Kathie Collins
Board President, Charlotte Lit Co-Founder & Creative Director
Poet & Mythologist
Kathie Collins, co-founder and creative director of Charlotte Lit and editor-in-chief of Charlotte Lit Press, is a poet, mythologist, and lifelong student of Jungian psychology—which, consciously and unconsciously, makes its way into her work. She earned her graduate degrees in mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she also served as adjunct faculty. Kathie is author of Jubilee (Main Street Rag). Her poems have appeared in Flying South, Immanence, Kakalak, Major 7th Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, and Santa Fe Literary Review. She’s a 2023 Pushcart nominee, and her poetry manuscript Grass Widow was named a finalist in both the Iron Horse Lit Review and Palette Poetry 2023 Chapbook competitions. Contact: kathie@charlottelit.org.
Paul Reali
Charlotte Lit Co-Founder & Executive Director
Writer, Editor, Coach, Instructor
Paul Reali is co-founder of Charlotte Lit, a nonprofit literary arts center in Charlotte, NC. He won the 2023 Doris Betts Fiction Award and is a past winner of the Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Story and Ruth Moose Flash Fiction awards. His writing on creativity and business has been widely published, and his fiction is forthcoming in the North Carolina Literary Review. He was awarded a Wildacres residency in 2022, and received a Regional Artist Project Grant from Charlotte’s Arts & Science Council in 2018. He has an M.S. in Creativity from Buffalo State University. Contact: paul@charlottelit.org.
Paula Martinac
Community Coordinator
Writer, Editor, Teacher
Paula Martinac is the award-winning author of seven novels and three nonfiction books. Her short stories and essays have been published in Main Street Rag, Raleigh Review, Minerva Rising, Hippocampus, and other places. She has received fellowships from the Arts & Science Council and the North Carolina Arts Council and was the recipient of the 2023 William F. Deeck-Malice Domestic Grant for an unpublished mystery novel. She teaches fiction writing at UNC Charlotte; is a developmental editor and writing coach; and writes book reviews for Historical Novels Review and Foreword Reviews.
Current Charlotte Lit Faculty & Speakers
Umayal Annamalai is a self-taught mixed media expressionist and a creative coach. She uses her creativity to explore her journey towards self-discovery and to connect with her inner self and the world around her. Her art is a reflection of her emotions, which she transforms into beauty and grace to heal herself and others. She employs bright and bold colors to help people heal their suppressed negative emotions and find their voice.
Sarah Archer’s debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has spoken and taught writing to groups in several states and countries. She is also a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast. saraharcherwrites.com.
Chris Arvidson grew up in Michigan. She holds a B.A. from Olivet College, an M.A. from UNC Charlotte, and an M.F.A. from Goucher College. Chris has been an adjunct instructor at Robert Morris University and at UNC Charlotte. She has co-edited three anthologies in which her own work appears: Mountain Memoirs: An Ashe County Anthology (Main Street Rag), Reflections on the New River: New Essays, Poems and Personal Stories (McFarland), and The Love of Baseball: Essays by Lifelong Fans (McFarland). Her poetry chapbook, The House Inside My Head (Finishing Line Press), was published in 2022. Chris recently curated an ekphrastic show at the Charlotte Art League “Evolution of Words and Art” and mounted her own ekphrastic show “Painting Words” in the League’s galleries.
Joseph Bathanti is former poet laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature. He is the McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor in Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. The Act of Contrition & Other Stories, winner of the EastOver Prize for Fiction was published in 2022.
Sandra Beasley — who first visited Charlotte Lit as the second 4X4CLT poet in 2016 — is the author of Made to Explode, winner of the Housatonic Book Award; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. In spring 2023, she was Davidson College’s McGee Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf , Small Gods of Grief, which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry, and A New Hunger, which was selected as a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her fourth book, These Many Rooms, came out from Four Way Books in 2019. With her late husband, the poet Kurt Brown, she translated a book by Flemish poet, Herman de Coninck: The Plural of Happiness. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the editor of five anthologies, she taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College, University of California, Santa Barbara, and at the Solstice low residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program. She served as Santa Barbara’s poet laureate from 2019 to 2021.
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with Jessica Jacobs, and she regularly teaches online as part of the SunJune Literary Collaborative.
Craig Buchner holds an M.F.A. from the University of Idaho and a MA in English from Western Carolina University. He’s taught writing at Brevard College, Washington State University, and Portland Community College. His debut collection of short stories, Brutal Beasts (NFB Publishing), was chosen as an “Indie Book of the Year” in 2022 by Kirkus Reviews. He is also the author of the novel Fish Cough (Buckman Press), which was named an “Indie Books We Love” by LoveReading in 2023. Craig lives with his family in Charlotte.
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He was the 2018-22 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency M.F.A. programs at New England College and Stonecoast.
Morri Creech is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent of which are The Sleep of Reason (Waywiser, 2013), a finalist for Pulitzer Prize, and Blue Rooms (Waywiser, 2018). His fifth book, The Sentence, is forthcoming from LSU Press. A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as grants from the North Carolina and Louisiana Arts councils, he is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte.
Sarah Creech is the author of two novels, Season of the Dragonflies and The Whole Way Home. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in various publications, including The Cortland Review, Writer’sDigest.com, Story South, and Literary Mama. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and children and teaches at Queens University of Charlotte.
Steve Cushman is the author of three novels, Portisville, which won the 2004 Novello Literary Award, Heart With Joy, and Hopscotch. He has also published a short story collection and two poetry chapbooks. Cushman’s first full-length poetry collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book Award and his latest collection, Without You, was published in 2023. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his family and works in the IT department at Cone Health safter working as an X-Ray Technologist for twenty years.
Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road (Viking), a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues (Penguin), Dig Safe (Penguin), Backwards Days (Penguin), Children with Enemies (Chicago), and the forthcoming The Lookout Man (Chicago) and the collaborative Andalusian Visions. His poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly, The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and numerous national and international anthologies. A recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he is a professor in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021, teaches in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Mississippi. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize and three times been included in The Best American Poetry series. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, and a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, all published with W. W. Norton. A novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin, called The Tilted World, was published by HarperCollins. Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton), was named an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book, a Goodreaders Favorite for 2017, and the winner of the Housatonic Book Prize.
Michael Gaspeny recently published Flight Manual: New and Selected Poems and A Postcard from the Delta, a Blues-infused novel about football and racial discord. He’s the author of a novella in verse, The Tyranny of Questions, and two chapbooks. He won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition and the O. Henry Festival Short Fiction Contest. For hospice service, he received the North Carolina Governor’s Award for Volunteer Excellence. His work history includes reporting, ad-writing, selling vacuum cleaners, and shackling chickens.
Judy Goldman is the award-winning author of seven books—three memoirs, two novels, and two collections of poetry. Her new memoir, Child, was named a Katie Couric Media Must-Read Book for 2022. Her recent memoir, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap, was named one of the best books of 2019 by Real Simple magazine and received a starred review from Library Journal. Her work has appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, The Charlotte Observer, Real Simple, LitHub, and many literary journals and anthologies.
Patrice Gopo’s essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Catapult, Charlotte Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and AFAR Magazine. Her essay “That Autumn” received a notable mention in the Best American Essays 2020 and earned a National CRMA award for best essay. She is a Sustainable Arts Foundation awardee and a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship recipient. Her essay collection, All the Colors We Will See, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her debut picture book All the Places We Call Home was inspired by an essay in her collection. Online: patricegopo.com.
Jaki Shelton Green, ninth Poet Laureate of North Carolina is a 2019 Academy of American Poet Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate appointment, and 2003 recipient of the NC Award for Literature. She teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and was appointed the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill. She is the author of eight poetry collections, a poetry LP and CDs. She is the poetry editor for WALTER Magazine and serves as the Poet Laureate in Residence at the NC Museum of Art.
Amy Hart is a photographer/filmmaker/creative director who has lived and worked across the country, and a few places around the world, and is now based in Charlotte. She was the official photographer for the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square NYC, and is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. She also loves creative writing, yoga, and playful water sports. Check out her work at amyhartstudios.com.
Jodi Helmer has been a full-time freelance writer since 2002. She’s written for small magazines and big brands and managed to support her family (and fund her 401k) in the process. You’ll find her work in National Geographic Traveler, Scientific American, and Our State and corporate sites for GE Healthcare, Pfizer, Mastercard and AARP.
Robin Hemley has published fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are the autofiction, Oblivion: An After-Autobiography (Gold Wake, 2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (Nebraska, 2020; Penguin SE Asia, 2021). He has previously published four collections of short stories, and his stories have been widely anthologized. His writing text, Turning Life into Fiction, has sold over a hundred thousand copies and has been in print for 25 years.
AE Hines is the author of Any Dumb Animal, his debut collection which received honorable mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell book contest, and was a da Vinci Eye finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His poems have won numerous prizes, and are widely published in anthologies and literary journals, including more recently: The Sun, Rattle, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Ninth Letter, Poet Lore, I-70 Review and The Greensboro Review. He resides in Charlotte and Medellín, Colombia. Online: aehines.net.
Irene Blair Honeycutt, award-winning teacher and poet, was recently acknowledged as one of six women who’ve shaped the history of Charlotte’s community of readers and writers. Among her honors are the Charlotte Writers Club’s Adelia Kimball Founder’s Award for her advocacy of writers, Central Piedmont Community College’s Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lectureship, a Creative Fellowship from the Charlotte Arts and Science Council and an NC Arts Council Scholarship. Her most recent of four poetry books is Beneath the Bamboo Sky (Main Street Rag, 2017). Currently working on a fifth manuscript, she also mentors poets and enjoys meeting with the woods.
Marjorie Hudson moved to rural North Carolina, working as a freelance writer with a column interviewing nature photographers and publishing articles in Garden & Gun, American Land Forum, Wildlife in North Carolina, Our State Magazine, and North Carolina Literary Review. As copyediting chief for Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, she encountered the work of contemporary Southern writers such as Jill McCorkle, Kaye Gibbons, and Clyde Edgerton for the first time. Inspired, she turned her hand to fiction writing, and her first story won a statewide award judged by Shannon Ravenel. She earned an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College.
Kathy Izard is an award-winning author and speaker who writes inspirational nonfiction, including The Hundred Story Home, The Last Ordinary Hour and her upcoming release Trust the Whisper (Summer 2024). Kathy also publishes children’s books including A Good Night for Mr. Coleman and Grace Heard a Whisper (Fall 2023). Kathy has written essays for Katie Couric Media and her work as been featured on the Today Show, inspiring people to be changemakers in their community. Online: kathyizard.com.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards and one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Collections of the Year, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), winner of the New Mexico Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/Penguin RandomHouse), which she co-authored with Nickole Brown. She is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah, a national nonprofit literary organization for Jewish poets. unalone, her collection of poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2024. She lives in Asheville, NC.
Surabhi Kaushik finds comfort and joy in playing the role of a copywriter, storyteller, poet, or essayist, not necessarily in that order. She is also a literary artist, which means she bridges talent and resources. She creates and facilitates writing programs to help build a strong, and supportive writing community.
CJ Lawing has been a landscape designer/installer for 20 years, 15 years of which she spent growing her own business, Living Art Design, in Charlotte. She is a recent graduate of Fairfield University’s Spiritual Direction program, where she became joyfully clear that nature has been the one true constant and guide in her life. Her passionate relationship with the natural world and its creatures nurtures and extends into all aspects of her life. If she had to choose one title to describe how she approaches her work, it would be artist-gardener.
Brooke Dwojak Lehmann
is a poet and creative who draws inspiration from nature, fashion, and her love of the piano. Her poems have been featured in Tar River Poetry, Pedestal Magazine and others. She was longlisted for the 2022 Palette Poetry Sappho Prize for Women Poets, and her chapbook manuscript, Pillar of Exquisite Sorrows, was named a finalist in Tusculum Review’s 2023 Chapbook Prize. Brooke holds a B.S. from Purdue University and is a graduate of the Arts and Science Council Cultural Leadership Training program. She serves as an advisory group member of Charlotte Center for Mindfulness.
Misha Lazzara is the author of the novels Manmade Constellations (Blackstone, 2022) and Desperate, NC (forthcoming). Her work has appeared on Poets.org, October Hill Magazine, Amethyst Review and more. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from North Carolina State University and an M.A. in Literature with a focus in Creative Writing from UNC Charlotte.
Zeba Mehdi is department chair of English at Central Piedmont Community College. She has degrees in English and Teaching, and attended Winthrop University, University of South Carolina, and Queens University of Charlotte. She has presented at several national conferences, and is a credited reviewer for multiple academic texts on the subject of writing.
Ashley Memory’s poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared in nearly 100 magazines, journals, and websites, including Poets & Writers, Pen Dust Radio, NBC THINK, The Independent, and the North Carolina Literary Review. She serves as a critique editor and judge for the quarterly writing contests held by the award-winning global community, Women On Writing. Online: ashley-memory.com.
Meghan Modafferi is the editorial director of Crash Course, an award-winning YouTube channel reaching more than 70 million people per year. She has taught writing and podcasting at Georgetown University, and her written and multimedia work has been published by National Geographic, Slate, and NPR.
Heather Newton’s novel The Puppeteer’s Daughters (Turner Publishing, 2022) was a finalist for the Forword INDIES Book of the Year Award and has been optioned for television. Her short story collection McMullen Circle (Regal House, 2022), was a finalist for both the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the W.S. Porter Prize. Her novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins, 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and named an “Okra Pick” by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. She teaches creative writing for UNC-Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and Charlotte Lit, and is co-founder and program manager for the Flatiron Writers Room writers’ center in Asheville. Online: heathernewton.net and flatironwritersroom.com.
Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019, and her anthology of lyric essays A Harp in the Stars was published by the same press in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity, and Creative Nonfiction. She is the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s low-residency MFA program and Goucher College’s MFA in Nonfiction program. Online: randonbillingsnoble.com.
Amy Paturel a journalist in Southern California who writes about health, fitness, food, wine and travel. For nearly two decades, she has covered everything from food to sex—and what results from both: obesity and parenting. But her expertise lies in health and nutrition, and she has a knack for translating complex medical information into easy-to-digest language. You’ll find her byline in niche publications, anthologies and popular newsstand magazines, including AARP, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, Parents, Reader’s Digest and O, The Oprah Magazine. She also regularly write for websites including WebMD.com and BabyCenter.com.
Malin Pereira, Professor of English and Dean of the Honors College at UNC Charlotte, earned her Ph.D. in English at University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a minor in Afro-American Studies. Following early work on Toni Morrison, her scholarship and teaching have focused on contemporary Black poetry. Her books include Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism and Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen: Conversations with Contemporary Black Poets. Her most recent publications are on Thylias Moss and Natasha Trethewey. Work in progress includes “A Black Cosmopolitan Poetics” for Cambridge University Press and “Contemporary Black Poets on Phillis Wheatley Peters.”
Tracey Perez is a fairytale and folklore scholar who teaches in the English Department at Queens University of Charlotte. She also facilitates therapeutic and legacy writing classes for cancer survivors. A native North Carolinian, Tracey holds a B.A. from Wake Forest University and received a graduate degree in Medieval Studies from University North Carolina Greensboro. When not teaching and researching, Tracey enjoys reading speculative fiction, binge watching historical fantasy series, and playing mah-jongg.
Jaime Pollard-Smith is a full-time writing instructor at Central Piedmont Community College with an M.A. from New York University. Her fiction has been published in Literary Mama. She is a contributor for Scary Mommy and Project We Forgot. Online: unbecoming.co.
Dannye Romine Powell has won fellowships in poetry from the NC Arts Council, the NEA and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared recently in Southern Review, Cave Wall, Baltimore Review, Ploughshares, and forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review. Her sixth collection is In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver (Press 53) won the 2020 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry. She is also the author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers. She is a two-time winner of The Randall Jarrell Prize in Poetry, and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and Yaddo.
Megan Rich has written two books, a YA novel and a travel memoir, and is seeking representation for her third, a literary thriller inspired by The Great Gatsby. She took part in the highly selective sub-concentration in creative writing at the University of Michigan, for which she completed a thesis of original poetry. She’s also a graduate of the selective Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project, and she is a 2022 recipient of the Arts & Science Council Charlotte’s Creative Renewal Fellowship. With 14 years’ experience as a creative writing teacher and mentor of students from ages 12 to 85, she is passionate about helping all writers find and refine their voices on the page.
David L. Robbins, New York Times bestselling author, creative writing professor, founder of James River Writers, The Mighty Pen Project, and co-founder of the Podium Foundation. Online: davidlrobbinsauthor.com
Katharine Sands, literary agent representing fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Agent provocateur of Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye, a collection of pitching wisdom from leading literary agents. Katharine Sands Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency: sarahjanefreymann.com
Kathryn Schwille is the author of the novel, What Luck, This Life, selected by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as one of the best southern books of 2018. Her short stories have appeared in New Letters, Memorious, Crazyhorse, Literary Hub and other journals, and have twice been cited for Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize. A recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council, she’s led fiction workshops for 20 years and was the 2021 Visiting Writer at Gardner-Webb University.
Brooke Shaffner’s novel Country of Under won the 1729 Book Prize and is forthcoming in April 2024 from Mason Jar Press. Country of Under was the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction runner-up. Brooke is working on a memoir, the first chapter of which won the Lit/South Nonfiction Award and appeared in Litmosphere. Other writing has been published in The Hudson Review, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, Marie Claire, The Lit Pub, and BOMB. Read more at brookeshaffner.com.
Kristin Donnalley Sherman lives in Charlotte, where she works as a writer, editor, and writing coach. She’s published both fiction and nonfiction and is currently at work on two novels. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Barrelhouse, Silk Road, Main Street Rag, Flashquake, and others. She completed the Book Development Program at Queens University of Charlotte.
Mary Szybist is the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. She the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her first book, Granted, won the 2004 GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A native of Williamsport, PA, she now lives in Portland, OR, where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of 10 books including Half/Life: New and Selected Poemsfrom Alice James Books, the memoir fragile, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse. His newest book is Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust—John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
Betsy Thorpe started in book publishing as an assistant at Atheneum, eventually becoming an acquiring and developmental editor while working at HarperCollins, Broadway Books (Random House), Macmillan, and John Wiley & Sons. She then started Betsy Thorpe Literary Services, which helps authors deliver their best work to the public, either through publishers or self-publishing. She is the co-author of numerous nonfiction books, including three featured in The New York Times, and is releasing three novels under the pseudonym of Hope Carolle with Dragonblade Publishing in 2023.
Junious “Jay” Ward is a poet, teaching artist, and Charlotte’s inaugural poet laureate. He is the author of Sing Me a Lesser Wound (Bull City Press, 2020) and Composition (Button Poetry, 2023), and is also a National Poetry Slam champion (2018) and an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019). Jay currently serves as a program director for BreatheINK and vice chair on the board of The Watering Hole. He has attended Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole, and Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, Diode Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.
Ross White is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks, Valley of Want, How We Came Upon the Colony and The Polite Society. He is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, where he hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to chapbooks. He teaches creative writing, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. With Matthew Olzmann, he edited Another & Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series.
Ashley R. Wright is an advocate for self-discovery and a guide to true unimpeded human healing. As a Certified Life Coach, Grief Recovery Specialist and former Social Worker, she has dedicated her human experience to helping others improve or attain healthy soul expression. As the creator and founder of Strokes of Freedom, she joins in with clients as a guardian on the quest to self. Offering both topic focused & free writing one on one or group sessions, she facilitates a safe haven for journal writing as the method of healing and discovery.
Kim Wright is the author of five novels—Love in Mid Air, The Unexpected Waltz, The Canterbury Sisters, Last Ride to Graceland, and The Longest Day of the Year. She is also an experienced nonfiction writer who has won awards in the field of food and travel writing. She teaches in Charlotte Lit’s Authors Lab, as well as at other regional programs including the Flatiron Writers Room in Asheville. As the Story Doctor she specializes in the developmental editing of novels.
Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared in The Collagist, Southern Poetry Anthology, Nimrod, storySouth, and others. She was the creator and curator of 4X4CLT, Charlotte Lit’s public art and poetry series. In January 2023, she was awarded an M.F.A. in Poetry from Warren Wilson College.
Charlotte Lit Faculty & Guests Through the Years
Poets Laureate
United States: Joy Harjo (4X4CLT), Ada Limón, Tracy K. Smith (4X4CLT)
North Carolina: Joseph Bathanti, Jaki Shelton Green, Shelby Stephenson
Charlotte: Junious “Jay” Ward
Other States & Cities: Laure-Anne Bosselaar (Santa Barbara, CA), Beth Ann Fennelly (Mississippi), Angelo Geter (Rock Hill, SC), Chelsea Rathburn (Georgia)
Anthony S. “Tony” Abbott, John Amen, Catherine Anderson, Sarah Archer, Tina Barr, Sandra Beasley, Erin Belieu, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Nickole Brown, Shelia A. Bumgarner, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Tara Campbell, Wiley Cash, Bryn Chancellor, Jennifer Chang, Chen Chen, Erin Rose Coffin, Morri Creech, Sarah Creech, Tracy Curtis, Axel Dahlberg, Tyree Daye, Abigail DeWitt, Julie Funderburk, Richard Garcia, Judy Goldman, Patrice Gopo, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Maureen Ryan Griffin, Christine Hale, Jennifer Halls, Lola Haskins, Cathy Hasty, Terrance Hayes, Jodi Helmer, Racquel Henry, Dustin M. Hoffman, Irene Blair Honeycutt, George Hovis, Jenny Hubbard, Charles Israel, Jr., Kathy Izard, Jessica Jacobs, A. Van Jordan, Surabhi Kaushik, Tarik Kiley, Karon Luddy, Maurice Manning, Paula Martinac, James May, Rebecca McClanahan, Ashley Memory, Meghan Modafferi, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Randon Billings Noble, Matthew Olzmann, Cecily Parks, Linda Pastan, Gail Peck, Jessica Peterson, Cathy Pickens, Diana Pinckney, Jaime Pollard-Smith, David Poston, Rick Pryll, David Radavich, Megan Rich, Emily Sage, C. T. Salazar, Kathryn Schwille, Martin Settle, Sam Shapiro, Kristin Donnalley Sherman, Melinda Sherman, Larry Sorkin, Jyotsna Srikant, Gilda Morina Syverson, Jeffrey Thomson, Paul Tran, Landis Wade, Elizabeth West, Luke Whisnant, Timothy Winkler, Kim Wright
