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Faculty

  • 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.

  • Belle Boggs

    Belle Boggs is the author of The Gulf: A Novel; The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood; and Mattaponi Queen: Stories. The Art of Waiting was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail, Buzzfeed, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award and was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. Her stories and essays have appeared in Orion, the Paris Review, Harper’s, Ecotone, the Atlantic, Newyorker.com, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is professor of English and director of the MFA program at NC State University.

  • Charmaine Cadeau

    Born in Toronto, Charmaine Cadeau now lives in Lewisville. She is an English professor at High Point University, where she teaches creative writing and literature, and serves as the advisor for Apogee Magazine. She has published two full-length collections of poetry, What You Used to Wear (Goose Lane Editions) and Placeholder (Brick Books), the most recent of which won the Brockman Campbell Book Award and the ReLit Award. Her newest book, Skytale, was handmade with the support of JackPine Press.

  • Jamie Chambliss

    Jamie Chambliss is an agent with Folio Literary Management. Her clients include Lara Prescott, Lauren Hough, Tom Vitale, and Rachel Rodgers. Prior to joining Folio, she was with 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’s a graduate of Wake Forest University and has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  • Mary M. Dalton

    Mary M. Dalton is Professor of Communication at Wake Forest University where she teaches courses focusing on critical media studies and screenwriting. Her scholarly publications include articles, book chapters, and books, and her documentaries have been screened at various festivals, museums, and on public television. Over the years, she has taught screenwriting to a number of students who populate writers’ rooms on shows you may have seen and whose screenwriting credits appear on films viewed at the theater or streaming at home. She delights in their accomplishments.

  • Stuart Dischell

    Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road (Viking), a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues (Penguin), Dig Safe (Penguin), Backwards Days (Penguin), Standing on Z (Unicorn), Children with Enemies (Chicago), and the forthcoming The Lookout Man (Chicago). A recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation. and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he is the Class of 1952 Excellence Professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

  • Joy Goodwin

    Joy Goodwin writes and produces independent films. Her credits include Black Nativity, May in the Summer, and the forthcoming Mabel (2022). She has been a fellow at Film Independent and The Writers Lab, and her screenplays have won awards at the Austin and Tribeca Film Festivals. She began her career in nonfiction television, winning an Emmy for documentary-writing. She is chair of the graduate screenwriting program at UNC School of the Arts.

  • Caleb Johnson

    Caleb Johnson is the author of the novel Treeborne, which received an honorable mention for the Southern Book Prize and was longlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize. His nonfiction, which has been cited in The Best American Essays, appears in Garden & Gun, Southern Living, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Caleb studied journalism at The University of Alabama and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wyoming. His work has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Jentel Foundation. Currently, Caleb teaches writing at Appalachian State University and mentors students in Drexel University’s low-residency MFA program.

  • Charlie Lovett

    Charlie Lovett is The New York Times bestselling author of The Bookman’s Tale, Escaping Dreamland, and other novels. He is the host of the podcast Inside the Writer’s Studio and a playwright whose plays for children have been seen in over 5,000 productions worldwide. Charlie is the former president of Bookmarks and has had the chance there and at book festivals around the country, and in the UK, to see every kind of author presentation you can imagine. He brings his background in theatre to his own presentations, which he has given at bookstores, schools, and festivals for more than twenty-five years.

  • Travis Mulhauser

    Travis Mulhauser was born and raised in Northern Michigan. 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 in 2017, an Indie Next Pick, and named one of Ploughshares Best Books of the New Year. Sweetgirl has also been published in France, Germany, Brazil, The Netherlands, and the UK. Travis is also 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 and two children.

  • Laura Mullen

    Laura Mullen is the author of eight books; recognitions for her poetry include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. Recent poems have appeared in Fence, Together in a Sudden Strangeness, and Bettering American Poetry. Her translation of Veronique Pittolo’s Hero was published by Black Square Editions, and her translation of work by Stephanie Chaillou has just appeared in Interim. A collection of poems is forthcoming from Solid Objects Press in 2023. She teaches at Wake Forest University.

  • Duncan Murrell

    Duncan Murrell has been in publishing for more than twenty-five years in a variety of roles: book editor, writer, author, publisher, and teacher. He is the founder (with fellow Algonquin Books alum Chuck Adams) of CraftBook Editorial. During his career he’s edited New York Times bestsellers for Algonquin Books, Warner Books, Grand Central, and Thomas Nelson. He directed the writing program at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, where he taught creative nonfiction and documentary writing courses, and he has also spent a semester as the visiting writer in UNC Wilmington’s Department of Creative Writing. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and The Oxford American magazine, and has an MFA in fiction from Bennington College and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University.

  • Derek Palacio

    Derek Palacio

    Derek Palacio received his MFA from the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Mortifications (2016), How to Shake the Other Man (2013), and “Sugarcane” (a short story which appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013). His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Witness, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Black Mountain Institute, Ragdale, CubaOne, and the National Park Service. He teaches in the MFA program at UNC Greensboro.

  • Maegan Poland

    Maegan Poland lives in Philadelphia, where she teaches creative writing and composition at Drexel University. Her debut short-story collection What Makes You Think You’re Awake? was selected by Carmen Maria Machado to win the Bakwin Award and was published in 2021 by Blair Press. Her fiction has been published in Mississippi Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Juked, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. She has received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology, a Tin House scholarship, and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. You can find more information on her website at www.maeganpoland.com.

  • Rachel Priest

    Rachel Priest is the assistant editor at The Bitter Southerner, an online and print publication focused on moving the South forward through great storytelling about the people, places, and movements in the region. She grew up in Minnesota but graduated from the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and history. Prior to her work at The Bitter Southerner, she was a writer and editor at The Red & Black’s culture desk and wrote long-form features for Ampersand magazine. Her stories focusing on transracial adoption and the Asian American experience can be found at Rewire and The Bitter Southerner. She currently lives in Atlanta.

  • Meg Reid

    Meg Reid is a book designer and writer living in South Carolina. She is the Director of Hub City Press in Spartanburg, SC, where she finds and champions exciting new voices from the American South. An editor and book designer, her essays have appeared online in outlets like DIAGRAM, Oxford American, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction from UNC-Wilmington, where she served as Assistant Editor of the literary magazine, Ecotone, and worked for the literary imprint Lookout Books. She also writes about all areas of design.

  • Steven Sherrill

    Steven Sherrill has five novels in the world (The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break and Joy, PA, among them), a book of poems (Ersatz Anatomy), hours of sound that occasionally verges on musicality here and here, enough video madness to give you a lifetime of nightmares at https://vimeo.com/user15194112, a basement full of paintings and banjos and synthesizers and gongs, and a motorcycle in his garage. In September of 2021, he rode that motorcycle 2500 miles, 21 days, through the Blue Ridge Mountains, with a travel banjo, to play and sing at the graves of Old Time Banjo Gods. Before that, Steven Sherrill dropped out of high school, got himself a Welding Diploma at a community college, and eventually graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop.

  • Julia Ridley Smith

    Julia Ridley Smith is the author of The Sum of Trifles (University of Georgia Press, 2021), a memoir in essays about cleaning out her parents’ house. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, the New England Review, and The Southern Review, among other publications, and her nonfiction was recognized as notable in The Best American Essays 2019. She’s been awarded scholarships, fellowships, and residencies by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Cuttyhunk Island Residency, and the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. After earning her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she worked for nearly twenty years as a freelance copyeditor of academic books. She’s taught creative writing and literature at UNC Greensboro, as well as art-based writing workshops at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Currently, she teaches fiction writing at UNC Chapel Hill, where she is the 2021-22 Kenan Visiting Writer. She lives in her hometown of Greensboro. You can find her at www.juliaridleysmith.com.

  • Carole Boston Weatherford

    Carole Boston Weatherford, Baltimore-born and raised, composed her first poem in first grade and dictated the verse to her mother on the ride home from school. Her father, a high school printing teacher, printed some of her early poems on index cards Since her literary debut with Juneteenth Jamboree in 1995, Carole’s books have received three Caldecott Honors, two NAACP Image Awards, an SCBWI Golden Kite Award, a Coretta Scott King Author Honor and many other honors. For career achievements, Carole received the Ragan-Rubin Award from North Carolina English Teachers Association and the North Carolina Literature Award, among the state’s highest civilian honors. She holds an M.A. in publications design from University of Baltimore and an M.F.A. in creative writing from University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is a Professor of English at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina.