Madville is proud to publish incredible authors who tell daring stories that break genres and share powerful stories of the hardships and triumphs of the underdog, and the artists and photographers they collaborate with. Learn more about the people we publish below!
Darnell Arnoultis the author of Incantations (Madville, 2024) the novel Sufficient Grace (Simon & Schuster) and two poetry collections, What Travels With Us and Galaxie Wagon (LSU Press), with shorter works in journals and anthologies. She has received the SIBA Poetry Book of the Year Prize, the Weatherford Award, the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award, and the Mary Frances Hobson Award in Arts and Letters and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives with her family in Mebane, NC. For more about Darnell and her workshops, visit darnellarnoult.net.
Ellen Austin-Li
Ellen Austin-Li’s first full-length collection, Incidental Pollen—a 2023 Trio Award finalist, a 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist, and runner-up to the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize—is forthcoming from Madville Publishing. Finishing Line Press published her two chapbooks, Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). Her work appears in Artemis, Thimble Literary, The Maine Review, Salamander, Lily Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, and many other places. She’s a Best of the Net nominee and holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen co-founded the monthly reading series, “Poetry Night at Sitwell’s,” in Cincinnati, where she lives.
A North Carolina native from the rural-back-woods-fishing community of Hampstead, Earl Sherman Braggs is a UC Foundation and Battle Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Braggs is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Hat Dancing with Miss Bessie Smith, Cruising Weather Bluesand Negro Side of the Moon are his latest. Among his many awards are the Anhinga Poetry Prize, the Cleveland (Ohio) State Poetry Prize (unable to accept, manuscript won in two places at the same time), the C&R Poetry Prize, the Jack Kerouac International Literary Prize, the Knoxville News Sentinel Poetry Award and the Gloucester County Poetry Prize. Braggs’ novel, Lookingfor Jack Kerouac was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Contest. Boy Named Boy, a Memoir, was published by Wet Cement Press. His most recent, and first, Madville publication, Obama’s Children, was released by Madville Publishing in 2021.
Joyce Compton Brown was born into an agrarian German/Scots Irish farm family in Iredell County, North Carolina. Appalachian State University confirmed her love for the mountains and Appalachian music, where she took classes in the Child Ballads and other subjects under the founder of the Appalachian Studies Association, Cratis Williams, and acquired her first banjo. Between bouts of paper grading, she welcomed chances to learn at Berea and Hindman workshops. Her early writing focuses on her Southern family roots and stories she heard as a child. Her later writing though based in specificity, attempts a sense of universality.
Wayne Caldwell
Wayne Caldwell is the author of two novels, Cataloochee (2007) and Requiem by Fire (2010; reissued 2020), and two volumes of poems, Woodsmoke (2021) and River Road (2024). He has won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the WNC Historical Association, and the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Rick Campbell
Rick Campbell is a writer, poet, and essayist who directed Anhinga Press for over 20 years, co-founded the Florida Literary Arts Coalition and its Other Words Conference. He teaches at Sierra Nevada University’s MFA Program and lives on Alligator Point, FL. His work was featured in Being Home: An Essay Anthology, edited by Sam Pickering & Bob Kunzinger (Madville Publishing, 2021.) His poetry was featured in Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology, edited by Karen Head & Collin Kelley (Madville Publishing, 2020), and By the Light of a Neon Moon, edited by Janet Lowery (Madville Publishing, 2019). His previous Madvillan poetry collection, Gunshot, Peacock, Dog, was published by Madville Publishing in September of 2018, and his latest collection of poetry, Provenance, was published by Blue Horse Press in 2020.
Bonnie Jo Campbell (Editor)
Bonnie Jo Campbell is an author a former Michigan farm girl, hitchhiker, Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus snow cone salesperson, and philosophy major who practices Koburyu kobudo weapons training and works as a writing professor at Pacific University. Her most recent publication is a short story anthology she co-edited with fellow Madvillan author Luanne Smith titledMuddy Backroads in June of 2022. Her work was featured in the anthology Taboos & Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings, edited by Luanne Smith, Kerry Neville, & Devi S. Laskar (Madville Publishing, 2021).
Sean D. Carberry
Sean D. Carberry is an award-winning writer, editor, and foreign policy and national security expert. In his more than 15 years as a radio and print journalist, he traveled to dozens of countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. He was NPR’s last Kabul-based correspondent, covering the country’s security and political transition 2012 through 2014. Before journalism, he was a Gold Record-winning recording engineer and producer. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his cat Squeak who he rescued from the streets of Kabul. His forthcoming Madvillan memoir, Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home will be released by Madville Publishing in August 2023.
Jenny Carey (Photographer)
Jenny Carey is a photographer and creative residing in Tampa, Florida. Her photographic images encompass the themes of memory, loss, and family using repetition, ordinary objects, and intimate environments. She seeks to narrate the unseen beauty in her immediate environment, despite the surroundings or one’s emotional state. Her home and personal objects are often subject matter in her images, but frequent travels have opened a favored narrative in her Erosionseries. Jenny is also the founder, and coordinator, of Creatives Exchange, an artist collective of professional artists, based in Tampa, which supports the creative interests of the group and community through exhibitions and original programs. She can be reached at jcarey@msn.com. She provided the photography for Gianna Russo’s 2022 Madvillan poetry collection All I See Is Your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic.
Wondra Chang
Wondra Chang was born in South Korea and has lived in the United States since 1970. Her debut novel, Sonju, was published by Madville Publishing in July of 2021, has been awarded the prestigious Kirkus Star, and chosen as one of their Best 100 Indie Books of the Year.
Patricia Clark
Patricia Clark is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Sunday Rising, The Canopy, and most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Slate, among others. Awards include a Creative Artist Grant in Michigan, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, and co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She also received the 2018 Book of the Year Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia for The Canopy. Patricia was professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University, where she was the university’s poet-in-residence. She was also poet laureate of the city of Grand Rapids from 2005-2007.
Michael Amos Cody
Michael Amos Cody was born in the South Carolina Lowcountry and raised in the North Carolina highlands. He spent his twenties writing songs in Nashville and his thirties in school. He’s the author of the novel Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press) and short fiction that has appeared in Yemassee, Tampa Review, Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. His short story collection, A Twilight Reel (Pisgah Press) won the Short Story/Anthology category of the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. Cody lives with his wife Leesa in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and teaches in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.
Jan Cole
Jan Cole was best known as a musician, composer, linguist and teacher. Studying music at the Paris Conservatory with Jean Pierre Rampal and Franciso LaGoya, among other musical legends, fueled Cole’s love of language as well as music. She performed on many instruments including flute, recorder, krummhorn, fife, penny whistle, guitar, ukulele, mandolin, tenor banjo, 5-string banjo, psaltery, guitarrón, keyboard, folk harp, and dulcimer. One of her greatest joys was seeing the professional successes of her flute and guitar students. Her poetry collection, Sisypha Larvata Prodeat, was re-published by Madville in 2018. This poetry collection was first published in 1987 when Jan Cole lived and worked in San Francisco, but the poems were written over the course of many years, beginning with her time in university at the Newcomb College of Tulane University and at the Sorbonne. Many of the poems are set in the town of Huntsville, Texas, where Jan was raised. She died in 2019.
Susan Cushman
Susan Cushman was co-director of the 2013 and 2010 Oxford (Mississippi) Creative Nonfiction Conferences. She was director of the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop. She was a panelist at the 2017 Decatur Book Festival, the 2012, 2017, and 2018 Southern Festival of Books, the 2017 and 2018, and 2021 Mississippi Book Festival, the 2013, 2017, 2018 and 2019 Louisiana Book Festival, the 2018 Mississippi Writers Guild Conference, the 2018 Alabama Writers Conclave Conference, the 2018 Pat Conroy Literary Center Visiting Author Series, the 2019 Southern Literary Festival, and the 2020 AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Professionals) annual conference. Her published books include five she has written: Pilgrim Interrupted (essay collection), John and Mary Margaret(novel), Friends of the Library(short stories), Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s (a memoir), and Cherry Bomb(a novel). She has edited three collections of essays: A Second Blooming: Becoming the Women We Are Meant to Be, Southern Writers on Writing, and The Pulpwood Queens Celebrate 20 Years! In addition, she has over a dozen essays published in five anthologies and various journals and magazines. She is the editor of the Madvillan forthcoming anthology, All Night, All Day: Life, Death & Angels, which will be released by Madville Publishing in June 2023. Much of Susan’s writing is infused with elements of her own life, including the very mystical spirituality of her Orthodox Christian faith and the personal demons she has been chasing since childhood. Her essays, short stories, memoir, and novels all reflect what she has learned through many dark nights of the soul, but also contain elements of hope and healing and honor her Southern roots.
Kimberly Davis (Editor)
Kimberly Davis is the director and founder of Madville Publishing. She sometimes teaches English Composition, Creative Writing, and Technical writing, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and a BA from Columbia College-Chicago in Arts and Entertainment Media Management. She spent five years on the editorial staff of Texas Review Press. She also edited Ron Kenney’s memoir, An Englishman in Texas. Kim has been engaged in freelance web design for over 20 years. See her design portfolio at Sublime Design Studio. Her poetry was featured in the 2019 anthology By the Light of a Neon Moon: Poetry Out of Dance Halls, Honky Tonks, Music Halls, and Clubs by Madville Publishing.
Rod Davis
Rod Davisis the author of East of Texas, West of Hell, the sequel to South, America, described as “a triumph of Southern noir.” He is also the author of Corina’s Way, winner of the fiction prize in the inaugural PEN Southwest Book Awards for 2000-2005, and of American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World, selected as one of the “Exceptional Books of 1998” by Bookman Book Review Syndicate. His title The Life of Kim and the Behavior of Men releases from Madville in 2024. A long-time journalist and magazine editor, he is a member of PEN America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and was formerly on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. He served as an Army first lieutenant in South Korea in the Vietnam Era.
Susanne Davis
Susanne Davis is the author of the short story collection, The Appointed Hour (Cornerstone, 2017), and Madvillan novel Gravity Hill (Madville Publishing 2022), which won second-place in the Blue Moon Novel Competition. Davis grew up on a dairy farm in Connecticut, still owned and operated by her family. Davis has taught creative writing at colleges, universities, in private workshops, and this year, at Asnuntuck Community College. She loves the dynamic exchange of the writing and teaching life. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories and essays are published in American Short Fiction,Notre Dame Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Fredericksburg LiteraryandArt Review and numerous other literary journals.
David Deutsch
David Deutsch studied medieval literature early in his career and now writes cultural studies of British literature, classical music, and queer American poetry and prose. In his own fiction, he prefers to take a break from historical subjects so as to explore actions and events that never quite happened but that have moral resonances within contemporary gay life. At present, he is working on a monograph on twenty-first-century American gay painting and a second novel set in New York and Oxford that focuses on modern classical music and genetics. His novel, Once Before Sunset, is his first publication with Madville Publishing.
Andrew Dunn is an award-winning art director, illustrator, and graphic designer. His work as a comic illustrator and concept artist led him to connecting with Johnathan Paul while in college. From that point on, Andrew has worked as the art director for many films and as the lead artist on Fairview Chronicles since 2007. His draftsmanship has grown through the years and has been influenced by artists such as Kenneth Rocafort, Greg Capullo, and Fiona Staples among others. His illustrations appeared in Johnathan Paul’s Madvillan novel, Fairview Chronicles (Madville Publishing, 2020).
Gary Fincke
Gary Fincke has published five collections of essays, Including The Darkness Call, which won the Robert C. Jones Prize (Pleaides Press, 2018). Individual essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize. His short story collections have been published by Coffee House, Missouri, and West Virginia and have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Collections of his poetry have won book prizes offered by Ohio State, Michigan State, Arkansas, Stephen. F. Austin, and Jacar.
Michael Gills
Arkansas native Michael Gills is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel New Harmony(forthcoming Raw Dog Screaming Press) Book 4 of the Go Love Quartet. A fourth collection of short fiction, Burning Down My Father’s House will be published by Texas Review Press in 2023. He co-edited the 2020 Runaway anthology along with Luanne Smith and Lee Zacharias, released by Madville Publishing. His fifth and his first Madvillan novel, Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear, will be published by Madville Publishing in 2023. Other work has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and won the Southern Humanities Review’s Theodore Hoefner Prize for Fiction, Southern Review’s Best Debut of the Year, recognition in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize Anthology, and inclusion in New Stories from The South: The Year’s Best. His undergraduate novel writing workshop has been featured in USA Today, and several of his students have gone on to publish books of their own, including Emi Wright’s, Alegría(Madville Press, 2021). Gills is a Distinguished Honors Professor at the University of Utah, where he lives in the hills with his wife of thirty-four years, Jill.
Connie Jordan Green
Connie Jordan Green is the author of novels for young people, poetry chapbooks and collections, and a personal newspaper column that ran for more than 42 years. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of awards for her writing including induction into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame, a Tribute to the Arts Award from the Oak Ridge Arts Council, and inclusion in Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (University Press of Kentucky). She taught creative writing for the University of Tennessee and continues to teach at various workshops.
Ben Groner III
Ben Groner III is the author of Dust Storms May Exist (Madville, 2024). He received Texas A&M University’s 2014 Gordone Award for undergraduate poetry and two Pushcart Prize nominations. His poems have been published in Whale Road Review, GASHER, The South Carolina Review, The Shore, Rust & Moth, Cheat River Review, and elsewhere. He is a former bookseller at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and son.
Theodore Haddin
Theodore Haddin is a poet, editor, and emeritus professor from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Previous collections are By a Doorway, in the Garden, and the chapbook The River and the Road. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Birmingham Poetry Review, Chariton Review, Valley Voices, POMPA, and Poetry South and in three anthologies. Reviews on American literature and poetry have been published in Valley Voices, The Anniston Star, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. A professionally trained violinist, Haddin has performed locally and supported music organizations including the Arianna String Quartet and individuals in Berlin and St. Louis. At UAB, he founded and directed The Humanities Forum, now named in his honor as The Theodore Haddin Forum for the Arts and Sciences.
Catherine Hamrick
Writer, editor, and content strategist, Catherine Hamrick worked at Southern Living, Cooking Light, Southern Accents, Victoria, Better Homes and Gardens, and Meredith Books. She also taught writing and communication arts at several colleges and universities. Her poetry has appeared in The Blue Mountain Review, Appalachian Places, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel: Appalachian Witness, storySouth, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at Random Storyteller.
Pauletta Hansel
Poet, memoirist, teacher and editor Pauletta Hansel is author of nine poetry collections including the Madvillan Heartbreak Tree, released in March 2022 by Madville Publishing. Heartbreak Tree is a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia. An interview in Salon.com about the book can be found here. Read three poems from the collection published in Still: The Journalhere. Reviews of the collection can be found here and here.
Jeff Hardin
Jeff Hardin is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including two Madvillan collections, most recently Watermark by Madville Publishing, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being (Madville Publishing), No Other Kind of World (Texas Review Press), and Small Revolution. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Originally from Savannah, Tennessee, he has taught for almost three decades at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee.
Mike Hilbig is an English professor at the University of Houston-Downtown and at Lone Star College. Sometimes, he picks up a bass guitar and plays for punk rock bands. Sometimes, he just hangs out with his wife, two step kids, and dog. His first book, the Madvillan Judgment Day & Other White Lies, was released by Madville Publishing in February of 2022.
Bobby Horecka
Bobby Horecka reading from his collection, Long Gone & Lost, in San Antonio in 2020.
Bobby Horecka holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston—Victoria, and taught at Victoria College. He has numerous works of short fiction, prose and poetry, published in literary magazines and anthologies like Amarillo Bay, Bluestem Magazine, Scribe, and The Ocotillo Review. Horecka spent 25 years in print journalism, working newsrooms large and small across Texas. His Madvillan short fiction collection told in vignettes, Long Gone & Lost: True Fictions & other lies, was published by Madville Publishing and was a finalist for the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters’ Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction.
Collin Kelley (Editor)
Collin Kelley is the author of the poetry collections Midnight in a Perfect World, Render, Better To Traveland Slow To Burn. He is also the author of the Venus Trilogy of novels, Conquering Venus, Remain In Light and Leaving Paris. A recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award, Deep South Festival of Writers Award and a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction, Kelley’s poetry, reviews, essays and interviews have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies around the world. He was the co-editor along with Karen Head of the Madvillan poetry collection Mother Mary Comes to Me, released by Madville Publishing in November 2020. His poetry was featured in Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology, edited by Julie E. Bloemeke & Dustin Brookshire (Madville Publishing, 2023.)
Ron Kenney
Ron Kenney authored the Madvillan memoir An Englishman in Texas, which tells the story of his life as an English jockey who came to the United States in 1960. His autobiographical account begins with his childhood in the northeast of England during WWII. He goes on to describe how, with no knowledge of horses, he was sent four hundred miles from home at 14 years of age to apprentice as a jockey. He’d been turned away by the foreman at the coal mine because he was too small. The story follows Kenney through his coming of age to his coming to America when he was 30.
It follows his fortunes in pursuit of the American Dream. Kenney tells of riding horses for some of the wealthiest and most famous horse trainers in Texas. He tells of his loves and his betrayals, and he introduces the people who helped him along the way. Ron Kenney passed away in 2021 at the age of 91.
Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature (selected by APALA); selected by The Georgia Center for the Book as a 2019 book “All Georgians Should Read,” finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award, long-listed for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature and the Golden Poppy Award. The novel was named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019, and has garnered praise in Booklist, Chicago Review of Books, The Guardian and elsewhere. Laskar’s second novel, CIRCA, was published on May 3, 2022, by Mariner Books. Her third novel, MIDNIGHT, AT THE WAR, will be published by Mariner Books in early 2024. In 2022, USA TODAY named Laskar among “50 AAPI authors” to read and Goop selected CIRCA as its June Goop Book Club pick. Laskar holds degrees from Columbia University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an alumna of both TheOpEdProject and VONA, among others. In 2017, Finishing Line Presspublished two poetry chapbooks. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family. Laskar co-edited Taboos & Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings along with Luanne Smith and Kerry Neville.
R.J. Lee was born and grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, and graduated from Sewanee (University of the South) with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Though he now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, he lived for thirty years in New Orleans during which he worked in journalism, advertising, and tourist commission work writing and publishing 16 novels from 1992 to the present. The Majestic Leo Marble is his 17th book.
Cooper Levey-Baker
Cooper Levey-Baker is a writer and journalist. His fiction has appeared in the Sierra Nevada Review and Burrow Press’s Fantastic Floridas series, and his journalism has won multiple awards from the Florida Magazine Association and the Florida Society for Professional Journalism. His first novel, Dead Fish Wind , was released by Madville Publishing in 2022.
Walter B. Levis
Walter B. Levis, a former crime reporter, lives in New York City. His articles have appeared in The NY Daily News, The National Law Journal, The Chicago Reporter, The Chicago Lawyer, The New Republic, Show Business Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others. He is the author of the novel Moments of Doubt. His short stories have appeared widely and have been chosen for a Henfield Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Angela Liu (Chinese Translator)
Angela Liu obtained a BA in Foreign Languages and Literature from the National Taiwan University in 1972. She later got an MA in English Education from the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, Kansas, and a CAGS (Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study) in Educational Media and Technology from Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts in 1974 and 1978 separately. After a short stint of teaching English as a second language in California and Boston, she switched career to a scientific field, and took literature and writing only as a hobby. In 2014, she retired and moved back to Taiwan with her husband. The following year, she was unexpectedly connected with Lorrie Lo in Texas through a common friend, thus had a chance to try translating English poems to Chinese for the first time for Jan Cole’s anthology, Sisypha Larvata Prodeat (Madville Publishing 2018.)
Swep Lovitt
Swep Lovitt was born and raised in Mississippi. After college, he worked for 30 years in Memphis and now resides in Brookhaven, Mississippi. He played college golf and took a Masters in Modern European History from the University of Southern Mississippi. His poetry collection, This Fierce Afterglow, was published by Madville Publishing in 2021. His publications include two volumes, A Boy’s Face with Swan Wings, and Sometimes the World is Too Beautiful, and 75 poems in magazines and literary journals including: The Texas Review, Mississippi Review, Poem, and Visions-Internatonal. Lovitt has two grown sons and a daughter, each with poems of their own.
Daniel Manuel Mendoza was born in Hammond, Indiana, and raised in Hebbronville, Texas. He is the author of Stray Dogs: Interviews with Working-Class Writers (Down & Out Books, 2016). His work has appeared in Boulevard, Pleiades, and Alchemy, among others. He lives in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Jim Minick
Jim Minick is the author or editor of eight books, including The Intimacy of Spoons: poems, Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas (nonfiction), Fire Is Your Water (novel), and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family. His work has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Poets & Writers, Oxford American, Orion, Shenandoah, Appalachian Journal, Wind, and The Sun. He serves as coeditor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.
Dean Monti
Dean Monti started writing at age two, but nothing legible until age five. Since then, his fiction has appeared in several literary journals in print and online. His title The Monosexual, releases from Madville in 2024. His critically-acclaimed novel, The Sweep of the Second Hand, was published by Academy Chicago Publishers and reprinted in paperback by Penguin. In addition to other novels, he is the author of several full-length and one-act plays and has had works staged in Chicago and Norfolk, Virginia. His short story “Why Dogs Don’t Talk” was adapted as a stage play and short film. Additionally, Monti has also taught creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago and at College of DuPage. He lives in Glen Ellyn with his wife, Julie and two difficult but sometimes loveable cats.
Charles Moody (Illustrator)
Charles Moody’s work has appeared in venues all over Texas. His art has also been featured as the cover for numerous literary and musical publications, most notably works by Naomi Shihab Nye, Randall Watson, and the German group, Beehover. Moody did the artwork for the graphic novel version of No Evil is Wide, which will be published by Madville on August 1st, 2023. Charles Moody also did the cover art for the non-illustrated version of No Evil Is Wide that Madville published in 2018, and which subsequently won a Distinguished Favorite award which was presented by the NYC Big Book Awards in 2022.
Mary B. Moore
Mary B. Moore’s published books include Dear If, Orison Books 2021; Flicker, Dogfish Head Award, 2016; The Book of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center, 1998; and the prize-winning chapbooks Amanda and the Man Soul and Eating the Light. Poems appear lately in Birmingham Poetry Review, POETRY, Tahoma Literary Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, Terrain, Calyx, Still: The Journal, Crosswinds and more. She has won NELLE’s Three Sisters Prize, Birmingham Poetry Review’s Collins Prize, and the second-place award in Nimrod’s 2017 Pablo Neruda Prize. She is a native Californian and was a professor at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where she now lives.
Steven T. Moore
Steven T. Moore often says that his mother is the wellspring of his poetry. She read and recited poetry to him before his birth and through his growing-up years in locales as varied as Central America and Gurnee, Illinois. Moore received his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and his M.A. and Ph.D. are from the University of Nebraska. The recipient of several teaching and scholarly awards, he is a university professor of English who often teaches poetry workshops and a class called Bon Appétit: Savoring Poetry & Good Cooking. While writing poetry, he immerses himself in jazz, the blues, and the spirit of Langston Hughes. Published widely in literary journals, he is also a bestselling children’s author and the author of two scholarly books examining Black rage.
karla k. morton
karla k. morton is a professional speaker, award-winning author, photographer. She was the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. She co-wrote The National Parks: A Century of Grace along with fellow former Texas Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach. Her poetry was featured in the 2020 Madvillan anthology, Some Notes You Hold, published by Madville Publishing, andBy the Light of a Neon Moon, edited by Janet Lowery (Madville Publishing, 2019). Her most recent poetry collection, Turbulence & Fluids, will be released by Madville Publishing in April of 2023.
Adelina Moya (Illustrator)
Mexican born artist, Adelina Moya (pictured at right with Jan Cole) studied graphic design at the Universidad de Las Americas in Puebla, Pue., Mexico. She studied watercolor with Lopez Oliver in Monterrey, Mexico, and she studied various styles of painting at the Universidad de Monterrey. Since then, Moya has continued her artistic studies continually incorporating new styles and media. Moya’s art has been shown in Puebla, Pue, Mexico, Atlixco, Pue, Mexico, Mexico City, and at numerous galleries in Texas. She did the illustrations for Jan Cole’s Madvillan poetry collection, Sisypha Larvata Prodeat.
Tori Viva Muñoz
Tori Viva Muñoz is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of CUSLAI (Center for U.S.-Latin America Initiatives) at The University of Texas at Dallas, Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology, Muñoz completed her Ph.D. in 2021, where her dissertation, “Double Hybridization and Bordercanx Literary Works: How the United States Turned Mexican Americans into the Forgotten People,” became a hybrid work on a distinct population within the Latinx community.
BettyJoyce Nash
A MacDowell fellow in 2013, BettyJoyce Nash won the Fitzgerald prize in 2015. She earned an MSJ, with distinction, from Medill Journalism (Northwestern) and an MFA in fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. Her fiction has been recognized with fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and VCCA-France. She teaches fiction at WriterHouse in Charlottesville; she’s also taught writing in college and jail. Her Madvillan novel, Everybody Here is Kin, will be released by Madville Publishing in 2023.
Jay Neugeboren
Author Jay NeugeborenJay Neugeborenis the author of 22 books, including five prize-winning novels, four collections of award-winning stories, and two prize-winning books of non-fiction. His stories and essays have appeared widely—in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Ploughshares, Tablet, and Commonweal, among others, and have been reprinted in more than 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and is the only author to have won six consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes. His archive is housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center in Austin, Texas.
Kerry Neville (Editor)
Kerry Neville is the author of two short story collections Remember to Forget Me, and Necessary Lies which received the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize in Fiction and was named a ForeWord Magazine Short Story Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Gettysburg Review, Epoch, and Triquarterly, and online in publications such as The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and The Fix. She has twice been the recipient of the Dallas Museum of Art’s “Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction,” and has also been awarded the Texas Institute of Letters Kay Cattarulla Prize for the Short Story and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize from Crab Orchard Review. Her essays and short stories have been named Notables in Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a Tyrone Guthrie Centre Artist’s Residency in Ireland and has been on faculty for the Frank McCourt/University of Limerick Summer Writing Program at New York University. In 2018, she was a Fulbright Scholar/Ireland where she was Visiting Faculty in the MA in Creative Writing at University of Limerick. She is the Coordinator of the MFA Program at Georgia College and State University where she is also on faculty. Neville co-edited Taboos & Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings along with Luanne Smith and Devi S. Laskar.
Juan Ochoa
Juan Ochoa authored Mariguano, a novel set in the drug trafficking world of the Texas/Mexico border circa 1980s. His short stories and essays appear in numerous journals. He teaches writing at South Texas College in McAllen. Ochoa is a licensed Mexican lawyer with an MFA in creative writing. He is currently writing the final volume in the trilogy El Penal. His novel P’al Otro Lado and other tales of bad hombres & nasty women launched September 2023 from Madville Publishing. P’al Otro Lado serves as a prequel to Mariguano.
Bruce Overby
Bruce Overby is a fiction writer with particular interest in issues of loss and belonging, family and relationships, the human condition in a technology-driven world, and addiction. His debut novel, The Cyclone Release, was released in November of 2022 by Madville Publishing. The Cyclone Release was a finalist in the Blue Moon Novel Competition.
Lisa J. Parker
Lisa J. Parker is a native Virginian, a poet, musician, and photographer. Her work is widely published in literary journals and anthologies, including This Gone Place (2010 Winner of the Weatherford Award) and The Parting Glass (Madville Publishing, Winner of The 2021 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize). Her photography has been on exhibit in NYC and published in several arts journals and anthologies. She has worked in the Department of Defense for nearly twenty years, worked as a first responder for 15 years, and currently serves as a crisis and disaster response volunteer with Team Rubicon. Some of her poetry may be found at www.wheatpark.com.
Linda Parsons
Linda Parsons is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the poetry collections Home Fires(1997), Mother Land(2008), Bound(2011), and Candescent (2019). Her subjects include gardening, childhood, and family history—five generations, from her granddaughter through her own grandmother, are depicted in Bound. Her poetry was featured in Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology, edited by Karen Head & Collin Kelley (Madville Publishing, 2020). Parsons is a member of the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. She has received grants from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Knoxville Arts Council as well as a Tennessee Writers Alliance award in poetry. She works as an editor and a policy analyst for the University of Tennessee’s internal audit department. She is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing. Her latest poetry collection, Valediction, will be released by Madville Publishing in June of 2023.
Johnathan Paul
Johnathan Paul is an award-winning Texas filmmaker, screenwriter, and artist. His work as a freelance illustrator and concept artist led him to experimental film, 3D animation, and documentary film-making. Johnathan wrote the first story set in the fictional town of Fairview in 1998 and has quietly expanded that world ever since. Fairview Chronicles is the first of many titles set in this fantastic universe filled with mystical horrors. He is a Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches film production, visual effects, and screenwriting. He also has a long history as a journalist and op-ed writer, having written for various film industry websites. Among his greatest influences are Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Terry Gilliam.
Brian Petkash
Brian Petkash is the author of the collection Mistakes by the Lake (Madville Publishing, 2020) and was raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Tampa and his stories have appeared in Midwestern Gothic and Southword, among other publications. He currently lives in Tampa, Florida, where he remains an avid fan of Cleveland sports.
Sam Pickering
Sam Pickering is writer and professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut. His unconventional teaching style was an inspiration for the character of Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society. Pickering specializes in the familiar essay, children’s literature, nature writers, and 18th and 19th century English literature. Pickering has published many collections of non-fiction personal essays as well as over 200 articles. His collections for Madville Publishing are The World Was My Garden, Too (May 2019), Terrible Sanity (January 2021), Being Home , an anthology edited along with Bob Kunzinger (September 2021), and The Gate in the Garden Wall.
Steve Putnam
Steve Putnamliving the dream: Farm kid, Navy E3, small-town GM mechanic, framing carpenter, and an onsite printer tech at a large corporate account. When the printers were all working, he hid out in a chain link cage, his basement shop, and wrote the first draft of Academy of Reality. No one at Corporate knew they were funding a novel about the strange ways of big business. For outstanding customer service, Putnam won ‘Tech of the Year’ and a trip to Arizona. (As a novel-in-progress, a version of this novel was shortlisted in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Competition in New Orleans.)
Rita Sims Quillen
Rita Sims Quillen is an author, poet, and musician. Her novel Wayland, a sequel toHiding Ezra, was published by Iris Press in fall 2019. Her full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, was published in 2016 by Texas Review Press and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. Hiding Ezra, released by Little Creek Books, was a finalist for the 2005 DANA Awards. One of six semi-finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she has received three Pushcart nominations and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012. Her latest collection of poetry, Some Notes You Hold, was released by Madville Publishing in October of 2020. It was a finalist for the 2022 American Writing Awards and a bonus pick for the 2023 Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Book Club Selection.
Goutham Rao
Goutham Rao is a practicing family physician, researcher in cardiovascular prevention, endowed professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University, and author of more than one hundred publications including five books. He has taught writing skills to physicians and other healthcare professionals for more than twenty years. Within a large healthcare system, Dr. Rao is responsible for promoting wellness and preventing burnout among physicians. During the height of the pandemic, he personally found creative writing therapeutic and started and leads a group called “Words for Wellness” which brings together healthcare professionals to discover the value of writing as both a creative outlet and a means to promote wellness. Dr. Rao grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and lives outside Cleveland.
linda ravenswood
linda ravenswood BFA MA, PhD is a poet and performance artist from Los Angeles. Her accolades include an Oxford Prize in Poetry (2022) and the Edwin Markham Prize in Poetry (2023). She is the founding editor of The Los Angeles Press, est. 2018, and the co-founder of the Poet Laureate program in Glendale, California. Her recent collections include Cantadora—letters from California (Eyewear London/The Black Spring Press Group, 2023), The Stan Poems (Pedestrian Press, 2022), Tlacuilx—Tongues in Quarantine (HINCHAS Press, 2021), and XLA Poets (HINCHAS Press, 2020).
JC Reilly
JC Reilly is a Louisiana writer living in Atlanta, Georgia. She writes across genres and has received Pushcart and Wigleaf nominations for her work, as well as awards from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, the Georgia Poetry Society, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. She is the author of the chapbook La Petite Mort and a contributing author to an anthology of occasional verse, On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year, and of the poetry collection What Magick May Not Alter, released by Madville Publishing in April of 2020. Follow her on social media @aishatonu. Her poetry was featured in Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology, edited by Karen Head & Collin Kelley (Madville Publishing, 2020).
Francine Rodriguez
Francine Rodriguez is an author who grew up in and around downtown Los Angeles and later worked as a Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity Investigator in the Federal sector. She has worked in the fields of law and psychology for over thirty years, and her experiences in these fields have informed her writing. Her work was featured in the anthology Taboos & Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings, edited by Luanne Smith, Kerry Neville, & Devi S. Laskar (Madville Publishing, 2021). Her short story collection,A Woman’s Story, was published by Madville in 2021.
Andrew Rooney
Andrew Rooney is an associate professor who teaches writing at Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India when not in Denver, Colorado. He has published a collection of stories, The Colorado Motet (Ghost Road Press) and a novella, Fall of the Rock Dove (Main Street Rag). His stories and poems have appeared in journals, magazines and websites all over the world. His novel, The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein, was published by Madville Publishing in February of 2019.
Yiskah Rosenfeld
Yiskah Rosenfeldis the author of Tasting Flight (Madville, 2024), and Naked Beside Fish (Finishing Line Press, 2024), an ekphrastic chapbook. She holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and an MA in jurisprudence and social policy from UC Berkeley. She is also a proud rabbinical school dropout. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, the Reuben Rose Memorial Prize, and was runner-up for the Jeff Marks Prize, the Julia Darling Prize, and, most recently, the Frontier Poetry Roots & Roads Prize. Tasting Flight was the runner-up for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. Poems appear in Lilith Magazine, The Seattle Review, The Bitter Oleander, Rattle, Slippery Elm, December, and elsewhere. Her writings have also appeared in anthologies such as Why to These Rocks: the 50th Anniversary Anthology of the Community of Writers, Wild Gods: An Anthology of Ecstatic Poetry, and Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. Kansas born and raised, Yiskah currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she balances solo parenting with teaching workshops on feminism, spirituality, and creativity.
David Rothman
David Rothman teaches writing for the City University of New York. A novella, The Lower East Side Tenement Reclamation Association, won the Omnidawn 2018 fabulist fiction prize and was published in 2020. A short story, “Guided by Voices” won a fiction prize with Glimmer Train. Other short stories were published in such journals as Hybrido, The Prague Review, Newtown Literary, The Piltdown Review, among others. He is the drummer for the NYC-based band, The Edukators, and is a proud resident of Jackson Heights, Queens.
Katie Sanyal is a debut novelist from Utah with roots in Georgia. She is an English major currently studying at the University of Utah. When she is not writing, she is reading, and when she is not reading, she can be found enjoying Salt Lake City with her friends and family.
Kate Saunders
Kate Saunders is a first-time author, but a life-long writer and avid entrepreneur. Following spinal surgery and a subsequent near-death experience, she felt compelled to reevaluate her life and reinvent herself through activism and writing. She views her 2020 Madvillan memoir, Stand in the Traffic, as a subtle path to raise her readers’ awareness.
Neil Shepard is the author of The Book of Failures (Madville, 2024) and How It Is: Selected Poems, published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry (Ireland); he edited the anthology Vermont Poets and Their Craft in 2019 (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-a-Day, as well as in many literary magazines, including Harvard Review, New American Writing, New England Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. He edited the Green Mountains Review for many years and currently edits the online journal Plant-Human Quarterly. These days, he splits time between Vermont and NYC where, until the pandemic, he taught poetry workshops at Poets House.
Michael Simms
Michael Simms is an American poet, novelist and literary publisher. His satiric Madvillan novel Bicycles of the Gods: A Divine Comedy and his YA fantasy novel The Green Mage (releasing March 2023) were published by Madville Publishing, and his most recent poetry collections are American Ashand Nightjar, both published by Ragged Sky Press.
Luanne Smith is an author and a native Kentuckian who now lives between New Jersey and Florida. She taught English for 30 years at West Chester University. Her most recent publication is a short story anthology she co-edited with fellow author Bonnie Jo Campbell titledMuddy Backroads in June of 2022. She also co-edited Taboos & Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings along with Kerry Neville and Devi S. Laskar, and the 2020 Runaway anthology along with Michael Gills and Lee Zacharias, released by Madville Publishing. Her poetry was featured in By the Light of a Neon Moon, edited by Janet Lowery (Madville Publishing, 2019).
Mark Tulin’s formative years were spent in Philadelphia playing baseball and getting into mischief with his friends. He parlayed his experiences growing up in a dysfunctional family to become a successful marriage and family therapist. Once he retired and relocated to California, his interest in creative writing flourished. His stories have appeared in anthologies, journals, and podcasts. He has published in Page & Spine, Cabinet of the Heed, and Fiction on the Web, among others. His poetry chapbook, Magical Yogis, was published by Prolific Press in 2017, and his collection, The Asthmatic Kid & Other Stories, was released by Madville Publishing in August of 2020.
Susan O’Dell Underwood
Susan O’Dell Underwoodis a poet and a fiction author, and has been teaching at Carson-Newman University since 1990. She is a Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program. Her areas of interest are poetry, Appalachian literature, and contemporary American poetry and literature. Her most recent novel, Genesis Road, was released by Madville Publishing in June 2022. Genesis Road was awarded the prestigious Kirkus Star.
Amit Verma
Amit Verma is a resident of Houston, TX, where he divides his time among things he Is passionate about, Including molding captive Impressionable minds and conducting research as a professor In Electrical Engineering, a perfect family, and a never perfect yard. His two works on literary fiction, The Lives and The Times, and The Lives and The Times II have been variously called, “rare find,” a “page-turner,”, and “…Is refreshing and does a humorous take on some of the pressing Issues…” His latest novel, A Quiver in the Purlieu, was released by Madville Publishing in November of 2021.
Randall Watson
Randall Watson is the author of No Evil is Wide, (Madville Publishing), which received the Quarterly West prize in the novella, The Geometry of Wishes (Texas Review Press), a finalist in the Juniper and Tampa Review Poetry Prizes, The Sleep Accusations, which received the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize at Eastern Washington University, (currently available through Carnegie Mellon University Press), and Las Delaciones del Sueño, translated by Antonio Saborit with an Introduction by Adam Zagajewski, published in a bi-lingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico. The graphic novel version of No Evil is Wide with art by Charles Moody was released by Madville Publishing in August of 2023.
Lorrie Lo Wagamon (Editor)
Lorrie Lo graduated from the National Cheng Chi University in Taiwan with a BA in journalism. She and husband Dr. Charles H. Wagamon, Jr. were dedicated to broadening English horizons in Taiwan for years. She edited various magazines and published several English learning books. She even established a service agency, Nova International Cultural & Educational Services (NICES) to promote cultural exchanges. Lorrie’s special passion, however, is publishing multi-lingual poetry books. She once helped Patricia Hu, a renowned professor of French literature and a poet in Taiwan, to publish her poetry books, The Falling Flowersand Tang Poems of Ancient Melodies in Chinese, English, and French. Those two books made great impressions on Jan Cole, a popular and well respected musician and poet of Huntsville, Texas, where Lorrie lived since 2014. Lorrie and Jan met and became dear friends. Jan wished to see her English and French poems also shown in Chinese, and Lorrie promised to make her dream come true. The path toward that dream has not been without obstacles, but Lorrie has been lucky to be in contact with a volunteer translator thousands of miles away, and with whose help she was, in the end, able to keep her promise and happily see the tri-lingual Sisypha Larvata Prodeat on its way.
Julie Liddell Whitehead
Julie Liddell Whiteheadlives and writes from Mississippi. An award-winning freelance writer, Julie covered disasters from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina throughout her career. She writes on mental health, mental health education, and mental health advocacy. She has a bachelor’s degree in communication, with a journalism emphasis, and a master’s degree in English, both from Mississippi State University. In August 2021, she completed her MFA from Mississippi University for Women.
Dana Wildsmith
Dana Wildsmith is the author of six collections of poetry, a novel, Jumping, and an environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South, which was the finalist for Georgia Author of the Year. Wildsmith has served as Artist-in-Residence for Devils Tower National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Everglades National Park. She is a Fellow of the Hambidge Center for Science and Creative Arts. Her seventh poetry collection,With Access to Tools, will be released by Madville in May 2023.
Steve Yates is the award-winning author of The Legend of the Albino Farm: A Novel (Unbridled Books), Some Kinds of Love: Stories (University of Massachusetts Press / Juniper Prize Winner), and Morkan’s Quarry: A Novel (Moon City Press). His novella, Sandy and Wayne, was chosen by New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff as the inaugural winner of the Knickerbocker Prize, published in a letter press edition by Big Fiction and later published as a book by Dock Street Press. His title The Lakes of Southern Hollow releases from Madville in 2024. He is associate director / marketing director of University Press of Mississippi, and lives in Flowood with his wife, Tammy.
Barbara Young
Barbara Young was born in a Nashville, Tennessee that was nothing like today’s city. She wrote poetry in high school, won a contest with a disappointing prize, went away to a small Baptist college. The nineteen-seventies are a blank during which she gave up writing in the belief that poetry should have something important to say, and she had nothing. Years later she discovered writing prompts, decided that important things were over-rated, and eventually—having found no other calling—began to admit to being a poet. She, husband Jim, and their two cats live in White Bluff, near Nashville. Her poetry collection, Heirloom Language, was released by Madville Publishing in May 2021.
Darnell Arnoult is the author of Incantations (Madville, 2024) the novel Sufficient Grace (Simon & Schuster) and two poetry collections, What Travels With Us and Galaxie Wagon (LSU Press), with shorter works in journals and anthologies. She has received the SIBA Poetry Book of the Year Prize, the Weatherford Award, the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award, and the Mary Frances Hobson Award in Arts and Letters and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives with her family in Mebane, NC. For more about Darnell and her workshops, visit darnellarnoult.net.
Ellen Austin-Li’s first full-length collection, Incidental Pollen—a 2023 Trio Award finalist, a 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist, and runner-up to the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize—is forthcoming from Madville Publishing. Finishing Line Press published her two chapbooks, Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). Her work appears in Artemis, Thimble Literary, The Maine Review, Salamander, Lily Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, and many other places. She’s a Best of the Net nominee and holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen co-founded the monthly reading series, “Poetry Night at Sitwell’s,” in Cincinnati, where she lives.
Joyce Compton Brown was born into an agrarian German/Scots Irish farm family in Iredell County, North Carolina. Appalachian State University confirmed her love for the mountains and Appalachian music, where she took classes in the Child Ballads and other subjects under the founder of the Appalachian Studies Association, Cratis Williams, and acquired her first banjo. Between bouts of paper grading, she welcomed chances to learn at Berea and Hindman workshops. Her early writing focuses on her Southern family roots and stories she heard as a child. Her later writing though based in specificity, attempts a sense of universality.
Wayne Caldwell is the author of two novels, Cataloochee (2007) and Requiem by Fire (2010; reissued 2020), and two volumes of poems, Woodsmoke (2021) and River Road (2024). He has won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the WNC Historical Association, and the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Patricia Clark is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Sunday Rising, The Canopy, and most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Slate, among others. Awards include a Creative Artist Grant in Michigan, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, and co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She also received the 2018 Book of the Year Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia for The Canopy. Patricia was professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University, where she was the university’s poet-in-residence. She was also poet laureate of the city of Grand Rapids from 2005-2007.
Michael Amos Cody was born in the South Carolina Lowcountry and raised in the North Carolina highlands. He spent his twenties writing songs in Nashville and his thirties in school. He’s the author of the novel Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press) and short fiction that has appeared in Yemassee, Tampa Review, Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. His short story collection, A Twilight Reel (Pisgah Press) won the Short Story/Anthology category of the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. Cody lives with his wife Leesa in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and teaches in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.
Rod Davis is the author of East of Texas, West of Hell, the sequel to South, America, described as “a triumph of Southern noir.” He is also the author of Corina’s Way, winner of the fiction prize in the inaugural PEN Southwest Book Awards for 2000-2005, and of American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World, selected as one of the “Exceptional Books of 1998” by Bookman Book Review Syndicate. His title The Life of Kim and the Behavior of Men releases from Madville in 2024. A long-time journalist and magazine editor, he is a member of PEN America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and was formerly on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. He served as an Army first lieutenant in South Korea in the Vietnam Era.
Gary Fincke has published five collections of essays, Including The Darkness Call, which won the Robert C. Jones Prize (Pleaides Press, 2018). Individual essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize. His short story collections have been published by Coffee House, Missouri, and West Virginia and have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Collections of his poetry have won book prizes offered by Ohio State, Michigan State, Arkansas, Stephen. F. Austin, and Jacar.
Connie Jordan Green is the author of novels for young people, poetry chapbooks and collections, and a personal newspaper column that ran for more than 42 years. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of awards for her writing including induction into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame, a Tribute to the Arts Award from the Oak Ridge Arts Council, and inclusion in Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (University Press of Kentucky). She taught creative writing for the University of Tennessee and continues to teach at various workshops.
Ben Groner III is the author of Dust Storms May Exist (Madville, 2024). He received Texas A&M University’s 2014 Gordone Award for undergraduate poetry and two Pushcart Prize nominations. His poems have been published in Whale Road Review, GASHER, The South Carolina Review, The Shore, Rust & Moth, Cheat River Review, and elsewhere. He is a former bookseller at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and son.
Theodore Haddin is a poet, editor, and emeritus professor from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Previous collections are By a Doorway, in the Garden, and the chapbook The River and the Road. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Birmingham Poetry Review, Chariton Review, Valley Voices, POMPA, and Poetry South and in three anthologies. Reviews on American literature and poetry have been published in Valley Voices, The Anniston Star, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. A professionally trained violinist, Haddin has performed locally and supported music organizations including the Arianna String Quartet and individuals in Berlin and St. Louis. At UAB, he founded and directed The Humanities Forum, now named in his honor as The Theodore Haddin Forum for the Arts and Sciences.
Writer, editor, and content strategist, Catherine Hamrick worked at Southern Living, Cooking Light, Southern Accents, Victoria, Better Homes and Gardens, and Meredith Books. She also taught writing and communication arts at several colleges and universities. Her poetry has appeared in The Blue Mountain Review, Appalachian Places, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel: Appalachian Witness, storySouth, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at Random Storyteller.
R.J. Lee was born and grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, and graduated from Sewanee (University of the South) with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Though he now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, he lived for thirty years in New Orleans during which he worked in journalism, advertising, and tourist commission work writing and publishing 16 novels from 1992 to the present. The Majestic Leo Marble is his 17th book.
Walter B. Levis, a former crime reporter, lives in New York City. His articles have appeared in The NY Daily News, The National Law Journal, The Chicago Reporter, The Chicago Lawyer, The New Republic, Show Business Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others. He is the author of the novel Moments of Doubt. His short stories have appeared widely and have been chosen for a Henfield Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Daniel Manuel Mendoza was born in Hammond, Indiana, and raised in Hebbronville, Texas. He is the author of Stray Dogs: Interviews with Working-Class Writers (Down & Out Books, 2016). His work has appeared in Boulevard, Pleiades, and Alchemy, among others. He lives in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Jim Minick is the author or editor of eight books, including The Intimacy of Spoons: poems, Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas (nonfiction), Fire Is Your Water (novel), and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family. His work has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Poets & Writers, Oxford American, Orion, Shenandoah, Appalachian Journal, Wind, and The Sun. He serves as coeditor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.
Dean Monti started writing at age two, but nothing legible until age five. Since then, his fiction has appeared in several literary journals in print and online. His title The Monosexual, releases from Madville in 2024. His critically-acclaimed novel, The Sweep of the Second Hand, was published by Academy Chicago Publishers and reprinted in paperback by Penguin. In addition to other novels, he is the author of several full-length and one-act plays and has had works staged in Chicago and Norfolk, Virginia. His short story “Why Dogs Don’t Talk” was adapted as a stage play and short film. Additionally, Monti has also taught creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago and at College of DuPage. He lives in Glen Ellyn with his wife, Julie and two difficult but sometimes loveable cats.
Mary B. Moore’s published books include Dear If, Orison Books 2021; Flicker, Dogfish Head Award, 2016; The Book of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center, 1998; and the prize-winning chapbooks Amanda and the Man Soul and Eating the Light. Poems appear lately in Birmingham Poetry Review, POETRY, Tahoma Literary Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, Terrain, Calyx, Still: The Journal, Crosswinds and more. She has won NELLE’s Three Sisters Prize, Birmingham Poetry Review’s Collins Prize, and the second-place award in Nimrod’s 2017 Pablo Neruda Prize. She is a native Californian and was a professor at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where she now lives.
Steven T. Moore often says that his mother is the wellspring of his poetry. She read and recited poetry to him before his birth and through his growing-up years in locales as varied as Central America and Gurnee, Illinois. Moore received his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and his M.A. and Ph.D. are from the University of Nebraska. The recipient of several teaching and scholarly awards, he is a university professor of English who often teaches poetry workshops and a class called Bon Appétit: Savoring Poetry & Good Cooking. While writing poetry, he immerses himself in jazz, the blues, and the spirit of Langston Hughes. Published widely in literary journals, he is also a bestselling children’s author and the author of two scholarly books examining Black rage.
Tori Viva Muñoz is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of CUSLAI (Center for U.S.-Latin America Initiatives) at The University of Texas at Dallas, Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology, Muñoz completed her Ph.D. in 2021, where her dissertation, “Double Hybridization and Bordercanx Literary Works: How the United States Turned Mexican Americans into the Forgotten People,” became a hybrid work on a distinct population within the Latinx community.
Steve Putnam living the dream: Farm kid, Navy E3, small-town GM mechanic, framing carpenter, and an onsite printer tech at a large corporate account. When the printers were all working, he hid out in a chain link cage, his basement shop, and wrote the first draft of Academy of Reality. No one at Corporate knew they were funding a novel about the strange ways of big business. For outstanding customer service, Putnam won ‘Tech of the Year’ and a trip to Arizona. (As a novel-in-progress, a version of this novel was shortlisted in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Competition in New Orleans.)
Goutham Rao is a practicing family physician, researcher in cardiovascular prevention, endowed professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University, and author of more than one hundred publications including five books. He has taught writing skills to physicians and other healthcare professionals for more than twenty years. Within a large healthcare system, Dr. Rao is responsible for promoting wellness and preventing burnout among physicians. During the height of the pandemic, he personally found creative writing therapeutic and started and leads a group called “Words for Wellness” which brings together healthcare professionals to discover the value of writing as both a creative outlet and a means to promote wellness. Dr. Rao grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and lives outside Cleveland.
linda ravenswood BFA MA, PhD is a poet and performance artist from Los Angeles. Her accolades include an Oxford Prize in Poetry (2022) and the Edwin Markham Prize in Poetry (2023). She is the founding editor of The Los Angeles Press, est. 2018, and the co-founder of the Poet Laureate program in Glendale, California. Her recent collections include Cantadora—letters from California (Eyewear London/The Black Spring Press Group, 2023), The Stan Poems (Pedestrian Press, 2022), Tlacuilx—Tongues in Quarantine (HINCHAS Press, 2021), and XLA Poets (HINCHAS Press, 2020).
Yiskah Rosenfeld is the author of Tasting Flight (Madville, 2024), and Naked Beside Fish (Finishing Line Press, 2024), an ekphrastic chapbook. She holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and an MA in jurisprudence and social policy from UC Berkeley. She is also a proud rabbinical school dropout. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, the Reuben Rose Memorial Prize, and was runner-up for the Jeff Marks Prize, the Julia Darling Prize, and, most recently, the Frontier Poetry Roots & Roads Prize. Tasting Flight was the runner-up for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. Poems appear in Lilith Magazine, The Seattle Review, The Bitter Oleander, Rattle, Slippery Elm, December, and elsewhere. Her writings have also appeared in anthologies such as Why to These Rocks: the 50th Anniversary Anthology of the Community of Writers, Wild Gods: An Anthology of Ecstatic Poetry, and Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. Kansas born and raised, Yiskah currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she balances solo parenting with teaching workshops on feminism, spirituality, and creativity.
Katie Sanyal is a debut novelist from Utah with roots in Georgia. She is an English major currently studying at the University of Utah. When she is not writing, she is reading, and when she is not reading, she can be found enjoying Salt Lake City with her friends and family.
Neil Shepard is the author of The Book of Failures (Madville, 2024) and How It Is: Selected Poems, published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry (Ireland); he edited the anthology Vermont Poets and Their Craft in 2019 (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-a-Day, as well as in many literary magazines, including Harvard Review, New American Writing, New England Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. He edited the Green Mountains Review for many years and currently edits the online journal Plant-Human Quarterly. These days, he splits time between Vermont and NYC where, until the pandemic, he taught poetry workshops at Poets House.
Julie Liddell Whitehead lives and writes from Mississippi. An award-winning freelance writer, Julie covered disasters from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina throughout her career. She writes on mental health, mental health education, and mental health advocacy. She has a bachelor’s degree in communication, with a journalism emphasis, and a master’s degree in English, both from Mississippi State University. In August 2021, she completed her MFA from Mississippi University for Women.
Steve Yates is the award-winning author of The Legend of the Albino Farm: A Novel (Unbridled Books), Some Kinds of Love: Stories (University of Massachusetts Press / Juniper Prize Winner), and Morkan’s Quarry: A Novel (Moon City Press). His novella, Sandy and Wayne, was chosen by New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff as the inaugural winner of the Knickerbocker Prize, published in a letter press edition by Big Fiction and later published as a book by Dock Street Press. His title The Lakes of Southern Hollow releases from Madville in 2024. He is associate director / marketing director of University Press of Mississippi, and lives in Flowood with his wife, Tammy.
