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.
Katie Burgess
Katie Burgess holds a PhD in fiction from Florida State and is editor of Emrys Journal. Her chapbook, Wind on the Moon, was published in 2019.
M. Linda Lee
A Virginia native, M. Linda Lee moved to Greenville, South Carolina, to take a job as an editor for Michelin Travel Publications, a post she held for 17 years. She whetted her appetite for food writing when she worked on the acclaimed Michelin Guide. Now a freelance writer/editor, she enjoys keeping tabs on the local food scene and writing about food, travel and interesting people as a regular contributor to TOWN magazine. When she’s not chained to her PC, Linda indulges her passion by serving on the board of Slow Food Upstate and is a board member emeritus for Euphoria, Greenville’s premiere food, wine and music festival.
Sam Slaughter
Sam Slaughter is the author of the cocktail book Are You Afraid of the Dark Rum: and Other Cocktails for 90s Kids in addition to two collections of short fiction. He received his BA from Elon University and his MA from Stetson University. His work has been published in a variety of places, from The Bitter Southerner and Maxim to literary outlets such as McSweeney's Online Tendency and Midwestern Gothic.
Heather Marshall
Heather Marshall is an author and teacher whose work is published in literary journals in the United States and in Scotland. Her novel, The Thorn Tree, was published in 2014. She is currently finishing work on a second novel about secrets, uncovering the truth, and belonging.
Beth Brown Ables
Beth Brown Ables is a writer, a mother and a creative type. She freelances for local magazines, focusing on profiles and features as well as food styling and recipe development. She's the creator of an ongoing series of seasonal cookbook zines called A Place Here.
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.
Eshani Surya
Originally from the Northeast United States, Eshani Surya is a writer based in Greenville, SC. Her writing has appeared in [PANK], Catapult, Paper Darts, Joyland, and Literary Hub, among others. She has won the New Delta Review Ryan R. Gibbs Award for Flash Fiction, has been longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Short Fictions, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is also the creator of The Marrow Scripts, a project based around telling stories of disability and chronic illness. Eshani is a Flash Fiction Reader at Split Lip Magazine, and has previously served as the Flash Fiction Editor at Sonora Review and as an Associate Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Eshani holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she also taught undergraduates. She now teaches community workshops and provides coaching to writers both through formal means such as Adroit Magazine’s Summer Mentorship Program and on a freelance basis.
John Pursley
John Pursley III teaches at Clemson University, where he directs the Clemson Literary Festival. He is the author of the poetry collection, If You Have Ghosts and the chapbooks, Supposing, for Instance, Here in the Space-Time Continuum, A Story without Poverty, A Conventional Weather, and When, By the Titanic. He is an editor at Burnside Review and South Carolina Review. His work has appeared in Poetry, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
Sarah Blackman
Sarah Blackman is a poet, fiction and creative non-fiction author originally from the Washington D.C area. She graduated from Washington College, summa cum laude, with a BA in English, minor Creative Writing, and earned her MFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 with a primary concentration in fiction and a secondary concentration in poetry. She is the Director of Creative Writing at the Fine Arts Center, an arts dedicated public high school in Greenville, South Carolina. Her poetry and prose has been published in a number of journals and magazines, including The Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Oxford American Magazine and The Missouri Review among others. She has been featured on the Poetry Daily website and anthologized in the Poets Against the War Anthology, Best New American Voices, 2006, Metawritings; Toward a Theory of Nonfiction, and xoOrpheus: Fifty New Myths which was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2014. Blackman is the co-fiction editor of DIAGRAM, the online journal of experimental prose, poetry and schematics and the second longest running online magazine in the country, and the founding editor of Crashtest, an online magazine for high school age writers which she edits alongside her students at the Fine Arts Center. She is a fiction reviewer for Kirkus and serves as an International Examiner for the Masters program in Creative Writing at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her story collection Mother Box was the winner of the 2012 Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize and was published by FC2 in 2013. Her novel, Hex, was published by the same press in April, 2016. In 2018 she joined the board of FC2.
Josh Sorrells
Josh Sorrells is a fiction writer living in the upstate. When he’s not writing, he’s teaching high school English. If you ask him about his dogs, he’ll be happy to show you pictures.