Literary Festival Biographies
Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami is the author of six books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her next novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into over twenty languages. Her essays have appeared in The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times Magazine. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles. Her new novel, The Dream Hotel, was published in March 2025.
Julie E. Bloemeke
Julie E. Bloemeke’s first full-length collection, Slide to Unlock, debuted with Sibling Rivalry Press in March 2020. In 2021, Slide to Unlock was chosen as one of two full- length poetry collections statewide as a Book All Georgians Should Read. A fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bloemeke earned her MA in American Literature from the University of South Carolina–where she was a Ramsaur Fellow–and her MFA in poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines including Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, among others. Her poems have been published in a number of anthologies including Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Popculture Poetry Anthology, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume V: Georgia and the My Cruel Invention Anthology, among others.
Beth Gilstrap
Beth Gilstrap is a writer from Charlotte, North Carolina who likes to play with genre lines. She is the author of two story collections including Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, and I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press. She is also the author of the chapbook No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press & EIC/publisher of the goth/punk zine, Black Lily. Her essays, stories, and hybrids have appeared in Poets & Writers, Wigleaf, Craft, Bending Genres, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. She and her house full of critters currently call the Charleston-metro area home. As a neurodivergent human who lives with c-PTSD, she is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness.
Jeremy Jones
Jeremy Jones is the author of the nonfiction book Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries (Blair, 2025) as well as the memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (Blair, 2014). Bearwallow was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and was awarded gold in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book (IPPY) Awards in memoir. His essays have been published in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, The Bitter Southerner, and Brevity, among others. Jeremy is a professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University and serves as the series co-editor for In Place: a literary nonfiction book series from WVU Press.
Alice Martin
Alice Martin is the author of the novel Westward Women (St. Martin’s Press), and her short stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Reed Magazine, the Writer’s Foundry Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and been anthologized in North Carolina’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction. She has worked as a junior literary agent at Writers House, and taught for Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University. She holds a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and an MA in English literature from New York University.
