Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger is a poet, flash fiction writer, and editor who lives in Akron, Ohio. She is Professor of English at the University of Akron, where she directs the NEOMFA creative writing program. Since 2008, Biddinger has edited the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press.

Her novella-in-flash, The Girl with the Black Lipstick was published by Black Lawrence Press in July 2025. Her most recent poetry collections are Department of Elegy (2022) and Partial Genius: Prose Poems (2019). She is also co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers (University of Akron Press, 2024).

Biddinger teaches graduate courses such as Literature for Creative Writers, Craft and Theory of Prose Poetry, and Flash Fiction Workshop, as well as introductory and advanced undergraduate creative writing workshops in poetry and fiction. She has received the mid-career Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, as well as several Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Creative Writing for her poetry. She was also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry.

Learn more about her work at Black Lawrence Press and find updates on LinkedIn and Linktr.ee.

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.

Lisa Kwong

Lisa Kwong is the author of Becoming AppalAsian (Glass Lyre Press, 2022) and a member of the Affrilachian Poets. Born and raised in Radford, Virginia, Kwong identifies as AppalAsian, an Asian from Appalachia. A first-generation college student, she earned her B.A. in English from Appalachian State University and holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Indiana University (IU). Her poem “Searching For Wonton Soup” was Sundress Publications’ 2019 Poetry Broadside Contest Winner, and her work has been nominated for the Weatherford Award in Poetry, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. Her poems have appeared in About Place Journal, Women Speak, Best New Poets, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Still: The Journal, Naugatuck River Review, Appalachian Heritage, Pluck!, The Sleuth, and other publications. Kwong is also a multidisciplinary educator. She has taught courses in Asian American studies, creative writing, English composition, and student success at IU and Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington, Indiana.

Joe Mills

A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds holds the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities and was honored with a 2017 UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. His work includes poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism. He has published eight volumes of poetry with Press 53: The Holiday Cycle; Bodies in Motion; Exit, Pursued by a Bear; This Miraculous Turning; Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet; Love and Other Collisions; Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers; and Somewhere During the Spin Cycle.

He has also published a collection of linked short stories: Bleachers. With his wife, Danielle Tarmey, he researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina's Wineries (John F. Blair, Publisher). He has also edited a collection of film criticism entitled A Century of the Marx Brothers (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He won the 2017 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition sponsored by the North Carolina Writers Network for his essay, "On Hearing My Daughter Trying to Sing Dixie." In 2015, he won the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for This Miraculous Turning.

He has degrees in literature from the University of Chicago (B.A.), the University of New Mexico (M.A.), and the University of California-Davis (Ph.D). As he was working on his third one, his mother asked, "Don't you know that stuff yet?"