CLINTON CROCKETT PETERS is the author of Pandora’s Garden: Kudzu, Cockroaches, and Other Misfits of Ecology from the University of Georgia Press. He has been awarded literary prizes from Shenandoah, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Columbia Journal, and the Society for Professional Journalists. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow, and a PhD in English/creative writing at the University of North Texas. His work also appears in Orion, Southern Review, Oxford American, The Rumpus, Hotel Amerika, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Berry College. (@ClintCrockettP)

KRISTINA GADDY believes in the power of narrative nonfiction and history. She writes for OZY‘s Flashback section, and has written for The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and historical publications, and recently co-produced a radio story on the Lee-Jackson Monument and Confederate legacy in Baltimore. She loves digging in archives and discovering obscure history, and came to writing after working in museums, where she co-curated and designed exhibits, digitized and archived local history collections, and produced a CD of field recordings of a ballad-singer and banjo-player Currence Hammonds. She has a MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Goucher College and B.A.s in History and Modern Languages from UMBC.

LARRY HANDY is a poet based in Monrovia, California a town where he has always lived. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. His creative work (poetry, nonfiction and fiction) has appeared in Quiddity, Rivet, Straight Forward Poetry, Westwind, GetUnderground.com and elsewhere. He was a finalist in Proximity’s inaugural Personal Essay Prize. Aside from writing, he is a distance runner and practitioner of Chinese martial arts. Larry Handy leads and performs regularly with the award-winning music and poetry ensemble Totem Maples.
 

Dr. HEIDI HUTNER is associate professor of English, Sustainability, and Gender Studies at Stony Book University. She teaches environmental literature and film, environmental justice, and ecofeminism. Her writing includes academic books, as well as essays in anthologies, New York Times, Ms. Magazine, Dame, Public Radio International, Spirituality and Health, Tikkun, and Yes! Magazine, among others. Hutner is at work on a narrative nonfiction book, Accidents Can Happen: Voices of Women and Nuclear Disasters, and a companion documentary film of the same name. (@HeidiHutner)

GINNY McREYNOLDS is an essayist from California. She is retired from a long career as a community college English, journalism and speech professor. She writes about growing up in the 1950s and 60s, as well as issues of reinvention and creativity. Her work has appeared in Next Avenue, Sixty and Me, Next Tribe, and The Washington Post, as well as in her weekly blog, Finally Time for This: A Beginner’s Guide to the Second Act of Life. She received her MFA from the Goucher College Creative Nonfiction program. (@McReynoldsGinny)
 
 
SARAH MINOR is the author of The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016). She teaches as an Assistant Professor of Nonfiction at the Cleveland Institute of Art and is the video editor at TriQuarterly Review. A recipient of fellowships from the American Scandinavian Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and The Kenyon Writer’s Workshop, Minor is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. Find her recent work in places like Diagram, The Cincinnati Review, and Lithub. (@sarahceniaminor)

MICHAEL SANTIAGO is a photojournalist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Michael received his B.F.A. at San Francisco Art Institute and a Master’s degree from S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. His work focuses on issues concerning people of color and their communities, including issues surrounding obesity, cancer, race and identity, family relationships, healthy eating, and youth empowerment. (@msantiagophotos)
 

PAIGE TOWERS is a creative and freelance writer who earned her BA from the University of Iowa and her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Emerson College. She currently lives in the diverse Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee and is at work on a book of essays about sound. Her writing has appeared in The Harvard Review, The Baltimore Review, McSweeney’s, Midwestern Gothic, Prime Number, So to Speak, Rock & Sling, and many other publications. She is a new Senior Editor of TRUE, Proximity’s weekly online publication. (@paige_towers)
 
 
JEFF ZENICK was born in Paris, France, to American parents. As a young man, he hitch-hiked around the United States, working as an agricultural laborer, picking oranges, cherries, strawberries. As an adult, he has worked an endless series of jobs out of labor pools, restaurants, construction, working as a common laborer. But, he was also always drawing. A self taught artist, Zenick was part of zine culture in the 1990s and created travel zines with drawings of urban landscapes and portraits drawn on location. He quit his last dishwashing job at the age of 50 and now works as an artist full-time. His work focuses on the lives of every day people, often inspired by existing portraits, from hundred-year-old yearbooks to digital mugshots. (@JeffZenick)