Spencer K. M. Brown is a finalist for the 2023 CMA National Book Award for “Best Novel,” winner of the 2016 Penelope Niven Award, the 2018 Flying South Fiction Prize, and a finalist for both the 2019 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and the 2019 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. His short fiction and poems have four times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in North Carolina, with his wife and their two sons. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast.
Halle Hill is from East Tennessee and lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A graduate of Maryville College and the M.F.A. Writing program at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), she is the winner of the 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize and was a finalist for the 2021 ASME Award for Fiction. Her short stories have been published in Joyland, New Limestone Review, Southwest Review, and The Oxford American, where she won the 2020 Debut Fiction Prize.
Jeffrey Dale Lofton hails from Warm Springs, Georgia, best known as the home of Roosevelt’s Little White House. He calls the nation’s capital home now and has for over three decades. During those early years he spent many a night trodding the boards of the DC’s theaters and performing arts centers, including the Kennedy Center, Signature Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, and Studio Theatre. He even scored a few television screen appearances, including a residuals-rich Super Bowl halftime commercial, which his accountant wisecracked “is the finest work of your career.”
Ultimately he stepped away from acting for other, more traditional work, including providing communications counsel to landscape architects and helping war veterans tell their stories to add richness and nuance to historical accounts. At the same time, he focused on pursuing post-graduate work, ultimately being awarded Master’s degrees in both Public Administration and Library and Information Science. Today, he is a senior advisor at the Library of Congress, surrounded by books and people who love books—in short, paradise.
Red Clay Suzie is his first work of fiction, written through his personal lens growing up an outsider figuring out life and love in a conservative family and community in the Deep South.
Ashley Lumpkin is a Georgia-raised, Carolina-based writer, editor, actor, and educator. She is the author of five poetry collections: {} At First Sight, Second Glance, Terrorism and Other Topics for Tea, #AshleyLumpkin, and Genesis. Her book, I Hate You All Equally, is a collection of conversations from her years as a classroom teacher. A lover of performance as well as the written word, she has been a competing member of the Bull City Slam Team since 2015 and currently serves as its coach. She is one-fifth (and only Slytherin member) of the Big Dreams Collective and currently serves as a member-at-large on the board of the North Carolina Poetry Society.
Steve Mitchell, a writer and journalist, has published in CRAFT Literary, Passengers Journal, entropy, december magazine, Southeast Review, among others. His novel, Cloud Diary, is published by C&R Press. His book of short stories is The Naming of Ghosts from Press 53 and a new collection, The Reason the Dress is Yellow, is forthcoming from Press 53. He is a winner of the Curt Johnson Prose Prize, the Lorian Hemingway International Short Story Prize, and the Alex Albright Creative Non-Fiction Prize. He has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies. He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC, and General Editor at Scuppernong Editions.
Lex Orgera writes poetry, hybrid nonfiction, and a newsletter called Yard Dragon exploring the intersections of nature, culture, and spirit. Orgera’s books include How Like Foreign Objects and Dust Jacket, and a memoir-in-fragments, Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms. A new book of poems, Agatha, about body autonomy, is forthcoming from Jackleg Press. Orgera has taught high school and college writing, many community-based workshops, and is the inaugural Executive Director of Greensboro Bound Literary Festival.
Bushra Rehman’s dark comedy, Corona, was chosen by the NY Public Library as one of its favorite books about NYC. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and author of the collection of poetry, Marianna’s Beauty Salon, described by Joseph O. Legaspi as “a love poem for Muslim girls, Queens, and immigrants making sense of their foreign home—and surviving.”
Her new novel, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, is a modern classic about what it means to be Muslim and queer in a Pakistani-American community.
Deonna Kelli Sayed is a Greensboro-based writer and performer. In 2023, she premiered her debut solo show, American Body. Deonna’s essays and short stories are found in Love, Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women; Everywhere Stories Volume III: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, and more. Deonna is a grant writer for Triad Health Project and represents PEN America in the NC Piedmont.
Julia Ridley Smith is the author of a memoir, The Sum of Trifles (University of Georgia Press, 2021), and a short story collection, Sex Romp Gone Wrong (Blair, forthcoming, 2024). Her short stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, Literary Matters, the New England Review, Southern Cultures, The Southern Review, among other places, and a new story is forthcoming in Copper Nickel. Currently a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she previously taught at UNC Greensboro. She is former associate editor at Bull City Press, where she was the editor of Inch magazine, and she has more than twenty years’ experience in freelance writing and copyediting.
