Kathie Collins
Board President, Charlotte Lit Co-Founder & Creative 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 & Executive Director
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.
Brooke Dwojak Lehmann
Program Director
Brooke is a poet that rekindled her interest in creative writing at Charlotte Lit. The Indiana native recently spent a short time in the Pacific Northwest, before returning to Charlotte in 2021. Though she holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University, her career has been spent in management consulting in the financial and non-profit sectors. She is a graduate of the Arts and Science Council Cultural Leadership Training program, a year-long immersion to identify and develop future arts leaders. Her other creative endeavors include playing the piano and fashion modeling. Her poetry has been featured in Tipton Journal, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Parentheses, and 805 Lit among others. She is delighted to bring her project management skills and creativity to Charlotte Lit.
brooke@charlottelit.org
Sarah VanderWood
Development Director
Sarah, a native Charlottean, earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of South Carolina and her law degree from Pepperdine University. She worked as a government attorney in Washington, D.C. before discovering a passion for nonprofit development. She splits her time between Charlotte Lit and the Griffith Observatory Foundation in Los Angeles. Her favorite things include her two cats, the Beatles, the Harry Potter series, and collecting old books.
sarah@charlottelit.org
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.
Tina Barr’s books include Green Target, winner of the Barrow Street Press Book Prize, as well as the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poems published in NC in 2018; Kaleidoscope (Iris Press), The Gathering Eye (Tupelo Press Editor’s Prize), and three chapbooks, all winners of chapbook contests. Her Fellowships include the National Endowment for the Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and MacDowell Colony. She teaches in the Great Smokies CW Program at UNCA.
Joseph Bathanti is former North Carolina Poet Laureate, and recipient of the 2016 North Carolina Award in Literature. He is author of ten books of poetry, including This Metal, nominated for the National Book Award, and winner of the Oscar Arnold Young Award; Restoring Sacred Art, winner of the 2010 Roanoke Chowan Prize, awarded annually by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association; Concertina, winner of the 2014 Roanoke Chowan Prize; and The 13th Sunday after Pentecost, released by LSU Press in 2016. His novel, East Liberty, won the 2001 Carolina Novel Award. His novel, Coventry, won 2006 Novello Literary Award.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is an award-winning author, poet, lawyer, and outspoken advocate for criminal justice reform, whose writing interrogates and challenges our notions of justice. He transformed himself from a sixteen-year-old kid sentenced to nine years in prison to a critically acclaimed writer and graduate of the Yale Law School. He’s the author of three volumes of poetry, including his most recent, Felon. An in-demand speaker, Betts speaks about his own experiences and the role that grit, perseverance, and literature played in his success. He also lectures on mass incarceration, contemporary poetry, and the intersection of literature and advocacy.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Small Gods of Grief (winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize), A New Hunger (an ALA Notable Book), and These Many Rooms. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” and in Georgia Review, Ploughshares and Harvard Review. Garrison Keillor read four of her poems on NPR’s “A Writer’s Almanac.” A Pushcart Prize recipient, and the editor of five anthologies, she taught at Sarah Lawrence College, UCSB, and teaches at the Solstice Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program.
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.
Sarah Creech is the author of two novels, Season of the Dragonflies (William Morrow, 2014) and The Whole Way Home (William Morrow, 2017). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Cortland Review, WritersDigest.com, StorySouth, Literary Mama, and others. She lives in Charlotte with her husband and children and teaches at Queens University of Charlotte.
Stuart Dischell is the author of Children with Enemies (University of Chicago Press, 2017), as well as Good Hope Road, a 1991 National Poetry Series Selection (Viking, 1993); Evenings & Avenues (Penguin, 1996); Dig Safe (Penguin, 2003); and Backwards Days (Penguin, 2007). Dischell’s poems have been published in journals such as The Atlantic, The New Republic, AGNI, Slate, The Kenyon Review, and in anthologies including Essential Pleasures, Hammer and Blaze, The Pushcart Prize, and Good Poems. A recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Melinda L. Ferguson grew up in Lima, Ohio, graduated from Miami University, and moved to New York City to earn and MA from Columbia University before embarking on a career in Manhattan as an editor for major book companies. After her family moved to Long Island, Ferguson taught English classes at Suffolk County Community College, English as a Second Language at the Smithtown Adult Education Program, and facilitated memoir writing workshops at community libraries. In 2016, Melinda received an MA degree in Creative Writing & Literature from Stony Brook/Southampton University. Melinda moved to Charlotte in 2016 to be near family.
Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, A New York Times Editors’ Choice; A Southern Living Best Book of 2018; An Amazon Editors’ Best Book of 2018; A Refinery29 Best Book of 2018; A New York Post Most Unforgettable Book of 2018. Tessa spent the 2013 season performing with the last American traveling circus sideshow, the World of Wonders. An essay about the sideshow won the 2016 AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction. Her writing can be found in Outside online, The New York Times, Glamour, The Believer, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, and more. She recently won a Tin House residency to work on her next book, a novel, which will be published by FSG in 2023.
Julie Funderburk is the author of the poetry collection The Door That Always Opens from LSU Press and a chapbook from Unicorn Press. The recipient of fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, she has poetry appearing or forthcoming in The Southern Review, Ecotone, Pleiades, and Cave Wall. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Queens University of 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.
Judy Goldman is the author of seven books – three memoirs, two novels, and two collections of poetry. Her new memoir, Child, will be published May 2022. Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap (published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) was named one of the best books of 2019 by Real Simple magazine and received a starred review from Library Journal. Her first memoir, Losing My Sister, was a finalist for both SIBA’s Memoir of the Year and ForeWord Review’s Memoir of the year. She received the Sir Walter Raleigh Fiction Award and the Mary Ruffin Poole First Fiction Award, as well as the three prizes awarded for a poetry book by a North Carolinian and Silverfish Review Press’s Gerald Cable Prize. She received the Hobson Award for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters and the Fortner Writer and Community Award for “outstanding generosity to other writers and the larger community.” Her work has appeared in USA Today, Washington Post, Charlotte Observer, Real Simple, LitHub, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Ohio Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
Patrice Gopo is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. Her essays have appeared in a variety of literary journals and other publications, including Gulf Coast, Full Grown People, Creative Nonfiction, and online in The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way, an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. She lives with her family in Charlotte.
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.
Irene Blair Honeycutt’s fourth poetry book, Beneath the Bamboo Sky (Main Street Rag 2017), is sub-titled Poems and Pieces on Loss and Consolation. Her kinship with trees began in her childhood in FL where she often retreated to her palm hut. She still meets with the woods and enjoys writing time in her mountain cabin. Her work has been published by journals, including Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology: VII, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She founded CPCC’s Sensoria. Upon her retirement from teaching, the college established a Distinguished Lectureship in her name.
George Hovis grew up in rural Gaston County, North Carolina. His debut novel The Skin Artist, nominated for the 2019 Sir Walter Raleigh Award and a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award, tells the story of Charlotte’s emergence in the 90s as a “world-class city,” one with deep and often tortured connections to the surrounding hinterlands. George’s stories and essays have appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including The Carolina Quarterly, Southern Cultures, New Madrid, and The North Carolina Literary Review. He is a professor of English at SUNY Oneonta, where he was awarded the 2017 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. georgehovis.net
Kathy Izard is an award-winning author and speaker who has helped bring transformation to Charlotte in homelessness, housing, and mental health. Her memoir, The Hundred Story Home, has been featured on NPR as well as The Today Show, inspiring people to be change-makers in their own communities. In 2019, she released A Good Night for Mr. Coleman, a children’s book written to encourage kids to dream big and Do Good. Kathy is the recipient of a Christopher Award, the Bank of America Neighborhood Hero Award, the NC Housing Volunteer of the Year Award, and was recognized as a William J. Clinton Distinguished Guest Lecturer.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, winner of the Goldie Award in Poetry from the Golden Crown Literary Society, and a finalist for both the Brockman-Campbell and Julie Suk Book Awards. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Julie Suk Award. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock-climbing instructor, bartender, and professor, and now serves as the Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, NC, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, with whom she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse), and is at work on parallel collections of essays and poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash. You can learn more about her at jessicalgjacobs.com.
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.
Ada Limón is the author of five poetry collections, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her fourth book, Bright Dead Things, was named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, she serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
Paula Martinac’s latest novel is Dear Miss Cushman (Bywater Books, December 2021). She is the author of six others, including Testimony; Clio Rising, Gold Medalist, Northeast Region, 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards; and The Ada Decades, a finalist for the 2018 Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBTQ Fiction. Out of Time, her debut novel, won a Lambda Literary Award. She has received fellowships from North Carolina Arts Council and the Arts and Science Council and teaches in the creative writing program at UNC Charlotte. More at paulamartinac.com.
Ashley Memory lives in the wilds of the southwestern Randolph County where the pileated woodpecker, chickadees and titmice serve as her “calling birds.” She has written for Poets & Writers, The Independent, and Wired. She serves as a critique editor and judge for the Women on Writing quarterly fiction and nonfiction contests, and writes a blog at ashley-memory.com.
Jaime Pollard-Smith is a full-time writing instructor at Central Piedmont Community College with a Master of Arts from New York University. Her fiction has been published in Literary Mama. She is a contributor for Scary Mommy and Project We Forgot. Read her thoughts at unbecoming.co.
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.
Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four prizewinning novels, including The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
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. In addition, she’s a graduate of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project program. With fourteen years experience as a creative writing teacher and mentor of students from ages twelve to eighty-five, she is passionate about helping others find and refine their voices on the page.
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 and Flashquake, and she has won or been a finalist in numerous contests, including Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Fiction, the Writers Workshop Memoirs, the Reynolds Price Fiction, River Styx Micro-fiction, and the Press 53 Open Awards for Short Short Fiction.
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.
Luke Whisnant is the author of the poetry chapbooks Street and Above Floodstage, the novel Watching TV with the Red Chinese, and the short story collection Down in the Flood. His chapbook In the Debris Field won the 2018 Bath Flash Fiction International Novella-in-Flash Award, and his flash has been published in many journals including Quick Fiction, Hobart, The Journal of Microliterature, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and CRAFT, where his “What They Didn’t Teach Us” won an Editor’s Choice Award in 2019. Whisnant’s new novel, The Connor Project, will be published by Iris Press in April 2022. He has taught short-form prose workshops for Charlotte Lit, the South Carolina Writers Association, Wildacres Writers Workshop, and in his own classes at East Carolina University.
Timothy Winkler is an illustrator and book artist whose Modern Fauna Art & Ephemera Studio is currently based in Charlotte. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, he has long studied and worked in all the various media of printmaking. He earned his MFA in Book Arts at the University of Alabama and has taught letterpress printing at Penland School of Crafts and a course on Outsider Art at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Winkler was a 2020 recipient of an Arts and Science Council Artist Support Grant.
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.
