Boyce Upholt is a writer, editor, and “nature critic” based in New Orleans. He is the author of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi (W.W. Norton, 2024), a national bestseller and the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Prize for Southern Writing in nonfiction, and his magazine writing has appeared in…

Miles Harvey’s collection of short stories, The Registry of Forgotten Objects (Mad Creek Books, 2024) won the Journal Non/Fiction Prize and the Society of Midland Authors award for best work of adult fiction. His nonfiction includes The King of Confidence (Little, Brown & Co., 2020) and The Island of Lost Maps (Random House, 2000), a…

Dr. Bess Rowen is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University, and affiliated faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies and Irish Studies. She is the author of The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and the editor of the Methuen Critical Edition of A Streetcar Named…

Tom Mitchell is emeritus professor of Theatre at the University of Illinois and Festival Scholar for the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis. He has edited Early Stories by Tennessee Williams, available from the University of Iowa Press, and The Caterpillar Dogs: Early Stories by Tennessee Williams, from New Directions. Mitchell edited the stories, “Fin du…

Benjamin Gillespie is Assistant Professor of Theatre History & Performance Studies at Santa Clara University. His essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Performance Research, Theatre Research in Canada, and on HowlRound. He is co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT)…

Margot Douaihy’s debut mystery, Scorched Grace, won the Pinckley Prize for First Crime Novel and was named one of the Best Crime Novels of the Year by The New York Times, The Guardian, CrimeReads, and others. Her second mystery, Blessed Water, was also named a New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year (2024)…

Tom Andes is the author of the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In 2025, his short story “Deadhead” received the Shamus…

C. Morgan Babst is a native of New Orleans. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Washington Post, Saveur, The Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, Lenny Letter, and the New Orleans Review, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Garden and Gun. Her essays “Death Is a Way to Be”…

Doug MacCash has been an arts and culture writer with The Times-Picayune newspaper and NOLA.com for more than 25 years. He shares in two Pulitzer Prizes for reporting immediately after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2022, MacCash’s cultural history book titled Louisiana True: Mardi Gras Beads, was published by LSU Press. His upcoming book on…

Ladee Hubbard is the author of the novel The Talented Ribkins, which received a 2017 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Her second novel, The Rib King, was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 and was a finalist for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. In 2022 she…