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
Sayantani Dasgupta is the author of the upcoming essay collection Brown Women Have Everything. Born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. Her essays have been named as "Notable" by Best American Essays 2022 and 2023. Previous books include the short story collection Women Who Misbehave, the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood, and Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between, a finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Creative Nonfiction. She has been awarded a Centrum Foundation Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and the WILMA Woman of the Year Award in Arts for 2022. Her writing has appeared in over sixty literary journals and magazines, including The Rumpus, Scroll, Economic & Political Weekly, IIC Quarterly, Chicago Quarterly Review, and others. She is a contributing editor for Assay: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction and the founder of Write Wilmington, an online writing initiative that's free and open to writers of all levels and skills around the world. Her research interests include creative nonfiction, literary fiction, South Asian history and literature, Indian cinema, world religions, fairy tales, folklore, and mythology. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington, Sayantani has also taught writing in India, Italy, Colombia, and Mexico.
Fiction Faculty
Elinam Agbo received her BA from the University of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. She is a winner of the 2018 PEN/Dau Short Story Prize, two Hopwood Awards for Short Fiction and Nonfiction, and the Les River Fellowship for Young Novelists. Her work has been recognized and supported by the Kenyon Review Fellowship, Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation, among others. A graduate of the 2019 Clarion Writers' Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop, she also co-founded MQR Mixtape, an online imprint of Michigan Quarterly Review. She has taught Creative Writing courses at Kenyon College and the University of Michigan, and poetry to elementary and middle school students as a Writer-in-Residence at InsideOut Detroit. Her writing has appeared in Apogee Journal, The Bare Life Review, American Short Fiction, Nimrod, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018, and elsewhere. In her free time, she likes to watch anime and Korean dramas.
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.
Yi Jiang received her MFA in Fiction from Vanderbilt University, where she was a Russell G. Hamilton Scholar. At Vanderbilt, she taught undergraduate fiction workshops and tutorials and served as fiction editor for the Nashville Review. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, and Epoch. Originally from Shanghai and Wisconsin, she is currently based in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is completing a debut novel and collection of short stories. She is currently an associate editor at BookPage. As of late, she has taken up horseback riding, claiming it to be for research. For more information, visit yijiangwrites.com.
Misha Rai is a Shirley Jackson Award nominated writer whose novel-in-progress has received support from the Kenyon Review Fellowship Program, the Whiting Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Dana Award in the Novel Category. Her short story “Twenty Years Ago” is a Distinguished story in the 2021 Best American Short Story anthology. She is the first-ever and only fiction writer to be awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies for creative work. An Edward H. and Mary C. Kingsbury Fellow, she is the recipient of the George M. Harper Award. Her essay, “To Learn About Smoke One Must First Light a Fire,” winner of the Dogwood Literary Prize in Nonfiction is listed as a Notable Essay in the 2019 Best American Essays anthology.
Her prose appears in a number of journals and anthologies. She was born in Sonipat, Haryana and brought up in India where she first worked as a journalist, and then, later, in human rights for the National Human Rights Commission, The International Labour Organization and on projects run by the Ministry of Women & Child, India, and the UNICEF. She currently edits for the Kenyon Review, where she curated Art and The Moment and co-curated On Books and Their Harbors as well as Proof Casts a Shadow. She teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Sewanee.
Find her on www.misharai.com
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's latest book is the award-winning The Anxiety Workbook, released in January 2023 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her other books include Terminal Human Velocity, Before I Came Home Naked, The Last Mastodon (a Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner), Weird Science and Rook & The M.E.: A Law & Order Inspired Narrative. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in magazines and journals including The Atlantic, DIAGRAM, Gastronomica, The Nation, Scientific American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume Three. Christina’s often busy tweeting about mastodons, coney-style hot dogs, and other current fixations as @olsonquest and wrangling her three rescue dogs. She lives in Georgia, where she is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.
Revision FACULTY
Maia Morgan writes fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Her work has been published in Glamour, Creative Nonfiction, The Chattahoochee Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The Rumpus, anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and produced on stages throughout Chicago. Prior to pursuing her graduate degrees, Maia worked as a teaching artist, writing, directing, performing, and teaching in schools, art organizations, mental healthcare facilities, and jails. She holds an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Newark and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Cincinnati, where she is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor. She lives in Cincinnati with her wife, Erin, and a quartet of four-legged creatures.
