Speakers
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Marlin (Bart) Barton lives in Montgomery, Alabama. In addition to his most recent novel, Children of Dust, he’s published two earlier novels and three story collections. His stories have been included in Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and he was the first recipient of the Capote Prize for short fiction by an Alabama writer. Barton teaches in a program for juvenile offenders called Writing Our Stories, which is a partnership between the Alabama Writers’ Forum and the Alabama Department of Youth Services, and he also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Converse University in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
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Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W. Norton) which was an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. Her seventh book, Memoirs and Micro-Memoirs, is forthcoming from Norton in 2026. A contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire and other outlets, she lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, MS.
https://www.bethannfennelly.com/
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Boyce Upholt is a “nature critic” whose writing probes the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, especially in the U.S. South. His journalism and essays have been published in the Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications, and he was awarded the 2019 James Beard Award for investigative journalism. Boyce lives in New Orleans.
PC: Daniel Pierre-Louis
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Chiwoniso Kaitano (she/her/hers) is a champion of artists everywhere and joined MacDowell in 2023 to oversee the creative mission as well as the financial well-being of the nation’s first multidisciplinary residency program. “Chi” comes to MacDowell from Girl Be Heard (GBH) where she served as the executive director for the last four years. GBH is a global NGO that advocates for social change through performing arts and storytelling in all of its forms. Prior to GBH she served as executive director of Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy, a 30-year-old Brooklyn-based arts and culture organization. Chi is an avid traveler, having lived on three continents. She holds a law degree from the London School of Economics and a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs. She also serves on the Board of Directors of three New York City-based nonprofits: the International Contemporary Ensemble, The Center for Fiction (formerly The Mercantile Library), and The Jazz Leaders Fellowship of Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. Originally from Zimbabwe, Chi lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, the political theorist Andrew Sabl and their children. Connect with Chi on Twitter @chiwonisok or Instagram @chiwoniso.
PC: Julie Bridgham
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Chris Guzaitis (she/her) is the Director of Grants and Awards at the Poetry Foundation, where she oversees the recently established grants program in support of nonprofit poetry and literary arts organizations, presses, and publications. With an initial commitment of $3 million per year, the Poetry Foundation is amongst the largest funders of poetry in the country. Prior to joining the Poetry Foundation in 2022, Chris served as the Senior Director at Illinois Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where she directed all statewide programming and grantmaking. Chris has over a decade of grantmaking experience in the arts and humanities.
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Chuck Reece is the editor-in-chief of Salvation South, an online magazine that aims to change old, tired, and untruthful narratives about the American South by presenting the work of essayists, journalists, poets, photographers, and filmmakers. Its ranks of contributors range from bestselling authors to poets laureate to Oscar-nominated filmmakers to young writers just starting out. He was the founding editor-in-chief of The Bitter Southerner, a publication launched in 2013. In 2014, he won the Southern Foodways Alliance’s John Egerton Prize, which recognizes “artists, writers, scholars, and others—including artisans and farmers and cooks—whose work, in the American South, addresses issues of race, class, gender, and social and environmental justice, through the lens of food.” Reece also writes and hosts the Salvation South Podcast, which encompasses a monthly series of half-hour audio stories and his three-minute weekly commentaries that run during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on Georgia Public Broadcasting’s twenty-station radio network, an NPR affiliate.
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Crystal Wilkinson, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is the award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence, Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. Named Kentucky’s Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2023, she has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Foundation and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky where she is Bush-Holbrook Professor in Creative Writing.
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Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), a Cave Canem Fellow, and a two-time Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Offing, and Poet Lore and has been featured by Poem of the Day, Poem-a Day, and Poetry Daily. Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut collection, won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Her new collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, was named one of the ten best poetry books of 2022 by the New York Public Library, and she recently contributed the essay “I Have Seen the Promised Land and It Is Me” to Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging. Trimble is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.
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Jason McCall holds an MFA from the University of Miami. His recent collections include the essay collection Razed by TV Sets and the poetry collections Two-Face God, A Man Ain’t Nothin’, and What Shot Did You Ever Take (co-authored with Brian Oliu). He is a native of Montgomery, Alabama, and he currently teaches at the University of North Alabama.
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Katherine Webb is a writer, educator, and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Bitter Southerner, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. An editor for Hub City Press, she lives in Birmingham with her spouse and two young children.
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SWING editor Leigh Anne Couch has worked in many capacities in books and magazines for more than twenty years, beginning with the Greensboro Review, then at Duke University Press where she managed the editing of over 25 academic and trade books annually. She was managing editor of the Sewanee Review for twelve years and oversaw its transition from letterpress production to digital. Recently Couch was on the ten-year strategic review board for the Cincinnati Review. Three years ago she founded SWING at The Porch, a nonprofit writers’ collective in Nashville; in 2023 SWING won the Firecracker award from the CLMP for best debut magazine. That same year she and Wyatt Prunty founded the Sewanee Poetry series at Louisiana State University Press, where they select and edit two books a year from an emerging and mid-career poet.
She has always been interested in the empathetic power of art and community building, and has done work with the Orange County Literacy Council in Chapel Hill, NC; The Carver Hill School in Durham; the Arts Council of Princeton; and Writers in the Schools in Greensboro. She was on the creative council of the Rivendell Writers’ Colony, was an admissions reviewer for Yaddo, and was on staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for nine years. She has held artist residencies at VCCA, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts, the KHN Center, and Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. And two years ago, Couch served on the literary publishing panel of the National Endowment for the Arts reviewing grant applications.
Her books of poetry include Every Lash (2020 Vassar Miller Prize winner) and Houses Fly Away (Zone 3 Press).
Photo credit to Farris Ralston
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Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s most recent book is The American Daughters (One World, 2024), which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called "a vibrant picture of antebellum New Orleans." He is also the author of the story collection The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You (One World, 2021), which was a New York Times Editors' Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the Story Prize. His first book, We Cast a Shadow (One World, 2019), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors' Choice and was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.
PC: Vaughn D. Taylor
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Paul Reyes is the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, where he develops a variety of content, including investigative reporting, essays, photography portfolios, poetry, criticism, and fiction. Before joining VQR, he was a senior editor with The Oxford American. His work as an editor has led to two National Magazine Awards (as well as several nominations), the Overseas Press Club Award, inclusion in the Pushcart Prize anthology along with regular appearances in the Best American anthologies. He is the author of Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession, an investigative narrative of the 2008 housing crisis. His essays and reporting have appeared in VQR, The Oxford American, Harper’s, The New York Times, Literary Hub, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. His writing has earned him a Literature Fellowship in Nonfiction from the National Endowment for the Arts, a nomination for the Harry Chapin Media Award, and a nomination for the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. He is a member of the Board of Directors for both MacDowell and the American Society of Magazine Editors.
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W. Ralph Eubanks is faculty fellow and writer-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. From 1995 to 2013 he was director of publishing for the Library of Congress, and he is the former editor of the Viginia Quarterly Review. A writer and essayist whose work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, he is the author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape and two previous works of nonfiction. When It’s Darkness on the Delta: An American Reckoning, his next book, will be published in Fall 2025.
PC: Maude Schuyler Clay
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Serenity Gerbman has been Director of Literature & Language programs at Humanities Tennessee since 2001, overseeing the Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word and other literary programs. She has served on review panels for the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program and for the SouthARTS literary arts division. She is a past nominee for the Athena Award as a representative of the Women’s National Book Association. Serenity received a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from Middle Tennessee State University.
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Suzette “Susie” Surkamer began as the South Arts chief executive in 2012. Previously, she had been the Executive Director of the South Caroline Arts Commission until she retired in 2009. Her past service includes president of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), treasurer of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, member of the Coca-Cola Scholarship National Selection Committee, member of the National Arts Education Partnership Steering Committee, member of the Winthrop University Board of Visitors, member of Clemson University’s President’s Advisory Committee, and on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and other organizations. Among her many honors, Susie received Winthrop University’s Medal of Honor in the Arts (2006), the Gary Young Award from NASAA (2008), the SC Arts Commission’s McNair Award (2011), and the Halsey and Alice North Board Alumni Award from the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (2019). Susie earned a Med in dance education from George Washington University and a BA in dance from the University of Maryland.
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Tania De'Shawn is a dynamic poet and teaching artist based in Birmingham, Alabama. With a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Berea College, her work deeply integrates her understanding of research and ethnographic observations. She is the author of the acclaimed debut poetry collection, "Be Gentle with Black Girls," which highlights the adultification bias faced by Black girls and sheds light on its detrimental effects on their education and social development. This powerful collection was nominated for the 2022 VIP Heavy Hearts Neighborhood Award.
Tania's poetic voice has resonated across various organizations including the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Girls Inc., Sidewalk Film Festival, and Majesty Lounge. She has contributed to the local arts scene as a Teaching Fellow for Pen America’s Birmingham chapter and as the Eco-Light Poet for the Magic City Poetry Festival. In addition to her literary pursuits, Tania founded Element Agape, an innovative organization that empowers artists to create impactful work that drives social change. Through her artistry and advocacy, Tania De'Shawn continues to inspire and uplift communities.