Kathie Collins
Charlotte Lit Co-Founder & Executive Director
Poet & Mythologist
Charlotte Lit co-founder Kathie Collins is a writer, poet, and lifelong student of Jungian psychology. She thrives in the in-between space from which dreams, creativity, and stories emerge. Kathie is happiest when she’s sharing that space with others and delights in the process of helping students transform their lived experience into gold. Kathie co-leads and serves as a memoir coach in Charlotte Lit’s Authors Lab program. She earned her Ph.D. in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she also serves as adjunct faculty. Kathie’s poetry has appeared in Kakalak, BibleWorkbench, Immanence, and Between. Her chapbook Jubilee was published by Main Street Rag in 2011.
Paul Reali
Charlotte Lit Co-Founder & Operations Manager
Writer, Editor, Coach, Instructor
Paul Reali, co-founder of Charlotte Lit, is the co-author of Creativity Rising: Creative Thinking and Creative Problem Solving in the 21st Century. In addition, his work has been published in Winston-Salem Journal, InSpine, Office Solutions, Lawyers Weekly, and others. His fiction has been awarded first place in the Elizabeth Simpson Smith and Ruth Moose Flash Fiction competitions, and he received a Regional Artist Project Grant from Charlotte’s Arts & Science Council in 2018. Paul has an M.S. in Creativity from the International Center for Studies in Creativity at SUNY Buffalo State, where he also is an adjunct instructor and the managing editor of ICSC Press. Paul has been a trainer and facilitator for more than 25 years, in the areas of creativity, innovation, and business and writing skills.
Lisa Zerkle
Curator, 4X4CLT
Lisa Zerkle’s poems have appeared in The Collagist, Comstock Review, Southern Poetry Anthology, Broad River Review, Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, Sixfold, poemmemoirstory, Crucible, and Main Street Rag, among others. Author of the chapbook, Heart of the Light, she has served as President of the North Carolina Poetry Society, community columnist for The Charlotte Observer, and editor of Kakalak. She is the curator of 4X4CLT, a public art and poetry series of the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts.
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville 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.
Bryn Chancellor is the author of the novel Sycamore, a Southwest Book of the Year, and the story collection When Are You Coming Home?, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. A native of California raised in Arizona and transplanted to the South, she is a grateful recipient of fellowships from the North Carolina, Alabama, and Arizona arts councils and the Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. She is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Angelo ‘Eyeambic’ Geter is an award-winning poet & spoken word who currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rock Hill, SC. Geter is a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, a National Poetry Slam champion, Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam finalist, Southern Fried Regional Poetry Slam finalist. His work has appeared in All Def Poetry, Post & Courier, Charleston Currents, and the Academy of American Poets “Poem a Day” series. Most recently, his work was featured in the “Power of Goodness” anthology published by Chapel Hill press. He is currently working on his debut poetry collection.
Beth Gilstrap is the winner of the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize for her second full-length collection Deadheading & Other Stories (forthcoming 2021). She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015, Twelve Winters Press) and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016, Hyacinth Girl Press). Her work was recently selected by Dan Chaon for inclusion in the Best Microfiction Anthology. Her stories, essays, and hybrids have appeared in Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, The Minnesota Review, Hot Metal Bridge, and Wigleaf, among others. She has taught at Queens University of Charlotte, UNC-Charlotte, and The Loft. She currently lives and writes in Louisville in a temperamental 120-year-old shotgun house.
Jaki Shelton Green, ninth Poet Laureate of North Carolina, is the first African American and third woman to be appointed as the position. She 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 North Carolina Award for Literature. Jaki teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and was named the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill. Her publications include: Dead on Arrival, Masks, Dead on Arrival and New Poems, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, breath of the song, Feeding the Light, and i want to undie you. On Juneteenth 2020, she released her first poetry album, The River Speaks of Thirst. Jaki is the owner of SistaWRITE, providing writing retreats for women writers in Ocracoke, Sedona, Arizona, Martha’s Vineyard, Northern Morocco, and Tullamore, Ireland.
Charles Israel, Jr., teaches creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte. His poetry chapbook, Stacking Weather, was published by Amsterdam Press. He’s also had poems and stories in Crazyhorse, Field, The Cortland Review, The Adirondack Review, Nimrod International Journal, Pembroke Magazine, Zone 3, Journal of the American Medical Association, and North Carolina Literary Review. He likes to read ancient epic poetry and contemporary creative nonfiction about voyages and journeys, sports and war. He lives in Charlotte with his wife, Leslie.
Jeff Jackson is a fiction writer, playwright, songwriter, and visual artist. His latest novel “Destroy All Monsters” received praise from Don DeLillo, Janet Fitch, and Dana Spiotta, and rave reviews from The New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR. His widely acclaimed first novel “Mira Corpora” was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Seven of his plays have been produced by the Obie-Award winning Collapsable Giraffe theater company in New York City. Charlotte Magazine selected him as the city’s “Best Author.” He has taught fiction at Davidson College and master classes at North Carolina Writers Network.
Caroline Langerman holds a BA in English Literature from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her personal essays on love, life, and parenting have been published in The New York Times and the websites of The Washington Post, Town & Country, Southern Living, ELLE, and Salon. She lives in Charlotte with her husband and two young children.
Paula Martinac is the author of six novels, most recently Testimony (2021); Clio Rising (2019), Gold Medal Winner, Northeast Region, Independent Book Publishers Awards; and The Ada Decades (2017), finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. Her plays have had productions and staged readings in New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. She is a part-time lecturer in creative writing at UNC Charlotte. In 2019, she received a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts and Science Council and a Literature Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council. More at paulamartinac.com.
Ashley Memory’s poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared in more than 75 magazines, websites, and anthologies, most recently in The Sun, O. Henry, The Rumpus, and Solstice Literary Magazine, which named her essay ‘’Of Needles and Kindness” a finalist for the Summer 2020 Michael Steinberg Nonfiction Prize. Since April 2020, she writes a monthly column on submission for the award-winning global website, Women on Writing, and she is also a critique editor and judge for their quarterly nonfiction contest. Learn more at ashley-memory.com.
Dannye Romine Powell has won fellowships in poetry from the NC Arts Council, the NEA and Yaddo, and is a two-time winner of the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, the New Republic, Harvard Review Online, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Paris Review and many others. Her fifth collection, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver (Press 53) won the 2020 Roanoke-Chowan Award from the N.C. Literary and Historical Association. She is also the author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers.
Megan Rich moved to Charlotte recently from Denver, Colorado. She has written two books, a YA novel and a travel memoir, and is working on her third, a literary-fiction novel inspired by The Great Gatsby. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, she was chosen to participate in the highly-selective subconcentration in creative writing, for which she completed a thesis of original poetry. In addition, she is a current member of the two-year Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project program. With twelve years experience as a creative writing teacher, she looks forward to providing prompts and chatting with other writers who are working through their own projects.
Larry Sorkin is a some-of-the-time North Carolina poet, a part-time business man, and an occasional performer of poetry with The Bechtler Ensemble. He presents workshops exploring the connections between poetry and fine arts, dance, music, and depth psychology. He is poet-in-residence at the Airy Knoll Arts Project. Poetry didn’t come to Sorkin until his forties when he fell under the infectious influence of Robert Bly. He considers it a calling to spread the passion. He often holes up on his ridgetop overlooking the Piedmont, daydreaming into the fields and onto paper. His poetry collection, Uncomfortable Minds, will be out in February, 2021.
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 at work on her second novel, The Writer’s Cottage.
Landis Wade is a recovering trial lawyer and host of Charlotte Readers Podcast. His third book, The Christmas Redemption, won the Holiday category of the 12th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards. He won the 2016 NC State Bar short story contest and has received awards for two nonfiction pieces. His work has appeared in Writersdigest.com, The Charlotte Observer, Flying South, Fiction on the Web, and in various anthologies, including Daniel Boone Footstepsand High Country Writers. Since retiring from the practice of law, Landis has taught courses on listening to and producing podcasts, legal considerations for podcasters, and making, distributing and promoting audiobooks.
Luke Whisnant’s In the Debris Field won the 2018 Bath Flash Fiction International Novella-in-Flash Award and was published by Ad Hoc Press. His flash story “What They Didn’t Teach Us” won an Editor’s Choice Award from CRAFT Magazine in Spring 2020 and has been nominated for the Best Microfictions anthology. Whisnant’s flash fiction has appeared in Quick Fiction, Hobart, Wigleaf, The Journal of Microliterature, PANK, Fiction Southeast, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and many others. His novel Watching TV with the Red Chinese was made into an independent film in 2011; his other books include the story collections Down in the Flood and The Connor Project(forthcoming in 2021), and two poetry chapbooks. A two-time winner of his department’s Excellence in Teaching Award, he serves as professor of English at East Carolina University, where he also edits the journal Tar River Poetry.
Kim Wright is the author of five novels, four books of nonfiction, and over three hundred articles in national magazines. Her novel Last Ride to Graceland won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction and she is a two-time recipient of the Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing. Kim is a lecturer in multiple creative writing programs as well as being the founder of The Story Doctor, a developmental editing service for novelists.
