About the Contributors
- About the Contributors
Julene Bair’s The Ogallala Road: A Story of Love, Family, and the Fight to Keep the Great Plains from Running Dry (Viking/Penguin, 2014) was a Booklist Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award and the High Plains Book Award. Her first book, One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, won Women Writing the West’s WILLA award. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Bair has published essays in venues ranging from High Country News to the New York Times. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and now resides in Santa Rosa, CA. (Learn more about her work at www.julenebair.com.)
Sue D. Burton is a physician’s assistant specializing in women’s health care. Her poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Green Mountains Review, Mudlark, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, and Verse Daily. Her manuscript Box has been awarded the 2017 Two Sylvias Press Poetry Prize (forthcoming 2018).
Kristin Collier is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Minnesota and a former public-school teacher in Chicago and New York City. She was a finalist in the 2016 New Letters Literary Awards for nonfiction, and her most recent work of long-form journalism can be found in City Pages.
Renée E. D’Aoust’s Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press) was a Foreword Reviews Book of the Year finalist. She is the managing editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. D’Aoust was an NEH 2017 Summer Scholar at the City, Nature: Urban Environmental Humanities institute run by the University of [End Page 221] Washington. Visit www.reneedaoust.com and follow her @idahobuzzy, where she tweets about her rescue dachshund, Tootsie.
Melissa Ferrone’s work has been published in Guernica, the Cimarron Review, the Colorado Review, the Normal School, The Pinch, Brevity, The Collagist, Fourth River, and the Baltimore Review, among others. Her nonfiction has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her work was listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2015. She was a nonfiction contributor to the 2015 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and she earned her MFA from West Virginia University.
Joey Franklin is the author of My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married. His work has appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle, the Gettysburg Review, the Norton Reader, and other publications. For this essay, he would like to acknowledge the intrepid reporting of Elliott Blackburn, Shelly Gonzalez, Tiffany Pelt, Christie Post, Cole Shooter, Adam Young, and others at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, KCBD News Channel 11, and KFYO FM 750, as well as the generosity of Joe and Melissa for sharing their story.
Sara Greenslit won the FC2 Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Award for her novel As If a Bird Flew by Me. She was awarded the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction for her novel The Blue of Her Body. She earned an MFA in poetry from Penn State University, and now she lives in Madison, WI, where she is a small-animal veterinarian.
Michaela Hansen is a Northwest native who likes to call Tacoma, WA, home even though she doesn’t always live there. She’s a recent graduate of the Texas State University MFA program. Her work has appeared in the McNeese Review; her short story “The Devil in the Barn” won the 2017 American Short Fiction prize and is forthcoming in its spring issue. When she’s not writing or reading with her orange cat Potter, she likes to wander around in the woods, sometimes on foot and sometimes on horseback.
Laura Jones earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at Northwestern University, and a BFA in film and television from New York University. For 15 years, she worked professionally in film and television production at PBS and Disney. She currently teaches writing at Ohio’s Central State University. [End Page 222] Her essays have been featured in Creative Nonfiction, About Place Journal, Foglifter, the Oklahoma Review, Litro (UK), and the Gay and Lesbian Review. Her collaborative piece about the South, Southlandia, will be published in They Said: A Multi...
