Faculty

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  Charmaine Cadeau

  Charmaine Cadeau‘s poetry books include What You Used to Wear, Placeholder, and Skytale. Her poetry awards include the Brockman Campbell Book Award, the Relit Award for best poetry book in Canada, and a national grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for her current book-in-progress. Born in Toronto, Canada, Charmaine now lives near Winston-Salem and works as an Associate Professor of English at High Point University. Alongside her poetry and editorial work, she writes lyric essays and conducts research on material culture related to books and reading practices.

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  Jamie Chambliss

  Jamie Chambliss is an agent with Folio Literary Management. She represents literary and upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, and her clients include Rowan Beaird, Lauren Hough, Rachel Rodgers, Daniel Wallace, and Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. Prior to joining Folio, she was at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, working on both fiction and nonfiction and in editorial and marketing. She’s drawn to literary and book club fiction and narrative nonfiction, especially dealing with food, pop culture, the quirks of human nature, the stories within the worlds of science and sports, and the forgotten corners of history. Prior to book publishing, she was a magazine journalist, covering, among other things, books, the arts, and sports narratives. She is a graduate of Wake Forest University and has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With nearly twenty years of editorial experience, she loves working with writers to polish their projects, and she’s especially drawn to the work of underrepresented voices.

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  Katie Grimm

  Katie Grimm joined Curtis, Brown, Ltd. in 2024, after more than a decade at Don Congdon Associates. Her clients have been awarded the Booker International Prize, the O. Henry Award, and more, and have been finalists or listed for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among others. Katie is seeking vivid, voice-driven literary and upmarket fiction, narrative non-fiction, and literary YA and MG with high-concept hooks. She often gravitates to novels that can be described as tragi-comic, borrow genre elements without necessarily sitting the category, and/or speak to the current contemporary moment regardless of their temporal setting. Across all categories, she’s looking for books with an immediacy of feeling, strong sense of purpose, and previously under- or misrepresented experiences. Originally from Colorado, she earned her BA in History and Spanish Literature from Bowdoin College. She’s currently based in Durham.

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  Ashley Lumpkin

  Ashley Lumpkin is a Georgia-raised, Carolina-based writer, editor, performance artist, and educator. She is the author of five poetry collections: { } At First Sight, Second Glance, Terrorism and Other Topics for Tea, #AshleyLumpkin, and Genesis. Her book “I Hate You All Equally.” is a collection of conversations from her years as a classroom teacher. Her work has appeared in Kinfolks Quarterly, Our Rhythm, Our Blues, and a host of other journals; she has also been featured on Button Poetry and Write About Now.  A lover of poetry slam as well as the written word, she has been a competing member of the Bull City Slam Team since 2015 and currently serves as its coach.  Her hybrid-memoir The Sad Stays (2024, Scuppernong Editions) is a candid look at her ongoing journey with mental health. Above all else, Ashley is a teacher, poet, and witness. She is a lover of mathematics and language. She loves you too.

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  Mesha Maren

  Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run, Perpetual West, and Shae.  She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University.

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  Travis Mulhauser

  Travis Mulhauser was born and raised in Northern Michigan. His novel The Trouble Up North (Grand Central/Hatchette) was one of NPR’s Books We Love in 2025, received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, was an Amazon Editor’s Choice Pick, and an Apple Audio Must Listen selection. His novel Sweetgirl (Ecco/Harper Collins) was long-listed for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was a Michigan Notable Book Award winner, an Indie Next Pick, and was named one of Ploughshares’ Best Books of the New Year. Travis is the author of Greetings from Cutler County: A Novella and Stories, and received his MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro. He is also a proud graduate of North Central Michigan College and Central Michigan University. He lives currently in Durham with his wife, two children, and dog. He has been published in France, the Netherlands, Brazil, Germany, and the UK, and his novel, Fair Chase (Grand Central/Hachette), is forthcoming in April 2026.

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  Sarah Rose Nordgren

  Sarah Rose Nordgren’s books include Feathers: A Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal (Essay Press, 2024), winner of the Essay Press Book Prize, and the poetry collections Darwin’s Mother (University of Pittsburgh, 2017) and Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh, 2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Agni, and Narrative, and have been featured by PBS Newshour, The Slowdown podcast, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She lives, writes, and teaches in her hometown of Durham and also serves as Associate Editor for 32 Poems. Her forthcoming craft book, Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change, will be published by the University of West Virginia Press in 2027.

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  M. Randal O’Wain

  M. Randal O’Wain is the author of Meander Belt: family, loss, and coming of age in the working-class south (Nebraska, 2019) and the story collection Hallelujah Station (Autumn House, 2020). His essays and stories have appeared in Masters Review, Zone 3, Hotel Amerika, Guernica, and Oxford American. He holds an MFA from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and teaches at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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  Drew Perry

  Drew Perry is the author of the novels This Is Just Exactly Like You and Kids These Days. He is a frequent contributor to Our State and teaches at Elon University.

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  Tita Ramirez

  Tita Ramírez grew up in Miami, the daughter of a Cuban exile and a Kentucky native. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in LitHub, The Normal School, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband and their two sons, and teaches creative writing at Elon University. Tell It to Me Singing is her debut novel.

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  Sarah Grunder Ruiz

  Sarah Grunder Ruiz is the USA Today Bestselling author of Last Call at the Local. Originally from South Florida, she now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband and two children. She holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University, where she now teaches First-Year Writing.

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  Crystal Simone Smith

  Crystal Simone Smith is the author of Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Duke University Press, 2025), winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award, and Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023). In 2022, her collection of haiku, Ebbing Shore, won The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Among other grants and awards, Smith is the recipient of a Duke Humanities Unbounded Research Fellowship funded by The Mellon Foundation. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including POETRY Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Rattle, Frogpond, and Modern Haiku. Her recent publication, Common Sense, Addressed to Today’s Citizens of America, is an erasure of the original document written by Thomas Paine in 1776. Released by Beacon Press, in the year of our nation’s semiquincentennial, Smith’s erasure exposes contradictions in a text considered to be the cornerstone of our democracy. She teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and writes poetry about the human condition and social change.