient of a Research Fellowship to Iceland from the American Scandinavian Foundation, a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her essay "Something Clear" was awarded the 2018 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose. Minor has held fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and was the 2018 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Writer's Workshop.
Minor serves as curator of the visual essay series at Essay Daily and as Video Editor at TriQuarterly Review. She holds a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Ohio University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona and currently teaches in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.
Paul Guest is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Because Everything Is Terrible, and a memoir, One More Theory About Happiness. His writing has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, Slate, New England Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and numerous other publications. A Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award winner, he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Aimée Baker’s first collection of poetry, Doe, was the 2016 Akron Prize winner at University of Akron Press and published in 2018. Doe and Baker's work is the subject of the documentary She (Birdy & Bean Films) starring Kate Mulgrew, Raven Goodwin, and Coco Jones. Baker's essays on true crime and memoir have been published by Guernica, Cincinatti Review, Black Warrior Review, and others. Two of her essays have been Best American Essays notables. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, and Guernica. Currently, she is a lecturer at a university and is at work on her next book.
Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany as part of a military family. He grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana and is a graduate of Indiana University Bloomington and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award, and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection of poems, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His fourth book, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017 and his mixed media project in collaboration with Nicholas Galanin and Kevin Neireiter inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books) was published in 2021. His most recent collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Rilke Prize. His first graphic novel Last On His Feet will be published in 2023 by Liveright.
Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Julia Peterkin Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19 and is Editor of Poetry magazine.
Gillian King-Cargile earned her BA in film production and an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University. She has worked with schools, libraries, universities, and national labs to create exciting stories, games, events, and even stand-up comedy routines that spark a love of reading and learning.
A member of the Horror Writers Association and the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, Gillian has published picture books, middle-grade nonfiction books, and longer work for readers of all ages. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, Carve Magazine, Everyday Fiction, River Styx, 3 Elements, Hello Horror, and other publications. She received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention for her story "The Dead Kid" and she is the 2022 winner of the Horror Writers Association's Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for Non-Fiction.
Gillian's latest books are Not the Worst Thing Ever (Poke Prize Press 2022), Vaccines Change the World (Albert Whitman 2022), and The Robot on My Tummy (Poke Prize Press 2023).
C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books 2022) was named a 2023 finalist for the Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize. His poems have most recently appeared in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly Review, West Branch, Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. C.T. writes reviews for Rhino Poetry and Mississippi Books Page, and is a poetry reader for Poetry Northwest.
Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. A Tunisian-American dual citizen, she has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She is the author of the debut full-length collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and the chapbooks Figment (Bull City Press), The Mothers (Slapering Hol Press), Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She holds a B.A. from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, the Key West Literary Seminars, Dickinson House, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Her poems have received prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize, among others, and appear in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Narrative Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University and is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Emma Binder is a fiction writer and poet from Wisconsin. They received their MFA in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and were the 2020 – 2021 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. In 2022, they received the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction and the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award. Their work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Narrative, The Texas Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. They live in Western Massachusetts, where they’re working on a collection of short stories about queerness, rural life, and survival.
