Glenis Redmond
Glenis Redmond is the First Poet Laureate of Greenville, South Carolina. She is a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, a Cave Canem alumni, and earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She has authored six books of poetry: Backbone (Underground Epics, 2000), Under the Sun (Main Street Rag, 2002), What My Hand Say (Press 53, 2016), Listening Skin (Four Way Books), Three Harriets & Others (Finishing Line Press), and Praise Songs for Dave the Potter (Art by Jonathan Green, University of Georgia Press).
Glenis received the highest arts award in South Carolina, the Governor’s Award and inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She is a Charlie Award recipient, awarded by the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, and was recently a recipient of the Peacemaker Award by the Upstate Mediation Center in 2022.
Glenis has spent almost three decades touring the country as a poet and teaching artist. She served as the Poet-in-Resident for the Peace Center in Greenville and the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, for seventeen years, Glenis has created and facilitated poetry workshops for school districts across the country.
Since 2014, she has served as the mentor poet for the National Student Poets Program through Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. In the past she has prepared these exceptional youth poets to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at The White House.
Her poetry has been showcased on NPR and PBS and has been most recently published in Orion Magazine, storySouth and The New York Times, as well as numerous literary journals nationally and internationally. Glenis can be found online at glenisredmond.com.
Jen Fawkes
Jen Fawkes is the author of Mannequin and Wife (LSU Press), a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee and Foreword INDIES Gold medal winner, and Tales the Devil Told Me (Press 53), a 2021 Foreword INDIES Silver medal winner and finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.
Jen’s work has appeared in, among others, One Story, Lit Hub, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Best Small Fictions 2020, and has won numerous fiction prizes from Salamander, Washington Square Review, and others.
The recipient of the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize, Jen lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with her husband and two cats: Tessio and Clemenza.
Her debut novel, A Young Lady’s Guide to World Domination, is forthcoming in 2024 from Abrams Books. She can be found online at jenfawkes.com.