SONGWRITING FACULTY
Rob Aldridge is a singer/songwriter and guitarist, who resides Florence, Alabama. Writing songs and performing professionally since he was 13, he has released two albums with his band, The Proponents, as well as two solo projects. A performance of his song, “True Love’s True Love” from the album Anything and Everyone, was featured in the documentary Stories in Rhyme, a film about songwriters and the Frank Brown Songwriter festival that has taken place every year in Orange Beach, AL for more than 35 years. His band’s most recent record, Mind Over Manners (2022), received international acclaim. Rob has toured the country and performed with, or opened for, singer/songwriters such as Jason Isbell, John Paul White, and John Moreland. While writing and performing is his job and first love, Aldridge has a passion for education and attended the University of North Alabama, where he majored in secondary education and English.
To learn more about Rob and The Proponents, visit https://robaldridgemusic.com/.
You may also meet him HERE and elsewhere on YouTube.
creative nonfiction FACULTY
Lucas Iberico Lozada’s essays, reviews, and reporting have appeared in many publications, including the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Times, the Nation, Foreign Policy, Vanity Fair, and Dissent. A former editor at Paste and Popula, he got his start as a reporter at the Reuters newswire in their São Paulo, Lima, and New York bureaus. He is a nonfiction fellow in the Literature & Creative Writing PhD program at the University of Southern California, where he is working on an essay collection about the many tombs of Christopher Columbus. He has taught literature and creative writing classes at Temple University, the University of the Arts, and USC, and has worked closely with high school students in the US and Brazil on their college application essays. He splits his time between Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
Fiction Faculty
Becca Hannigan earned an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where they served as fiction editor for Ecotone and taught undergraduate courses. They also taught online workshops after completing a residency with the Sundress Academy for the Arts; facilitated writing classes at Urban Peak, a center for youth experiencing homelessness; and worked as an editorial intern for Brink Literacy Project. In 2016, they attended the Sewanee Writers' Conference as a scholar, and for the past two summers they've been an administrator for the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference. Their work has been featured in 303 Magazine, the Rumpus, Story Quarterly, and is forthcoming in the North Carolina Literary Review. You'll find them in Denver, continuing to work on essays, short stories, and grant writing.
Luke Geddes received his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wichita State University. His novel Heart of Junk, about an eclectic group of merchants at a Kansas antique mall who become implicated in the kidnapping of a local beauty pageant star, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist and was cited as a Best Book of 2020 on NPR's Weekend Edition. It has been optioned for television adaptation by Fox 21 studios. The author and critic Roxane Gay called his story collection I Am a Magical Teenage Princess one of her favorite books in her 2017 New York Times "By the Book" interview. Luke has taught at the University of Cincinnati, Thomas More University, and the Sewanee Young Writers Conference. He lives in Milwaukee, WI.
Janalyn Guo received her MFA in Fiction from Brown University, and her writing has been featured in Bat City Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Mooncalves Anthology of Strange Stories, and other places. Her collection of fantastical short stories, Our Colony Beyond the City of Ruins, was published by Subito Press in 2018 and reissued by Calamari Archive in 2024. She has received fellowships to support her writing from Brown University, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has also dabbled in game writing for VR and site-specific, choose-your-own-adventure storytelling for the city of Austin. She currently lives and writes in Philadelphia, where she is completing a novel about fishponds and imaginary worlds and a second collection of short stories.
Poetry faculty
Maggie Blake Bailey is a poet and educator with degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and Brown Universities. Most recently, she received her MFA in creative writing for Sewanee’s School of Letters. As an educator, she taught literature and creative writing, as well as directed theater productions, for over fifteen years at Groton School, Deerfield Academy, and The Westminster Schools in Atlanta, GA. Her first full length poetry collection, Visitation, was published by Tinderbox Editions, and her chapbook, Bury the Lede, is available from Finishing Line Press. Her more recent poems can be found in Rust and Moth, Foundry, Psaltery and Lyre, and elsewhere. Her first murder mystery, Seams Deadly (Crooked Lane Books, 2023), is now available, and the second in the series is forthcoming in August 2024. Maggie is currently at work on a second collection of poetry, centered on sleep disorders. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, two young children, and two golden retrievers in a house full of books, fabric, and squishmallows.
Visit www.maggieblakebailey.com to learn more.
Christina Olson is the author of The Anxiety Workbook, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press’s Pitt Poetry Series, and named the finalist for Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2024. Her chapbook The Last Mastodon, based on her time as poet-in-residence at the Western Science Center in Hemet, CA, won the 2019 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Her poetry & creative nonfiction has appeared in more than a hundred magazines & journals, including The Atlantic, Brevity, Fourth Genre, Gastronomica, The Nation, Poetry Daily, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume Three. Christina is a professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University and has taught at SYWC since 2019.
Ciona Rouse is a poet and educator. The author of Vantablack, the first chapbook of Third Man Books (2017), her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Oxford American, wildness, Booth, and selected by Ada Limón to feature on The Slowdown podcast. She’sfeatured on NPR’s Turning the Tables in a collaborative project. She has been a visiting writing instructor at The University of the South Sewanee, Vanderbilt University, The Porch Writers’ Collective, Tennessee Young Writers’ Workshop, Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center and others. A frequent collaborator with various artists, she served as a resident poet for the “Nick Cave: FEAT” art exhibition at Frist Art Museum in 2017-2018, and was co-curator of the Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick exhibition (2020-2022). A graduate of Columbia College of South Carolina, Rouse currently lives in Nashville, Tenn., where she’s helped bring the Nashville poetry community together by curating a number of poetry experiences.
playwriting FACULTY
Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s plays include Zelda in the Backyard, Gee's Bend, White Lightning, The Flagmaker of Market Street, and The Furniture of Home. Her plays have been produced/workshopped at the Royal Court (London), Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and the New Conservatory Theatre, among others. Elyzabeth is the host of the podcast series Teaching Theatre for Howlround. She is the 2024 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow, as well as a 24-25 PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Mentorship Fellow. She is a graduate of the dramatic writing program at New York University and an alumnus of Youngblood at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South. www.wilderwriting.net
