A MixTape WordLove Soirée: Five writers reading short bursts of their work and sharing the music that made it possible.
Amy M. Alvarez is an Affrilachian poet. Her work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, regionality, nationality, and systemic injustice. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, VCCA, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Selected as one of 2022’s Best New Poets, her poetry has appeared in nationally and internationally recognized literary journals including Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, River Styx, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, PRISM international, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of Esssential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). Amy was born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents. She has taught English and Humanities courses at public high schools in the Bronx, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts. She now lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, and teaches at West Virginia University.
Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. She has been a middle school teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. Her essays have appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in 2022.
A 2021 Whiting Award winner, and shortlisted for Granta magazine’s “Best of Young American Novelists,” Steven Dunn is the author of two books from Tarpaulin Sky Press: water & power (2018) and Potted Meat, which was a co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and has been adapted for a short film entitled The Usual Route, from Foothills Productions. Steven was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from University of Denver.
Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, most recently None of This is an Invitation (coauthored with Jessica Alexander, Astrophil Press at University of South Dakota, forthcoming), Tannery Bay (coauthored with Steven Dunn, FC2/The University of Alabama Press, forthcoming), and Thick City (Bull City Press, forthcoming). Our Prayers After the Fire, originally published on Blue Square Press, was reissued by Spuyten Duyvil in 2022. Other work can be found in or is forthcoming from Flaunt Magazine, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Fugue, Crazyhorse, Witness, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Denver, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. A 2021 Lambda Literary poetry fellow, she serves as co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM, and is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University where she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing program.
Glenn Taylor’s fourth novel, The Songs of Betty Baach is forthcoming in March 2023. His first novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. Glenn’s work has appeared in such venues as Oxford American, Tin House, Electric Literature, and Huizache. Born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, he now resides in Morgantown, where he teaches in the MFA Program at West Virginia University.