Charlotte Lit People

Paul Reali
Charlotte Lit Co-Founder & Executive Director
Writer, Editor, Coach, Instructor

Paul Reali is co-founder of Charlotte Lit and is a lead for its Authors Lab book-writing program. His fiction has been awarded first place in the Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Story and Ruth Moose Flash Fiction competitions, and his play Fresh Paint was selected for the Playmakers 10-Minute Play Festival in 2022. Paul 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 MS in Creativity from SUNY Buffalo State.

paul@charlottelit.org | paulreali.com

Brooke Dwojak Lehmann
Program Director

Brooke Lehmann, Program Director of Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, is a poet and creative that draws inspiration from nature, fashion, and her lifelong love of the piano. Her poems have been featured in Tar River Poetry, Pedestal Magazine, Tipton Journal and others. She was also a longlist finalist for the 2022 Palette Poetry Sappho Prize for Women Poets.  Brooke is a graduate of the Arts and Science Council Cultural Leadership Training program, a year-long immersion to identify and develop future arts leaders. 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

Joseph Bathanti, former poet laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, is author of 19 books, most recently a volume of poems, Light at the Seam (LSU Press, 2022). Bathanti 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, is forthcoming from EastOver Press in fall of 2022.

Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including 2021’s Come-Hither Honeycomb. A Rona Jaffe Fellow and recent winner of the AWP George Garrett prize, her poems have appeared in places such as The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, Atlantic Monthly and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, and have been selected for multiple appearances in the Best American Poetry anthology series. Born and raised in Omaha, NE, Belieu now lives in Houston, where she teaches in the University of Houston’s MFA/Ph.D. creative writing program.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, 2021 MacArthur and 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, and founder of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit radically transforming the access to literature in prisons across this country. For more than 20 years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award–winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post-incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, 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.

Shelia A. Bumgarner is a senior librarian in the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. She has been with the department since 1988 when she moved to the Queen City. A native of Burlington, NC, Shelia graduated from Elon University with a major in history. A Pi Gamma Mu Scholarship winner, she received a Master’s in American History from UNC Greensboro and later a Master’s in Library Science from the same school. She has years of experience in conducting research that can be used by historians, genealogists, journalists, and authors. Over the years, many authors have credited her in their books to extend their appreciation for Shelia’s research assistance.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Calvocoressi teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.

Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. She’s the recipient of the following awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities: the 2016 Larry Neal Writers’ Award in Adult Fiction, the 2016 Mayor’s Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist, and Arts and Humanities Fellowships for 2018-2022. Her publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, and CRAFT Literary. She’s the author of a novel and four multi-genre collections including her newest, Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection. She teaches fiction at American University, Johns Hopkins University’s Advanced Academic Programs, the Writer’s Center, Politics and Prose, Catapult, and the National Gallery of Art’s Virtual Studio.

Bryn Chancellor is author of the novel Sycamore, which was a Southwest Book of the Year, an Indie Next pick, an Amazon Editors’ Best Book of 2017, and among Bustle‘s Best Debuts of 2017. Her story collection When Are You Coming Home? won the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Brevity, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Her honors include fellowships from the North Carolina, Alabama, and Arizona arts councils, the Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, and scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences. A graduate of Vanderbilt University’s MFA program, she is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Chen Chen’s second book, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is forthcoming in September 2022. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast.

Erin Rose Coffin holds an MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Maine Review, Hunger Mountain, Raleigh Review, Gulf Stream, Arcturus, Angel City Review, and Punch Drunk Press. In 2021, she won the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, judged by Tomas Q. Morin. She is a member of the Goodyear Arts Collective, where she also previously served as a writer-in-residence. In 2016, she was a finalist in the North Carolina State Poetry Contest, judged by Yusef Komunyakaa, and in 2018, she judged the Carol Bessent Hayman Poetry of Love Award. She lives in Charlotte with her partner and her cat.

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, StorySouth, and Literary Mama. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and children and teaches at Queens University of Charlotte.

Abigail DeWitt is the author of three novels: Lili, Dogs, and News of Our Loved Ones. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Narrative, LitHub, Five Points, Witness, Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has been cited in Best American Short Stories and has received grants and fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Tyrone Guthrie Center, the McColl Center for the Arts, and the Michener Society. She received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She has taught creative writing, composition, and French at various colleges and universities, including Boston University, Lenoir-Rhyne College, University of North Carolina at Asheville, Harvard University Summer School, and Appalachian State University.

Justin Evans is a poet and electrician and a few other adjacent things. He’s served as co-editor of Vanilla Sex Magazine and poetry editor of QU. His poetry has appeared in Gutslut Press, Blood Orange Review, Defunct, and elsewhere. His writing credits for the stage include A Tonguey Kiss for Samuel Davidson, Satan v. Laundry, and Ubu Roi: A Reading with Rage Games and Weepery. He holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte.

Julie Funderburk is the author of The Door That Always Opens (LSU Press), which received a Brockman-Campbell Book Award Honorable Mention, and the chapbook Thoughts to Fold into Birds (Unicorn Press). She has been awarded fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the North Carolina Arts Council, and her latest poetry is forthcoming or appears in The Southern Review, Ecotone, Pleiades, and the anthologies Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South and You Are the River. She teaches at Queens University of Charlotte.

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.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from the Texas/Mexico borderlands. Her five award-winning books include the memoirs All the Agents and Saints and Mexican Enough; and the best-selling guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. She has written for The New York Times, The Wash​ington Post, BBC, Travel + Leisure, and Oxford American. Distinctions include a Henry Luce Scholarship to China, a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize. Currently associate professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she has performed on five continents in capacities ranging from a Moth storyteller to a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department. Online: StephanieElizondoGriest.com.

Jennifer Halls is an intuition consultant who for 30+ years has helped thousands of people physically experience and understand how to access their deep intuitive knowing. The runes are one of the tools Jennifer uses to help people shift to an intuitive perspective and dive into fresh creative understandings. She is the author of The Runes Workshop: A You Know.® Intuition Workbook. Her upcoming book titled You know. will be available soon. Online: Youknow.net.

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.

Racquel Henry is a Trinidadian writer, editor, and writing coach with an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She owns the writing studio Writer’s Atelier in Maitland, FL, and serves as editor of Black Fox Literary Magazine and Voyage YA. Racquel has been a featured author, presenter, and moderator at writing conferences and MFA residencies across the US. She is the author of Holiday on Park, Letter to Santa, and The Writer’s Atelier Little Book of Writing Affirmations. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry can be found in various anthologies, literary magazines, and online outlets. When she’s not working, you can find her watching Hallmark Christmas movies.

Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collection One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His second collection No Good for Digging and chapbook Secrets of the Wild were published by Word West Press. He spent 10 years painting houses in Michigan before getting his MFA from Bowling Green State University and his Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. More than 80 of his stories have appeared in magazines, including Black Warrior Review, Saturday Evening Post, The Threepenny Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and One Story. He is an associate professor of English at Winthrop University in South Carolina.

Irene Blair Honeycutt is an award-winning teacher and poet. Her fourth poetry book, Beneath the Bamboo Sky (Main Street Rag, 2017), is sub-titled Poems and Pieces on Loss and Consolation. Irene’s kinship with trees began in her childhood in Florida where she built and 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, Black Moon Magazine, Kakalak and Virginia Quarterly. She founded Central Piedmont Community College’s Sensoria, mentors writers, and is completing her fifth poetry manuscript.

Kathy Izard is the author of two adult nonfiction books, The Hundred Story Home and The Last Ordinary Hour, as well as an illustrated children’s title A Good Night for Mr. Coleman. She is a certified book coach who loves helping writers get their words in the world. Online: kathyizard.com (books), and womenfaithstory.com (book coaching, workshops and retreats).

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 Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press), winner of the New Mexico Book Award. Chapbook Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal,she co-authored Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/PenguinRandomHouse) with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown. Her collection in conversation with the Book of Genesis will be out from Four Way Books in 2024.

Paula Martinac is the author of seven novels—four in historical fiction and one award-winning, history-infused ghost story. A lifelong student of history, she was once a museum and historic site curator and is now a writing instructor and coach, and a book reviewer for Historical Novels Review and Foreword Reviews. She has received fellowships from the Arts & Science Council and the North Carolina Arts Council and teaches fiction writing at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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 a writer and multimedia storyteller whose work has been published by National Geographic, Slate, and the NPR affiliate WUNC. She has taught writing and podcasting courses at Georgetown University.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of a book of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which was named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and four award-winning poetry collections, most recently, Oceanic (2018). Awards for her writing include fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

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.

Cathy Pickens’ first mystery, Southern Fried, won the coveted St. Martin’s Press Malice Domestic Award for Best Traditional Mystery. She’s written five books in the series, as well as Charlotte True Crime Stories and four other books in a regional series for History Press, as well as CREATE!, on developing the creative process. She writes a regular true crime column for Mystery Readers Journal and articles on writing craft and on business, published in writing craft collections. She served as national president of Sisters in Crime and on the national board for Mystery Writers of America. As a long-time professor in the McColl School of Business at Queens University of Charlotte, she won numerous teaching awards. She’s coached writers working on mystery, suspense, and middle-grade fiction; and memoir and other nonfiction.

Rick Pryll is an award-winning author and poet. His latest novel, La Chimère of Prague (2020), made it as high as #1 on Amazon in the psychological literary category. His previous book, The Chimera of Prague, was selected as the winner of the 2018 New York Book Festival award for romance. A graduate of MIT, Rick wrote a novella as the thesis for his mechanical engineering degree. Rick has taught classes and led talks at Charlotte Lit since 2018. His stories and poems have been featured in Think, Optimism, Ekleksographia, Prometheus Dreaming, and The Esthetic Apostle. He lives with his wife, 2018 ArtPop Charlotte artist Holly Spruck, their two kids, two cats and a dog.

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.

Emily Sage is a Charlotte-based, independent singer/songwriter and producer with strong leanings in jazz and soul. Her romantic and lullaby-like songwriting style is largely influenced by her time spent growing up in Portugal. Emily moved to Nashville to study songwriting and music business at Belmont University, then to Charlotte when looking for a space to build her career and develop her vision. She has spoken and taught workshops on songwriting and overcoming writer’s block in Europe and Africa as well as in Denver, Nashville, and Charlotte. Emily’s music has been featured on NPR, WFAE’s Amplifier, DEF | CLT, Charlotte Agenda, and Queen City Nerve, which also named her as Critic’s Pick for Best Singer/Songwriter of 2019.

C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. He’s the author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books) and three previous chapbooks, most recently American Cavewall Sonnets (Bull City Press, 2021). He’s the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. His poems have most recently appeared in West Branch, Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, The Hopkins Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

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.

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.

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.

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling from Penguin in the US and the UK. They are a visiting faculty in poetry in the Pacific University MFA in Writing program, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. A recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, their work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.

Landis Wade is a recovering trial lawyer turned author turned host of the popular Charlotte Readers Podcast (where he has conducted more than 300 author interviews), whose third book—The Christmas Redemption—won the Holiday category of the 12th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards, and whose recent novel, Deadly Declarations, received praise by Kirkus Reviews, BookLife Reviews and Midwest Book Reviews. He also has been interviewed on more than 25 podcasts and media outlets, gaining interview experience from both sides of the mic. He’s taught courses on podcasting, audiobooks, book marketing, and writing, and has been active in the Charlotte and North Carolina writing communities.

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 (forthcoming from Button Poetry in 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.

Luke Whisnant is a three-time winner of the East Carolina University English Department’s Excellence in Teaching Award. He is the author of six books and chapbooks, including In the Debris Field, which won the 2018 Bath Flash Fiction International Novella-in-Flash Award, and Watching TV with the Red Chinese, made into an independent film in 2012. His most recent book is The Connor Project, a novel (2022). He lives in Greenville, NC, where he edits the journal Tar River Poetry.

Timothy Winkler is an illustrator and book artist whose Modern Fauna Art & Ephemera Studio is based in Charlotte. A native of Nashville, he has long studied and worked in all of 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 at Charlotte. Timothy was a 2020 recipient of an Arts & Science Council Artist Support Grant.