Literary Festival Biographies
Poetry
Natalie Diaz
Born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University and received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the author of the poetry collections Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), which New York Times reviewer Eric McHenry described as an “ambitious … beautiful book.” Her other honors and awards include the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Diaz lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she has worked with the last speakers of Mojave and directed a language revitalization program. In a PBS interview, she spoke of the connection between writing and experience: "For me, writing is kind of a way for me to explore why I want things and why I'm afraid of things and why I worry about things. And for me, all those things represent a hunger that comes with being raised in a place like this.”
Dan Albergotti
Dan Albergotti is the author of two full-length collections of poems: The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), which won the 2007 Poulin Prize, selected by Edward Hirsch; and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), which won the 2013 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, selected by Rodney Jones. He has also published three poetry chapbooks with Unicorn press: The Use of the World (2013), Of Air and Earth (2019), and Circa MMXX (2022). His third full-length collection, Candy, will be published by LSU Press in 2024. He has been awarded fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the South Carolina Arts Commission, the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His individual poems have been published in such journals as The Cincinnati Review, Five Points, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. His work has also been reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2017, The New York Times Magazine, The Writer's Almanac, and two editions of The Pushcart Prize. He has taught at Coastal Carolina University since 2005 and currently lives in Tampa, Florida.
Melissa Crowe
Melissa Crowe is the author of Lo (University of Iowa Press, 2023), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, New England Review, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals, and she was the 2021 recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She coordinates the MFA program at UNCW, where she teaches poetry and publishing.
Eugenia Leigh
She is a Korean American poet and the author of two collections of poetry, Bianca (Four Way Books, March 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), winner of the Late Night Library's 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry selected by Arisa White, as well as a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, The Nation, Guernica, Poetry, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Waxwing, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, the Best New Poets anthology, and the Best of the Net anthology. Poems from Bianca were awarded Poetry magazine's 2021 Bess Hokin Prize and received Special Mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was awarded the Thomas Lux Scholarship for her dedication to teaching, demonstrated through her writing workshops with incarcerated youths and with Brooklyn High School students.
Sabrina Orah Mark
Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, was published by Dorothy, a publishing project. Happily, which began as a monthly column on fairytales and motherhood in The Paris Review, was published by Random House in 2023. She has received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In addition to teaching private workshops she currently teaches nonfiction, fiction, and poetry for the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, Reginald McKnight, and their two sons.
Fiction
Harrison Scott Key
He is the author of How to Stay Married, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?, and The World's Largest Man, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. His first TEDx talk went viral among a certain demographic. Harrison's humor and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Travel Writing, Oxford American, The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Town & Country, Salon, and Creative Nonfiction, as well as several magazines. He holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and a Ph.D. in playwriting and has worked at SCAD for quite literally thousands of years, where he’s held appointments as chair of liberal arts, professor of English, professor of writing, and executive dean. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, with three children and one wife.
Claire Jiménez
She is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023). She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her Ph.D. in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Remezcla, AfroHispanic Review, PANK, The Rumpus, and Eater, among other publications. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.
David Joy
He is the author of When These Mountains Burn (winner of the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award), The Line That Held Us (winner of the 2018 Southern Book Prize), The Weight of This World, and Where All Light Tends to Go (Edgar finalist for Best First Novel). His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in several publications, and he is the author of the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey and a coeditor of Gather at the River: Twenty-Five Authors on Fishing. Joy lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina.
Claire Luchette
She is the author of the novel Agatha of Little Neon and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Claire's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Granta, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, and Iowa Review, among others. Their story "New Bees" won a 2020 Pushcart Prize. A National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Claire has received grants and fellowships from MacDowell, the Corporation of Yaddo, the James Merrill House, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Millay Colony, Lighthouse Works, John Carroll University, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. They were the 2022-2023 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the NYPL's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Marream Krollos
She was born in Alexandria, Egypt. She has since lived in Los Angeles, New York, Seville, Seoul, Christchurch, and Riyadh. She received her PhD from the University of Denver. She previously lived in Jeddah where she taught one of the very few creative writing classes in the kingdom. She is the author of STAN, Sermons, and Big City.
