Staff

Bonnie Antosh is a playwright and screenwriter from both Carolinas & New York. She's a Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival winner, an alum of The Road's Under Construction Cohort, an NC Arts Council grantee, and a Tennessee Williams Scholar (& current staff member) at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her EST/Sloan commission LEMURIA is in pre-production with New York Classical Theatre; it's also the winner of the NC New Play Project's Mark Gilbert Award and a finalist for Seven Devils and SETC's Getchell New Play Contest. BA: Yale. BonnieAAntosh.com

Pritha Bhattacharyya is a graduate of the Literature and Creative Writing PhD at the University of Houston. She received her MFA from Boston University. She's received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, Bread Loaf, Napa Valley, Sewanee, VCCA, Hedgebrook, Inprint Houston, and elsewhere. Her work appears in The Southern Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere.

Travis Eisenbise's short fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Joyland, Denver Quarterly, and The Masters Review Anthology for Emerging Writers. Originally from Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, Travis holds an MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and has spent the last fifteen years working for environmental and reproductive health nonprofits. He is going to be the new Associate Director of Programs and Finance for the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Norris Eppes has published fiction and essays in X-R-A-Y, HAD, The Surfer's Journal,Four Way Review, HASH, BeachGrit, Bitter Southerner, Newsweek, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Tennessee and was the 2014-15 Aiken Taylor Editorial Fellow at the Sewanee Review. www.norriseppes.com.

Afsheen Farhadi was born in Phoenix, Arizona. His fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, The Rumpus, Witness, Catapult, Subtropics, and elsewhere. He has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, where he was a Provost Graduate Fellow, and is currently the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing, Prose at Southern Methodist University.

Jonathan Bohr Heinen's writing has appeared in Florida Review, Cimarron Review, Arroyo, The Boiler, Tusculum Review, Four Way Review, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has received special mention from the Pushcart Prize, and the opening chapter of his novel manuscript was selected for CRAFT's First Chapters Contest. He teaches writing and publishing courses at the College of Charleston, where he is the managing editor for swamp pink, formerly known as crazyhorse.

Sakinah Hofler is a fiction writer, poet, and playwright. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, among other literary journals, and her plays have been produced by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. She has won the Yemasee Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers in Fiction, the Manchester Fiction Prize, the C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, and the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. She was named a 2024 FORGE NYC Fellow and the 2023 winner of the Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices. Her work has received support from the Albert C. Yates Foundation, the Kingsbury Foundation, the de Groot Foundation, the Taft Research Center, and the P.E.O. Scholar Award. She has served the literary community in numerous roles that include first reader for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, staff member of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and assistant editor of the Cincinnati Review. A former chemical engineer for the United States Department of Defense, she currently teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University. She’s at work on her first novel and her first short story collection.

Anessa Ibrahim holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and is a PhD candidate and Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review and American Short Fiction. She lives in Minneapolis.

Kate Jayroe is a PhD student in fiction at the University of Cincinnati. Work by Kate appears in The Gettysburg Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, X-R-A-Y, Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Tammy, The Fanzine, and more. katejayroe.com

Cianon Jones is a writer, creator, and performer. Jones recently wrote with the OMG! Studios Philly’s writers’ room from concept to creation of TV Guide New Play Festival: Stories for the Afrofuturist, a multi-play saga. Produced plays include Liar Upon the Starship Limpidius (Equinox New Play Festival, 2020) and Condensed Milk (Brown Girls Squared, 2019). This fall Cianon will be joining the University of Iowa’s Playwrights Workshop MFA.

Caroline Kim is the author of a collection of short stories, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories, which won the 2020 Drue Heinz Prize in Literature, was a finalist for a Northern California Book Award and was long listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and The Story Prize. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, Litmag’s Anton Chekov Award for Flash Fiction, and a Kundiman Fellowship from Sewanee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Best Short Stories 2024, Georgia Review, Story, New England Review, The Rumpus, Lithub, The Michigan Review, and TriQuarterly, among others.

Shelby Knauss is a poet from Council Bluffs, Iowa. She graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South in 2018 and was the 2018-2019 Post-Baccalaureate Fellow for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review.

Alyssa Konermann is a content designer by day, Pilates instructor and photographer by . . . other time of day. A former magazine editor and journalist, she has a master's in creative writing and writes both fiction and nonfiction.

Nathaniel Nelson is a poet from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Oregon. They were a former Tennessee Williams Baccalaureate Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and their poems have appeared in The Southern Review and Birmingham Poetry Review.

Phillip Christian Smith is a member of New Dramatists (class of 2030), a Fire This Time Festival Playwright, Fresh Ground Pepper PGPG, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee (current staff), Playwrights Realm and Lambda Literary Fellow, Winter Playwrights Retreater. O'Neill, PlayPenn, Trustus, and BAPF Finalist. Florida Rep PlayLab, Valdez conference. Co-Literary Director of Exquisite Corpse Company. He teaches acting at Pace University and playwriting at Hunter College. BFA UNM, MFA Yale School of Drama, MFA Hunter College. He is currently working on a Roe Green Commission with Cleveland Playhouse. www.phillipchristiansmith.com

Bea Troxel is a musician and essayist born and raised in Nashville. She released her latest record, Gettin' Where, via Ruination Records in 2021. She's currently at work on a collection of essays about a family of beavers in Nashville (among other things!) and is starting her MFA at the University of Arizona. She is obsessed with beavers, wave country, and fake phones. www.beatroxel.com

Briana Wheeler graduated from The University of the South: Sewanee in 2020 and has worked on staff for the Sewanee Writers' Conference ever since. She currently lives in Knoxville, TN, where she works as a teacher and pursues writing.