Table of Contents

Virginia Archer is a native of Louisiana and graduated from Louisiana State University with a degree in an thropology, through which she discovered her passion for folklore and story. In her writing, Virginia is inter ested in the spaces where religious folkways, poverty and the natural environment intersect in rural Amer ica. She currently resides in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, their son and golden retriever. Her writ ing has been featured in Deep South Magazine, 225 Magazine, Country Roads Magazine, They Call Us, and is forthcoming in Mutha Magazine, Soul Lit and Min erva Press. Jeannette Brown lives and writes in Knoxville, TN. Her novel, The Illusion of Leaving, was published by Texas Review Press. Her short fiction has been pub lished in Bellevue Literary Review, Southwestern American Literature, and others. Her play, Cuba Libre, is currently in development with the Tennessee Stage Company. Floyd Collins holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Twentieth-Century Literature from the Uni- versity of Arkansas. He has authored several volumes of poetry, including My Back Pages: The Teresa Poems (2022). The Living Artifact, a selection of his essay-re views, appeared in 2021. Most recently Waking Past Midnight: Selected Poems, a career retrospective, was published by Stephen F. Austin State UP in 2023. Anton DiSclafani is the author of the novels The Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls and The After Party. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, Narrative, American Short Fiction, and the New York Times. She lives in Auburn, AL. Gregory Hansen is Professor of Folklore and English at Arkansas State University, where he also teaches in the Heritage Studies PhD Program. He is the author of A Florida Fiddler: The Life and Times of Richard Sea man, and his publications focus on roots music, folk lore and language, and public folklore. Joan Wylie Hall is a senior lecturer emerita at the Uni versity of Mississippi, author of Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction (1993), and editor of Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004) and Conversations with Natasha Trethewey (2013). She has published scores of essays, reference book entries, and book reviews. Tyler Hauth writes fantasy and horror inspired by the southern United States. His stories often invoke a sense of dread by calling on elements of the supernat ural or fantastic. He teaches writing at Emerson Col lege, owns The Book Forge in Orange, MA, and is a devoted husband / father to an incredible wife and two young boys. Tyler has a novel releasing in late 2024 with Nef House Publishing called The Dog War. He hopes to write many more in the coming years. Tyrone Jaeger is the author of the novel Radio Eldo rado, the story collection So Many True Believers and the cross-genre novella The Runaway Note. His writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Southern Human ities Review, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Porter Fund Literary Prize, and he has been a member of the faculty at Hendrix College since 2008. Born and raised in the Catskill Moun tains, Tyrone lives on Beaverfork Lake, AR, with his wife and daughter. Visit his website www.tyrone jaeger.com. Mason Joiner is Assistant Professor of English at Del gado Community College in New Orleans, LA. He moved to New Orleans from Alexandria, LA, in 2010 and received a BA in Film & Theatre from the Uni versity of New Orleans and an MA in English from Northwestern State University. Guy Lancaster currently is the editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Ar kansas Library System (CALS) and the author of a number of books on race and violence, including

American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching (U of Arkansas P, 2021). Al Maginnes is the author of fourteen collections of poems, most recently Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems (Redhawk Publications 2023). He is retired from teaching and lives in Raleigh, NC. Kelsey D. Mahaffey rests her head most nights in Nashville, TN, but keeps half her heart in New Or leans. She needs music and nature like breath and water and walks the Earth barefoot beside a bow legged cat. Her work can be seen (or is forthcoming) in Pensive, The Sunlight Press, Writers Resist, Cumberland River Review, Eunoia Review, and Minerva Rising Press. Andrew Scheiber is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. He has published on a wide range of authors (Nathaniel Haw thorne, Henry James, Rebecca Harding Davis, August Wilson, and Toni Morrison) as well as on literary theory, music, and film. His work has appeared in The Henry James Review, Legacy, Modern Fiction Studies, and New Literary History as well as in Arkansas Review. Frank Thurmond grew up in Little Rock, AR, and holds graduate degrees in English from Southern Methodist University and Oxford University. His books include the memoir Before I Sleep: A Memoir of Travel and Reconciliation (2012, Et Alia Press), a collec tion of short fiction titled Ring of Five: A Novella and Four Stories (2015, Et Alia Press) and his poetry chap book Remembrance and Other Poems (2022, Braddock Avenue Books). In addition to writing, he is a musi cian and filmmaker, and his script for his short film “The Dealer’s Tale” won the Best Screenplay award at the El Dorado Film Festival. (The film also received a commendation from director Werner Herzog.) His newest book is Lottie Deno: A Novel, and he has adapted it into a screenplay for a feature film. He teaches literature, composition, music and screenwrit ing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Jeffrey Utzinger’s first collection of nonfiction essays, The Risk Involved, is forthcoming with April Gloaming Publishing (November 2024). Jeffrey has an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in American Literature. He lives in Lockhart, TX, where he keeps chickens, a duck, and occasionally, a few thousand bees. Claude Wilkinson has been Provost Scholar and also John and Renée Grisham Visiting Southern Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. His poems have appeared recently in Alabama Literary Re view, Arkansas Review, Chronicles, Poetry South, and Southern Quarterly, and his recent poetry collections include Marvelous Light, World without End, and Soon Done with the Crosses. Edward Ziegler is an author, poet, lecturer, and legal scholar who lives and writes in the Wildcat Moun tains near Denver He is a native Kentuckian, a former All-American high school and Notre Dame footballer, an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Denver and co-founder and past president of The Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute. His recent po etry and memoirs are found in literary reviews in the United States, Canada, Italy, Russia, India, and Ma laysia. His literary writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. www.edwardziegler.com.