Literary Festival Biographies
Percival Everett
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His latest novel, JAMES, was published in March of 2024 and received the National Book Award of 2024. His other titles include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
Adam O'Fallon Price
Adam O'Fallon Price is the author of two novels, The Grand Tour (Doubleday 2016) and winner of the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, The Hotel Neversink (Tin House 2019). His short fiction has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Granta, VICE Magazine, EPOCH, The Kenyon Review, The Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, and many other places. He lives in Carrboro, NC and teaches fiction writing at the University of North Carolina.
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from Woodland, North Carolina. She wrote Sleepovers, winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize and the Towson Prize for Literature. Stories from it have been published in The Paris Review and The Oxford American.
Dan Leach
Dan Leach has published work in Copper Nickel, Southwest Review, and The Sun. He has two collections of short fiction: Floods and Fires (University of North Georgia, 2017) and Dead Mediums (Trident Press, 2022). Texas Review Press recently selected Stray Latitudes, his debut poetry collection, as the winner of their 2023 Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and currently teaches writing at Charleston Southern University.
Danni Quintos
Danni Quintos is the author of the poetry collection, Two Brown Dots (BOA Editions, 2022), chosen by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as winner of the Poulin Poetry Prize, and PYTHON (Argus House, 2017), an ekphrastic chapbook featuring photography by her sister, Shelli Quintos. She is a Kentuckian, a mom, a knitter, and a member of the Affrilachian Poets. She received her BA from The Evergreen State College, and her MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Cream City Review, Cincinnati Review, The Margins, Salon, and elsewhere. Quintos lives in Lexington with her kids & farmer-spouse & their little dog too. She teaches in the Humanities Division at Bluegrass Community & Technical College. She is currently working on a YA novel-in-verse entitled, Mercy No Mercy.
Dustin Pearson
Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, 2022), winner of the 2024 Nancy Dasher Book Award, Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018), and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). In 2019, The Root named Dustin one of nine Black poets working in “academic, cultural and government institutions committed to elevating and preserving the poetry artform.” In 2020, a film adaptation of his poem “The Flame in Mother’s Mouth” won Best Collaboration at the Cadence Video Poetry Festival. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, The Anderson Center at Tower View, and the Watering Hole, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a director of the Clemson Literary Festival. His writing has been recognized and featured by Shonda Rhimes and further distinguished by the Katherine C. Turner and John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Awards and a 2021 Pushcart Prize. His work also appears in The Nation, Poetry Northwest, Blackbird, The Boiler, Bennington Review, TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo where he teaches creative writing and literature.
Jeremy Michael Clark
Jeremy Michael Clark is the author of The Trouble with Light, selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Common, Poem-A-Day, The Southern Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. His work has also been anthologized in Soul Sister Revue: A Poetry Compilation and Once A City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology. He has received support from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. A former editorial assistant at Callaloo, he received his MFA from Rutgers University-Newark and his MSW from the University of Pennsylvania. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, he lives in Brooklyn.
José Olivarez
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants, and the author of two collections of poems, including, most recently, Promises of Gold—which was long listed for the 2023 National Book Awards. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. Along with Felicia Rose Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. Alongside Antonio Salazar, he published the hybrid book, Por Siempre in 2023. He lives in Jersey City, NJ.
Justin Phillip Reed
Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer and amateur bass guitarist. His preoccupations include horror cinema, ideological failure, and uses of the grotesque. His most recent book, the hybrid collection With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood: A Horror Miscellany, was released on Halloween 2023 and deemed a “f—ing good time” by Gulf Coast. He previously authored the poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (winner of CLMP’s 2021 Firecracker Award for Poetry, finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, a New York Times New and Noteworthy title, and one of NPR’s Favorite Reads of 2020) and Indecency (winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award). Born and raised in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, he participates in alternative rock music cultures, ogles Toyota Tacomas, and enjoys smelling like outside. He makes d-grade music under the moniker “wurstbrat,” writes online for the Nu Metal Agenda, and his favorite band is Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile. He is currently Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University.
L. S. McKee
L.S. McKee is the author Creature, Wing, Heart, Machine, winner of the 2022 Zone 3 First Book Award in Poetry, selected by Tiana Clark. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. She grew up in Northeast Tennessee and, after several years in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Boston, she now lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Georgia. Learn more about her work at www.lsmckee.com. Photo credit: Stephanie Alvarez Ewens
Reginald McKnight
Reginald McKnight is a short story writer and novelist. He has won the O. Henry Award, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Whiting Writer's Award, and many other awards and prizes for his work. In addition to writing, McKnight has been a professor of English at many institutions including the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently the Hamilton Holmes Professor at the University of Georgia in Athens. He is the author of several works of fiction including He Sleeps and The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas.
Stephen Hundley
Stephen Hundley is the author of The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2023) and Bomb Island (Hub City Press, 2024). His stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Stephen holds an MA from Clemson, an MFA from the University of Mississippi, and is currently completing a PhD in English at Florida State University, where he is writing a book about the feral horses of Cumberland Island.
Toni Jensen
Toni Jensen is the author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, a Dayton Peace Prize finalist and a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. Jensen’s essays have appeared in magazines such as Orion, Catapult and Ecotone. She also is the author of the story collection From the Hilltop. Jensen has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas and teaches in the low residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Métis.
