Chapbook Lab Director
Kathie Collins, Ph.D., cofounded Charlotte Lit with Paul Reali in 2015 and has supported the organization in a variety of roles ever since. While it’s difficult to pinpoint job descriptions in an office where everyone does a little of everything, she’s recently taken to calling herself creative director. The rest of the team just calls her “Boss.” As the oldest of three and mother of five, the trait is ingrained. Kathie is also a poet, mythologist, and lifelong student of Jungian psychology. She is the author of Jubilee (Main Street Rag). Recent work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Flying South, Kakalak, Pedestal Magazine, and Santa Fe Literary Review. Her chapbook manuscript, Grass Widow, was named a finalist in Iron Horse Lit Review’s 2023 Chapbook contest. Contact: kathie@charlottelit.org
Workshopping Facilitator
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.
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at three different animal sanctuaries. She writes 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. Her work speaks in a queer, Southern-trash-talking way about nature beautiful, damaged, and in desperate need of saving. To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published in 2020.
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 MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Lola Haskins’ poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, London Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle and elsewhere, as well as having been broadcast on NPR and BBC radio. She has published fourteen collections of poems, a poetry advice book and a non-fiction book about fifteen Florida cemeteries. Ms. Haskins has been awarded three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships, the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and several prizes for narrative poetry. She retired from teaching Computer Science at the University of Florida in 2005 and served from then until 2015 on the faculty of Rainier Writers Workshop.
AE Hines’s debut collection, Any Dumb Animal, received Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest, and was a daVinci Eye finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book award. His poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary journals, including more recently: Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Rhino, Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, The Greensboro Review, and I-70 Review. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Writing at Pacific University.
