Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from Woodland, North Carolina. Her debut short story collection, Sleepovers, won the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Award. Sleepovers was
called "elegant and mesmerizing" by the New Yorker and "blunt and life-affirming" by Publisher's Weekly. Stories from it appear in the Paris Review and the Oxford American. They've also been translated into Italian and Urdu. Ashleigh is a 2022 Tanne Foundation Award recipient, a Senior Editor at Joyland Magazine, and the host of “All You Can Eat” on Boone Area Community Radio. She's interested in voice, sound, and memory. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University.
https://ashleighbryantphillips.com/

Matthew Wimberley grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Avery County. He is the author of two collections of poetry, All the Great Territories (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), winner of the 2018 Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book award and the 2020 Weatherford Award in poetry, and Daniel Boone’s Window (Louisiana State University Press, 2020) selected by Dave Smith for the Southern Messenger Poets series. His chapbook, Snake Mountain Almanac, was selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the Rayne Arroyo Chapbook Contest from Seven Kitchens Press. Winner of the 2015 William Matthews Prize from the Asheville Poetry Review, his work was selected by Mary Szybist for the 2016 Best New Poets Anthology and his writing has appeared in the Poem-a-Day series from the Academy of American Poets, Blackbird, and Threepenny Review. Wimberley received his MFA from New York University, where he worked with children at St. Mary's Hospital as a Starworks Fellow. He served as the 2021-22 Rachel Rivers-Coffey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University, where he continues to teach creative writing.

Read two of Matthew Wimberley’s poems at https://poets.org/poem/materials-gravestone-rubbing