Chris Bachelder is the author of the novels The Throwback Special, Abbott Awaits, U.S.!, Bear v. Shark, and Lessons in Virtual Photography. His short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including The Paris Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Mother Jones, The Cincinnati Review, and New Stories from the South. His novel Abbott Awaits was published in 2011, to strong reviews: “Not since John Cheever,” said novelist Brock Clark, “has an American male fiction writer written so ingeniously, so beautifully, so heartbreakingly about the pain and sweetness of domestic life.'' His acclaimed novel The Throwback Special was a finalist for the National Book Award. The book follows twenty-two men who meet each year to reenact the 1985 Joe Theismann football injury. Bachelder was awarded the prestigious Terry Southern Prize in 2016. He received an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida and taught at New Mexico State, Colorado College, and the University of Massachusetts before joining the creative writing faculty of the University of Cincinnati in 2011.

Barbara Black is the author of three classic studies of Victorian literature and culture: On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2000); A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland (2012); and Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and its Stories (2019). When On Exhibit appeared in 2000, critic Joseph Childers praised it for “[beginning] in very important ways to unravel the representation of culture to itself.” A Room of His Own, nominated as Best Book of 2013 by the North American Victorian Studies Association, was lauded as “an absorbing and enlightening study” by the Times Literary Supplement and as a “beautifully conceived, thoroughly researched, and deftly argued book” by scholar Karen Chase Levenson. Most recently, Black's new book, Hotel London, was awarded a 2020 Book Award from the Victorian Society in America and exalted by critic Jacqueline Banerjee for "skill in combining cultural theory with social and personal history."

Black’s essays and reviews—on Dickens, Wilde, Gissing, Fitzgerald, among others—have appeared in Salmagundi, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Poetry, and Dickens Studies Annual, among other journals, as well as in the book Dickens and Gender (2012). Barbara Black earned an AB at Bryn Mawr College and a PhD at the University of Virginia. She currently serves as professor of English at Skidmore College, where she was recently honored with the Ralph A. Ciancio Award for Excellence in Teaching. Barbara Black is the review editor for the international journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition was reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. The audiobook of that collection became available in 2017. She was an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years until she gave up her beloved position there in hope of writing full time. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. Currently, she is the editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches periodically at a number of places in addition to the Sewanee School of Letters, including the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA and the Hindman Settlement School. Nickole Brown lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at two different animal sanctuaries. She’s at work on a bestiary of sorts about these animals. A chapbook featuring some of these poems called To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and another sequence called The Donkey Elegies was published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2020, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with Jessica, and they regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative.

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, a recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, a winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Clark is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, The Washington Post, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Virginia Ottley Craighill has been teaching at Sewanee since 2001 and is also a graduate of the University of the South (C’82), the University of Georgia, and the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches 19th century and modern American literature (especially Tennessee Williams), literary journalism, creative non-fiction, and literature by women. Her work has been published in the Sewanee Review, Gulf Coast, Chattahoochee Review, Best American Sports Writing 2019, and Kalliope, among others.

Sidik Fofana received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA in creative writing from NYU. He has taught at NYU and in public schools in Brooklyn. His novel Stories from our Tenants Downstairs is forthcoming from Scribner in the US and Hodder in the UK in 2021. His stories, including "The Okiedoke" and "The Rent Manual," have appeared in the Sewanee Review. His work has also been published in Granta, and he was a 2018 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow. 

You can hear Sidik read from "The Rent Manual" here:

Sewanee Review YouTube Reading

Meera Subramanian is an award-winning independent journalist whose work has been published in national and international publications including the New York Times, New Yorker, Nature, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Orion, where she serves as a contributing editor. Her book A River Runs Again: India's Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka, published by PublicAffairs in 2015, was short-listed for the 2016 Orion Book Award. Through her work, she has explored the disappearance of India’s vultures, questioned the “Good Anthropocene,” sought out fragile shorelines, and investigated perceptions of climate change among conservative Americans. Her essays have been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing, as well as multiple editions of The Best Women’s Travel Writing. She was an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow (2016-17) and Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow (2013-14) and earned an MA in Journalism from New York University. She is currently a co-director of the Religion & Environment Story Project and a contributing editor of Orion, and she recently taught at Princeton University as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities.

Winner of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Southern editor of the Paris Review. Previously he was an editor at Harper's, Oxford American, and GQ Magazine. His prize-winning first book, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, was published in 2004. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker. His journalism and reviews appear regularly in the New York Times, Harper's, Oxford American, GQ, and the Paris Review. Many of these pieces are gathered in his book Pulphead, which has been widely and enthusiastically reviewed. Winner of two National Magazine Awards, the Whiting Writer's Award, and a 2015 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife and two daughters.

Jamie Quatro's debut novel, Fire Sermon, published in 2018 with Grove Press (U.S.), Picador (U.K.), and House of Anansi (Canada). Selected as one of the Top Seven Novels of 2018 by The Economist, and named a Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement, Fire Sermon is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book, Indie Next pick, and New York Times Editors' Choice. Quatro's story collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was chosen as a favorite book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker. The collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, the Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

Quatro’s books are published in translation in Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Poland, and the Netherlands. A contributing editor at Oxford American, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Recent essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Oxford American, and as part of the Greenpeace Climate Visionaries series. Her stories are anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, The Story and Its Writer, and the 2018 Pushcart Prize Anthology. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, she lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.