Lee Matalone is the author of the novel HOME MAKING (Harper Perennial 2020). Her fiction has been featured in the The Offing, Denver Quarterly, Hobart, Joyland, Nat. Brut, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Bat City Review, among other places. Her essays and reporting have appeared in LitHub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the National, and Flavorwire, among others. She has been a contributor to the Tin House, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee writers conferences, and has been awarded residencies at Pocoapoco and Art Farm. Home Making is her first novel. She is a lecturer at Clemson University.
John Jeter
Journalist, novelist, playwright, academic and entrepreneur, John Jeter is best known in the Upstate as co-owner of The Handlebar, a now-legendary concert venue in Greenville, S.C. Most recently, he signed with a literary agent to represent his latest novel, SPENT: THE LAST DAYS OF SEX & ROCK ‘N’ ROLL. For 20 years, he and his wife, Kathy Laughlin, ran the live-music club where he bought talent for some 2,500 shows, presenting the likes of John Mayer, Sugarland, Zac Brown Band, Joan Baez, John Hiatt, Jason Isbell and many more. He leveraged his experience to create a position as adjunct professor in the Music Business & Technology Certificate program at Converse College, where he won the Above & Beyond Award in 2017. He’s a nationally published author: ROCKIN’ A HARD PLACE, a Hub City Press memoir based on his experience as the Greenville club’s talent buyer; THE PLUNDER ROOM, his debut novel from St. Martin’s Press; and THE LUCIFER GENOME, a co-authored thriller from Brigid’s Fire Press. While currently at work on a musical, he’s also a contract stringer for The New York Times. His work has also appeared in USA Today. In 2019, he won a writing residency in Italy to work on his stage play, THE LAST LYNCHING. He has traveled to Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Central America, Mexico and Canada, the Caribbean, southern Africa, the Middle East and throughout the United States. He has appeared on Oprah! and on TV, in newspapers and radio, as a contributor and a subject.
Deno Trekas
Deno Trakas is the Laura and Winston Hoy Professor of English and director of the writing center at Wofford College. He has published fiction and poetry in journals and anthologies, two chapbooks of poems, a memoir entitled Because Memory Isn't Eternal: A Story of Greeks in Upstate South Carolina, and a novel, Messenger from Mystery. He's a five-time winner of the South Carolina Fiction Project Prize and a recipient of the South Carolina Academy of Authors Fellowship in Fiction.
Shannon Greene
Shannon is a writer, editor, and librarian with a B.A. in English and a Masters in Library and Information Science. Her work can be seen around the web at Mutha Magazine and in print in Folk Rebellion's The Dispatch, as well as GCLS's Library Now magazine, at which she is also a contributing editor. She is a co-creator and writer at the podcast Strange South, and working on a novel set in a fictional Western NC town called Panther Valley about a girl who communes with snakes, carries a knife and a deck of tarot cards, and apprentices an animal control specialist named Hez. Shannon craves a good research project, writes with her head and heart, and loves editing to take someone else's writing to the next level.
Ashley Warlick
Ashley Warlick is a novelist, food and freelance writer living in Greenville. She is the winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. She teaches fiction in the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, and works as the buyer at M. Judson Booksellers.
