Danielle Cadena Deulen and Shara Lessley

Danielle Cadena Deulen is the author of a memoir, The Riots, winner of the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award, and two poetry collections: Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us and Lovely Asunder. She has received an Oregon Literary Fellowship, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is host of Lit from the Basement, a podcast and radio show. She is an assistant professor for the graduate writing program at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife and Two-Headed Nightingale, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Washington College’s Mary Wood Fellowship, the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, and an Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council. Shara’s writing has appeared in The Nation, Kenyon Review, and the Gettysburg Review, as well as The Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies. A contributing editor for Acre Books, Shara currently lives in Dubai.