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!
Authors Brian Petkash, Gianna Russo, George Drew, Publisher Kim Davis, and Christine Cock in Tampa in 2019
Darnell Arnoult
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
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.
Julie Bloemeke (Editor)
Julie Bloemeke is a poet, freelance writer, editor, guest lecturer, and teacher of online poetry workshops. In 2021, her first poetry collection, Slide to Unlock ,was chosen as one of two full-length poetry collections statewide as a Book All Georgians Should Read. Slide to Unlock was also chosen as the Finalist in Poetry for the 57th Georgia Author of the Year Award. She is currently an Associate Editor for South Carolina Review and co-edited a tribute issue of Limp Wrist for Dolly Parton’s 75th birthday in January 2021. Along with Dustin Brookshire, she is the co-editor of the Madvillan anthology Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology, which debuted with Madville Publishing on Dolly’s 77th birthday, January 19, 2023.
Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines including Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Cortland Review, Nimrod, Pine Hills Review, Crab Orchard Review, Muse/A Journal, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Poet Lore, and others. Her poems have been published in a number of anthologies including Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Popculture Poetry Anthology, The Pandemic Poetry Anthology, A Constellation of Kisses, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, The Great Gatsby Anthology, The Sense of the Midlands, The Nancy Drew Anthology, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume V: Georgia, and the My Cruel Invention Anthology, among others.
Earl Braggs
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 Blues and 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, Looking for 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.
Dustin Brookshire (Editor)
Dustin Brookshire, a finalist for the 2021 Scotti Merrill Award, is the founder/editor of Limp Wrist and curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series, a Zoom-based poetry reading series, program director for Reading Queer, and founding chapter president of the South Florida Poets. He is the author of the chapbooks Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). With poet Julie E. Bloemeke, Dustin is a co-editor of the Madvillan poetry collection Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023).
Dustin’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in or is forthcoming in Assaracus, Whiskey Island, South Florida Poetry Journal, South 85, Olney Magazine, Mollyhouse, The West Review, Oddball, Gulf Stream Magazine, Redheaded Stepchild, SubtleTea, Ocho, Oranges & Sardines, Ouroboros, Qarrtsiluni, and other publications. He has been anthologized in Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012) and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writes on the American South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014).
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. Her writing discipline began at age ten, writing five short stories a day under the tutelage of a writing teacher. She won first place in a province-wide in-person writing competition and her winning short story appeared in a widely-read newspaper. She studied journalism at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Bernard Rauch.
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 2017) and the short story collection A Twilight Reel (Pisgah Press 2021), winner of the Short Story / Anthology category of the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. Cody’s novel Streets of Nashville (Madville Publishing 2025) was named a Finalist for the Best Thriller Book Awards 2025 by bestthrillers.com and won the Independent Press Award 2026 in the category of Thriller. 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.
Kim Davis (editor-in-chief)
Kimberly Parish (K.P.) Davis was once upon a time an adrenaline junkie. Director and founder of Madville Publishing, Kim grew up in Texas, but sailed around the world as a chef aboard private yachts for fifteen years before returning home. Her short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in literary journals, anthologies, and online. She spent five years on the editorial staff of Texas Review Press, and holds an MFA from Sam Houston State University and a BA from Columbia College, Chicago. Her short story collection, Trust Issues was published by Cornerstone Press in 2025, and her chapbook, A Thin Line is forthcoming from Bass Clef Books. Her website is kpdavis.com.
Rod Davis
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.
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 Literary and Art 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.
George Drew
George Drew was born in Mississippi and raised there and in New York State, where he currently lives. He is the author of seven collections, most recently Pastoral Habits: New & Selected Poems (2016), Down & Dirty (2015) and The View from Jackass Hill (2011, winner of the 2010 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize), all published by Texas Review Press. His eighth collection, Fancy’s Orphan, was published in 2017 by Tiger Bark Press, and his ninth, Drumming Armageddon was published in 2020, by Madville Publishing. His work was featured in the anthology Muddy Backroads: Stories From Off the Beaten Path, edited by Luanne smith and Bonnie Jo Campbell (Madville Publishing, 2022). George has published widely, with poems, reviews and essays appearing in journals around the country. His work also has been anthologized, most recently in The Southern Poetry Anthology, II: Mississippi (Texas Review Press, 2010), Down to the Dark River: An Anthology of Poems About the Mississippi River(Louisiana Literature Press, 2015), The Great American Wise Ass Anthology(Lamar University Literary Press, 2016), Like Light, (Bright Hill Press, 2017), Birchsong: Poetry Centered in Vermont, II (The Blueline Press, 2018), and the Madvillan collection By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Publishing, March 2019).
Andrew Dunn (Illustrator)
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. Ted passed away in January of 2024. He was 91.
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 Journal here. 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.