Faculty

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  Heather Bell Adams

  Heather Bell Adams is the author of Maranatha Road (West Virginia University Press 2017), which won the IPPY gold medal for the Southeast, and The Good Luck Stone (Haywire Books 2020), which won Best Historical in the Next Generation Book Awards. A recipient of the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Award, Carrie McCray Literary Award, and James Still Fiction Prize, Heather’s work appears in Still: The Journal, Atticus Review, The Thomas Wolfe Review, The Petigru Review, Pembroke Magazine, Broad River Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Raleigh where she works as a lawyer.

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  Dasan Ahanu

  Dasan Ahanu is a poet, cultural organizer, scholar and performing artist based in Durham. Dasan is a resident artist with the St. Joseph’s Historic Foundation/Hayti Heritage Center in Durham, NC where he has developed poetry and spoken word programming for youth and adults. He has competed regionally and nationally in poetry slam as a founding member and coach of Durham’s own Bull City Slam Team. The team has won two regional championships and achieved a third-place finish nationally. Dasan is co-founder and managing director of Black Poetry Theatre, a Durham based theatre company that creates and produces original poetry and spoken word-based productions. In 2004, he was awarded an Indy Arts Award by INDY Weekly for his work in arts and activism. Then in 2015, he was awarded the honor again, the first time in the award’s history that has happened. He is the author of four poetry collections that include The Innovator (HWJW Publishing 2010), Freedom Papers (HWJW Publishing 2012), Everything Worth Fighting For (Flowered Concrete 2016), and Shackled Freedom: Black Living in the Modern American South (Willow Books 2020). Dasan is also an alumni Nasir Jones Fellowship with the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. His scholarly work is focused on art interventions, creative expression, Hip Hop and popular culture. Currently, Dasan is a visiting professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill and a consultant working with organizations on art-based strategies. He is also the Rothwell Mellon Program Director for Creative Futures with Carolina Performing Arts.

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  Michele T. Berger

  Michele T. Berger is a professor, a writer, a creativity coach and a pug-lover. Her main love is writing speculative fiction, though she also is known to write poetry and creative nonfiction, too. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire, Concrete Dreams: Witches, Warriors and Wise Women, Afromyth: A Fantasy Collection Volume 2, Stories We Tell After Midnight #2, UnCommon Origins: A Collection of Gods, Monsters, Nature and Science, Flying South: A Literary Journal; 100 Word Story; Thing Magazine; Blood and Bourbon, FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, and Midnight and Indigo. Her nonfiction writing and poetry have appeared in The Chapel Hill News, Glint Literary Journal, Oracle: Fine Arts Review, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, The Feminist Wire, Ms. Magazine, Carolina Woman Magazine, Western North Carolina Woman, A Letter to My Mom (Crown Press), Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler (Twelfth Planet Press) and various zines. She is the 2019 winner of the Carl Brandon Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society for her story “Doll Seed” published in FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. In 2020, her science fiction novella “Reenu-You,” about a mysterious virus transmitted through a hair care product billed as a natural hair relaxer, was published by Falstaff Books. Much of her work explores psychological horror, especially through issues of race and gender. She is currently a trustee on board of the North Carolina Writers’ Network (NCWN) and President-Elect of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.

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  Ellen C. Bush

  Ellen C. Bush  is Digital Initiatives and Database Director at UNC Press. She has 25 years of publishing experience bringing books and journals into an ever-changing marketplace. Her chapbook Licorice was published by Bull City Press, and her poems have appeared in Four Way Review, The Collagist, Inch, and other outlets.

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  Barbara Claypole White

  Originally from England, bestselling author Barbara Claypole White writes and gardens in the forests of Orange County. Her passion for chipping away at stereotypes of mental illness inspires quirky stories about troubled but courageous characters, complicated relationships, and crazy critters . . . topped off with a dollop of hope. Her novels include The Perfect Son (a Goodreads Choice Awards Semifinalist for best fiction), and The Promise Between Us, which won an international Nautilus Award for books that foster change. Novel six, The Gin Club, is currently on submission.

  To connect with her, please visit www.barbaraclaypolewhite.com.

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  Maggie Cooper

  Maggie Cooper is an agent with Aevitas Creative Management, representing adult fiction and select nonfiction projects. Based in Boston, Maggie joined Aevitas in 2018. She holds a degree in English from Yale University, attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and earned her MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as an editor for The Greensboro Review. Prior to becoming an agent, she worked in the world of independent and university presses, as a bookseller, and as a teacher to students ages 10 through 85. Maggie is actively seeking imaginative, genre-bending literary fiction; capacious historical novels; beautifully told queer stories; and smart, feminist romance. Her other loves include epistolary novels, well-earned happy endings, and narratives that disrupt cisness, whiteness, and the heteropatriarchy.

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  Tracy Crow

  Tracy Crow is a literary agent and president/CEO of MilSpeak Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated toward supporting and publishing the creative works of military veterans and family members through its imprints, MilSpeak Books and Family of Light Books. She is also the author/editor of six books to include the novella, Cooper’s Hawk: The Remembering; the popular history, It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan with co-author Jerri Bell; the award-winning memoir, Eyes Right: Confessions from a Woman Marine; the military conspiracy thriller, An Unlawful Order, under her pen name, Carver Greene; the true story collection, Red, White, & True: Stories from Veterans and Families, WWII to Present; and the breakthrough writing text, On Point: A Guide to Writing the Military Story, in which Tracy combines her skills and experience as a former Marine Corps officer, award-winning military journalist, author, editor, and assistant professor of creative writing.

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  Tyree Daye

  Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville and a Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the author of two poetry collections: River Hymns, the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, and Cardinal from Copper Canyon Press, 2020.

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  Georgann Eubanks & Donna Campbell

  Since 2000, Georgann Eubanks (left) and Donna Campbell (right) have conducted hundreds of interviews as the principals of Minnow Media, LLC, an Emmy-winning multimedia company that primarily creates independent documentaries for public television. With Donna as photographer and Georgann as writer they also created the three-volume Literary Trails series commissioned by the NC Arts Council and published by UNC Press. Their 2018 book, The Month of their Ripening: North Carolina Heritage Foods Through the Year, has just been rereleased in paperback, while their most recent collaboration took them across six States of the South to interview conservation botanists and citizen scientists in the field about endangered species and climate change. Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction, will be released by UNC Press in October.

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  Ian Finley

  Ian Finley holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University, where he earned the Harry Kondoleon Award for playwriting. He is the author of plays, including Native (featured at the NCWN 2018 Fall Conference), The Nature of the Nautilus (winner of the Kennedy Center’s Jean Kennedy Smith Award 2002), and the Our Histories series of plays for Burning Coal Theatre Company. For this body of work, he was named the 2012 Piedmont Laureate. He has taught at Southern Methodist University, as well for the OLLI programs at NC State University and Duke University.

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  L.C. Fiore

  L.C. Fiore’s new novel is Coyote Loop (Adelaide Books, 2021). His historical novel, The Last Great American Magic, won Novel of the Year from Underground Book Reviews. His debut novel, Green Gospel, was named First Runner-Up in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and storySouth, among many others, and he’s written for various baseball publications, including The Love of the Game: Essays by Lifelong Fans. Before he was the communications director for the North Carolina Writers’ Network, he held many jobs, from custodian to paperboy to Executive Assistant at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. He lives in Chapel Hill with his family.

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  Marianne Gingher

  Marianne Gingher is the author most recently of Adventures in Pen Land, a comic memoir of her writing life, and the editor of Amazing Place, an anthology of essays. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Oxford American, the Washington Post, the Southern Review, Our State, and elsewhere. She recently retired from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she taught creative writing for more than three decades.

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  Jaki Shelton Green

  Jaki Shelton Green, appointed the ninth Poet Laureate of North Carolina in 2018, is the first African American and third woman to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate. She was reappointed in 2021 for a second term by Governor Roy Cooper. She is a 2019 Academy of American Poet Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate, and 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. Jaki Shelton Green teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill. Additionally, she received the George School Outstanding Alumni Award in 2021. 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 LP, a poetry album, The River Speaks of Thirst, produced by Soul City Sounds and Clearly Records and released a CD, i want to undie you in 2021. Jaki Shelton Green is the owner of SistaWRITE providing writing retreats for women writers in Sedona, Martha’s Vineyard, Ocracoke, Northern Morocco, and Tullamore, Ireland.

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  Mimi Herman

  Mimi Herman is a writer and editor, Kennedy Center teaching artist, and co-director of Writeaways writing workshops in France, Italy, New Mexico, and online. Since 1990, she has engaged over 25,000 students with writing workshops. She is a Warren Wilson alumna and the 2017 North Carolina Piedmont Laureate, and serves as a member of the AWP Board of Directors. Mimi has held readings at Why There are Words, Symphony Space, and—with David Sedaris—at Memorial Auditorium in North Carolina. Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, The Hollins Critic, Prime Number, and other journals. She is the author of Logophilia and The Art of Learning. Her latest collection of poetry, A Field Guide to Human Emotions, is available from Finishing Line Press, and her novel, The Kudzu Queen, will be released from Regal House Publishing in 2023.

  You can find Mimi at www.mimiherman.com and www.writeaways.com.

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  Cierra Hinton

  Cierra Hinton is the Executive Director-Publisher at Scalawag, a non-profit, movement journalism organization with a mission to disrupt and shift the narratives that keep power in the hands of the few in pursuit of a more liberated South. She is also a member at Blue Engine Collaborative, a network of independent consultants and advisors to media organizations around the world. Before her current role, Cierra was an individual giving officer at a number of education nonprofits including Teach For America. Cierra has also served as the Director of Network Building and Operations at Press On, a Southern media collective, and was a fellow at the Poynter Institute through the Media Transformation Challenge. She sits on the boards of LION Publishers and the NC Local News Workshop. She lives in Durham with her partner, J.

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  Linda Hobson

  Linda Hobson, the author of a book on novelist Walker Percy and editor of a second, has a Ph.D in English from the University of Alabama and is a graduate of both Denison and Duke. A former Executive Director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, since 2007 she has worked as a writer, editor, publishing consultant, book reviewer, interviewer, public speaker, and writing workshop leader. Hobson owns and manages Triangle Editing, a contract-writing, online writing/editing, book editing, and consulting business that serves clients in the Research Triangle and beyond.

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  Fred Joiner

  Fred Joiner is a poet and curator based in Chapel Hill. He is the Poet Laureate of Carrboro and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Obsidian, All the Songs We Sing (Blair), Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press), and other publications. Most recently, Joiner guest curated an exhibition (Micro/Macro) of the 2021 Masters of Fine Arts in Studio Art graduates at UNC Chapel Hill for the Ackland Art Museum. Joiner is the chair of the Advisory Board for the Orange County Arts Commission and board member of the American Poetry Museum and Arch Development Corporation.

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  Tamara Kissane

  Tamara Kissane is Founder & Executive Director of Artist Soapbox (www.artistsoapbox.org) and Soapbox Audio Collective. She is a Durham-based playwright, theatre-maker, parent, and podcaster. In 2020, Tamara was the Piedmont Laureate and received Outstanding Contribution to the Arts from Chatham Life & Style. She also is a co-founder and playwright for Curious Theatre Collective and leads Soapbox Audio Collective Writers’ rooms, Public Works events, and Creative Accountability Groups. In North Carolina, she’s worked with University Theatre at NC State, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Seed Art Share, Burning Coal, Manbites Dog Theater, The ArtsCenter in Carrboro, Duke Theatre Studies, Transactors Improv, Summer Sisters, Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, Archipelago and both hands theatre company. Recently she’s received grants from the Manbites Dog Theater Fund, the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Durham150, and the Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Award (Durham Arts Council). She is the parent of two young children.

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  Kim Lindman

  Kim Lindman joined Stonesong as an assistant, and now holds the positions of Associate Literary Agent and Social Media Coordinator. Originally from the West Coast, Kim studied English Literature with a subfocus in Journalism at Seattle Pacific University. After moving to the NYC area, she has worked at a distillery and as a researcher with the United Nations, among others. She is interested in representing adult fiction, with particular interest in literary fiction and magical realism, and non-fiction, with particular interest in food and the environment.

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  Phillip Loken

  Phillip Loken (he/him) is the Associate Digital Marketing Manager at UNC Press with 5+ years of digital marketing experience from working with Noirbnb, Lumina Clothing, Urbane Luggage, and Infinite Magazine. Phill is also a Raleigh, NC-based multimedia fine artist offering a unique approach to the documentation of Black southern culture, encompassing some of what you’re familiar with and some of what you’re not.

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  Kelly Starling Lyons

  Kelly Starling Lyons is a teaching artist and award-winning children’s book author whose mission is to transform moments, memories and history into stories of discovery. Her more than a dozen titles span picture books, easy readers and chapter books, fiction and nonfiction, standalone and series. She counts starred reviews, Junior Library Guild and Bank Street Best selections, National Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies and Scholastic Reading Club picks among the accolades her books have received. Titles include Sing a Song: How Lift Every Voice & Sing Inspired Generations, Going Down Home with Daddy, the Jada Jones and Ty’s Travels series; and Dream Builder: The Story of Architect Philip Freelon.

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  Mesha Maren

  Mesha Maren is the author of Sugar Run (Algonquin Books, 2019) and Perpetual West (2022). Her work has appeared in the Oxford American, the Guardian, Tin House, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She is an assistant professor at Duke University and also serves as a NEA Writing Fellow at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia.

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  David Menconi

  Author/journalist David Menconi spent 34 years writing for daily newspapers, 28 of them at The News & Observer in Raleigh. He has also written for Rolling Stone, Billboard, Spin, and The New York Times, also serving as the Triangle’s Piedmont Laureate for 2019. His latest book, Step It Up & Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) won the 2021 North Caroliniana Society Book Award and first runner-up in the culture category of the Eric Hoffer Awards. His next book will be a history of the folk label Rounder Records, to be published in 2022 by UNC Press.

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  Cassie Mannes Murray

  Cassie Mannes Murray is a literary agent at Howland Literary who has sold fiction, essays, memoir, short stories, and narrative nonfiction books to corporate publishers, independent publishers, and small presses. As an agent, she hopes to work with writers who are blending genre categories and may be considered “weird” to the publishing industry. Her clients have been published in TIME, Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, and various literary journals. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction with Distinction from UNCW where she was a Shannon Morton Fellow and a Ralph Brauer Fellow, and worked in the publishing laboratory. She has had the privilege of working with various publishing entities including ecotone magazine, Lookout Books, and Raleigh Review, and has been published herself in magazines like The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Passages North, Fugue Journal, and Hobart. Her essay, “Love in the Belly of Beginning” received a Best American Essays 2020 notable, and she’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2022 anthology. Before going back to school for her MFA, Cassie was a high school English teacher for six years, and ran a book blog called Books & Bowel Movements. She wrote her first book in grade school titled Toe Jam Wars.

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  Alice Osborn

  Alice Osborn’s past educational and work experience is unusually varied, and it now feeds her work as an author, book editor, and musician. In the past 15 years, Alice has coached and edited writers at all levels and genres both locally and around the world. Searching for Paradise is her most recent CD featuring crowd-pleasing originals about history, heroes, and hope, and Heroes without Capes is her most recent collection of poetry. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her previous poetry collections are After the Steaming Stops and Unfinished Projects. Alice is the recipient of a United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County 2019 Professional Development Grant; she is the President of the NC Songwriters’ Co-op, and has served for eight years on the NC Writers’ Network’s Board of Trustees. She’s currently working on a novel and CD about the ill-fated Donner Party of 1846-1847. When she’s not writing or performing, Alice teaches guitar, fiddle, and banjo. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband, two children, and four birds all named after musicians.

  Visit Alice’s website at www.aliceosborn.com and check out her music at www.reverbnation.com/aliceosborn.

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  Sara Pequeño

  Sara Pequeño is the newest Raleigh-based journalist and opinion writer for McClatchy’s North Carolina Opinion Team. She plans to use her platform to cover social issues and local politics with empathy and a passion for progressive ideas. Prior to her hiring at The News & Observer, Sara worked as the digital content manager at INDY Week, an alt-weekly newspaper based in the Triangle. There, she focused on Orange County and the UNC System, but occasionally stepped into other beats focused on social justice and state-level politics.

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  Arshia Simkin

  Arshia Simkin was born in Pakistan and spent the first six years of her life there. She grew up in Arlington, Virginia and currently lives in Raleigh with her husband. A former lawyer, she is a graduate of the North Carolina State University MFA program in creative writing and the co-founder of the Redbud Writing Project, a creative writing organization that teaches workshops in the Triangle. Her writing has appeared in Crazyhorse; she was one of three winners of the 2020 CRAFT Flash Fiction contest; and received honorable mention in NC State’s James Hurt Prize for fiction. In her spare time, she enjoys playing badminton and water coloring.

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  Karen Tucker

  Karen Tucker is the author of the novel Bewilderness (2021). Her short fiction can be found in The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, Tin House, Boulevard, Epoch, and elsewhere. Born and raised in North Carolina, she earned her Ph.D in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University, and currently teaches fiction writing at UNC Chapel Hill.

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  Han VanderHart

  Han VanderHart lives in Durham, under the pines. She has poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI, and elsewhere. She is the reviews editor at EcoTheo Review, the editor at Moist Poetry Journal, and the author of the chapbook Hands Like Birds (Ethel Zine Press, 2019) and the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021).

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  Kyle Villemain

  Kyle Villemain is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Assembly, a statewide digital magazine about North Carolina launched in February, 2021. Prior to The Assembly, he was a speechwriter for higher education and nonprofit leaders including UNC System President Margaret Spellings and UNC-CH Chancellor Carol Folt. He’s a 2015 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill.

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  Daniel Wallace

  Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish and, most recently, Extraordinary Adventures. He directs the Creative Writing Program at UNC.

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  Cat Warren

  Cat Warren just retired from North Carolina State University, where she taught science journalism, editing, and creative nonfiction. Before joining NC State, Warren was a newspaper reporter. She’s covered bombers holding a school hostage, a physician who sexually assaulted dozens of patients over decades, and the deep poverty in Connecticut cities. Cat has also been a national education magazine editor and a communication director for a non-profit justice organization. Her first nonacademic book, What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World (Touchstone) became a New York Times bestseller and was long listed for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

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  Karin Wiberg

  Karin Wiberg is owner of Clear Sight Books, where she helps seasoned business leaders write nonfiction books. Whether she ghostwrites, edits, or coaches, her clients develop a clear message and compelling voice; and for those who choose to self-publish, she turns manuscripts into books. Karin’s professional experience ranges from the Fortune 500 and association management to small businesses and nonprofits. She’s served on grant panels for the City of Raleigh Arts Commission and the NC Arts Council and judged writing contests for Writer’s Digest and the Jane Austen Society of North America. Karin holds an MBA from the University of Iowa and a business coaching certificate from North Carolina State University. Her poetry has been published in Stirring, Petrichor Review, riverSedge, Two Hawks Quarterly, and elsewhere, and she is the author of Chicken Haiku, an illustrated book of poems.

  Find Karin online at www.clearsightbooks.com.