Spring/Summer 2023

Rae Garringer is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer living in southern West Virginia where they were raised. They are the founder of Country Queers, a multimedia oral history project documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013. Garringer is currently editing a collection of personal essays by queer and trans Appalachian writers and working on a manuscript about ten years of Country Queers.

Walton Muyumba is an essayist and critic. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Believer, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, and Oxford American, among other outlets. Muyumba is also the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago UP, 2009). He is the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of English at Indiana University-Bloomington, where he teaches creative nonfiction and literary studies. 

Michael O. Snyder is a documentary photographer and filmmaker exploring the dynamic relationship between environmental and cultural change. He is a National Geographic contributor, Portrait of Humanity Award Winner, a Pulitzer grantee, a Climate Journalism Fellow at the Bertha Foundation, a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a recent speaker at the UN Climate Conference, and a resident artist at the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Meg Bernhard is a writer from southern California’s Inland Empire. She has reported from around Europe and the United States for the Los Angeles Times, Hazlitt, the New Yorker, Guernica, and Harper’s, among others, and occasionally writes about wine. 

Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems, including A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf, 2017) and Elegy (Graywolf, 2009), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno (Graywolf, 2013), illustrated by Henrik Drescher, Purgatorio (Graywolf, 2021), and Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz (Northwestern UP, 2022). She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf, 2023) and a translation of Paradiso (Graywolf, 2025) are forthcoming.