Fiction
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.
Poetry
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’s featured 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.
Creative Nonfiction
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.
