Crystal Oliver – Director
Crystal Oliver is a poet and songwriter living in Southern Maryland with particular interests in literary citizenship as community service, studies in songwriters, and professional literacy. She is a lecturer of English, an adjunct professor of Music, the Director of the Chesapeake Writers’ Conference, and the Poetry Editor at EcoTheo Review. Her areas of teaching specialization include creative writing, the poetics of song, and feminist and multicultural critical approaches to the literature of music, magic, and addiction. She has also taught at Pratt Institute, The City University of New York, and Brooklyn College, among other places. She has released four albums: Fixing to Break (MW Records, 2002), Bessie’s Last Stand (2003), Voter (2007), and Light it Up (2012). Her writing has appeared in Bluestem, The Brooklyn Review, The Delmarva Review, Woman, and Southern Maryland: This Is Living.
Oliver received the 2022 Jordan Teaching Exemplar Award and the 2022 Andy Kozak Faculty Contribution to Student Life Award. She received the Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award from the University of Maryland, College Park, and earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College.
Matt Burgess
Fiction
Matt Burgess is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Dogfight, A Love Story and Uncle Janice. He teaches writing and literature at Macalester College.
Eva Freeman
Youth Workshop
Eva Freeman is an Adjunct Lecturer at Baruch College and a former producer for ABC News. Her short story, “In the Aftermath,” was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize and subsequently appeared in Granta. Her work has also been published in Citizen, The Catamaran Literary Journal, The Salt Hill Journal and Black Renaissance Noire, among others. She was recently named a 2022 Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence and a Kimbilio Fellow for Black Fiction and is the recipient of Baruch’s Barbara Gluck Teaching Excellence Award. Freeman received a BA in English from Yale University and an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Jerry Gabriel – Director Emeritus
Fiction
A 2016 NEA arts grant recipient and author of two collections of stories: Drowned Boy, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, and The Let Go (2015, Queen’s Ferry Press).
Heather Green
Poetry
Heather Green is the author of No Other Rome (Akron Poetry Series, 2021) and the translator of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won (Octopus Books, 2018). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Everyday Genius, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her translations of Tzara’s work have appeared in Poetry International, Ploughshares, AGNI, and several anthologies, as well as Asymptote, where she serves as the Visual Editor. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Hopscotch Translation, Harriet Books, On the Seawall, Words Without Borders, and Poetry Daily, where she serves on the editorial board. She teaches as an Assistant Professor in the School of Art at George Mason University and as a member of the poetry faculty of Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European MFA program.
Wayne Karlin
Wayne Karlin’s fiction and non-fiction have ranged from books about the Vietnam War and its aftermath to novels set in Europe and Israel, and historical novels set in the 17th and 19th Centuries. He has published eight novels: A Wolf by the Ears, Marble Mountain, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners (all with Curbstone Press), Lost Armies, The Extras, Us (all with Henry Holt), and Crossover (Harcourt), and three works of non-fiction: Rumors and Stones, War Movies (Curbstone Press), and Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books). A collection of his short stories, Memorial Days, will be published by Texas Tech University Press in May 2023. His books have also been published in England, and in translation in Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Vietnam. As editor of the Voices from Vietnam Series from Curbstone Press, he introduced books of translated contemporary Vietnamese fiction to an American readership. Karlin has received five State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994 and 2004), the Paterson Prize in Fiction for 1999 for Prisoners, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in Arts Award in 2005, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction for 2019 for A Wolf by the Ears. The manuscript for his novel What Their Fathers Never Told Them was a finalist for the 2021 PEN American Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
Melissa Scholes Young
Creative Nonfiction
Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the award-winning novels Flood and The Hive. She received the Shelf Unbound Best Book Award in 2021 and the Next Generation Indie Book Award in 2023. She’s published two chapbooks, Scrap Metal Baby and Guinea Pig. She serves as Editor of Grace in Darkness, Furious Gravity, and Grace in Love, anthologies by women writers and directs the From the Attic online series. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Atlantic, Ms., Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, and Believer Magazine. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundation, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Humanities Truck. Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri and a first-generation student, she is a Professor in the Literature Department of American University where she directs the undergraduate creative writing program. She’s at work on a memoir about shame and working-class families.
Meredith Taylor
Merideth M. Taylor is Professor Emerita of Theater and Dance at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a founding member of the African and African Diaspora and Women Studies programs at the College. She is the author of Listening in: Echoes and Artifacts from Maryland’s Mother County; co-editor of In Relentless Pursuit of an Education: African American Stories from a Century of Segregation; and screenwriter/director of the documentaries With All Deliberate Speed: One High School’s Story and Telly-Award-winning Talking and Walking Common Ground.
Her book Making a Way Out of No Way: Lives of Labor, Love, and Resistance (New Village Press, 2024) is a richly imagined, photo illustrated narrative of 150 years of life in slavery on tobacco plantations in Southern Maryland.
Nadeem Zaman
Fiction