Jessie van Eerden

Jessie van Eerden is the author of the portrait essay collection The Long Weeping (Orison Books, 2017), as well as two novels: My Radio Radio (Vandalia Press, 2016) and Glorybound (WordFarm, 2012). Her work has appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing , Oxford American , Willow Springs , and other magazines and anthologies. She has been awarded the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, the Milton Fellowship, and a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. Van Eerden holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing at Hollins University. Photo by David Flores

Clint McCown is the author of four novels, most recently Haints (New Rivers Press, 2012). His other novels include The Weather Man (Graywolf Press, 2004), War Memorials (2000), and The Member-Guest (Doubleday, 1995), as well as three books of poetry. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize and has won the American Fiction Prize twice from New Rivers Press. His other awards include the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Sister Mariella Gable Award, and a Germaine Bree Book Award, among others. He has worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros., a creative consultant for HBO, an actor with the National Shakespeare Company, and as a broadcast journalist, for which he received an Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence. McCown received his MFA from Indiana University, where he served as editor of Indiana Review . He was founding editor and publisher of Beloit Fiction Journal which he published for twenty years, and currently teaches in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University.