No Contact: About the Contributors

Hannah Bae is a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer who is at work on a memoir about healing from childhood trauma and family estrangement. In 2024, she was a New York State Council on the Arts grantee in literature and a nonfiction juror for the Kirkus Prize. Bae was the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a 2022 and 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow for the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and a 2019 fellow at Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Follow her on Instagram at @hannahbae.

Eben E. B. Bein is a biology teacher turned climate justice educator, intergenerational organizer, and multidisciplinary artist. They were a 2022 fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter in Variations” poetry contest. Their words can be found in the likes of The Atlantic, NOVA (PBS), PINCH, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and four anthologies. Their first chapbook, Character Flaws, won Fauxmoir’s Spring 2023 chapbook competition and meditates on judgment in intimate relationships. They are currently working on their first full-length collection about parent-child conflict, healing, and love. They live on Pawtucket land (Arlington, Massachusetts) in a house they co-bought with their husband and poet friends.

Soni Brown is a Jamaican-born, Colorado-based writer for a university and a comic-memoir educator. She holds an MFA in writing and earned fellowships from Tin House, PREE Writing Studio, and Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Her work appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Believer, Desert Companion, Sisters from AARP, New York Daily News, F(r)iction, and Africa Is a Country. She wrote the documentary Across the Tracks: A Las Vegas Westside Story. Her essay about leaving the United States for Jamaica after George Floyd’s murder received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2023.

Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and nonfiction writer living on unceded lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, British Columbia. His most recent poetry collection, What Is Broken Binds Us (University of Calgary Press, 2025), includes poems on family estrangement, his American ancestors’ involvement in enslavement, and recovery in a broken body. Daniel has been deeply engaged in Canadian literary communities since the 1970s, publishing five books, editing anthologies and literary journals, and writing freelance journalism. www.lornedaniel.ca

Lindsey Danis writes fiction and essays on travel, queer joy, and queer history. Her nonfiction book (Out) On the Road: How Queer Travel Is Different and Why It Matters is forthcoming. Danis’s essays have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, AFAR, Fodor’s, and Longreads, been named a notable mention in The Best American Travel Writing, and appeared in several anthologies. When not writing, Danis is often found hiking or kayaking near her Hudson Valley home.

Michelle Dowd is the author of Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, a memoir about growing up in an apocalyptic cult and reclaiming her life through wildness, beauty,

and the body. Her work appears in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Alpinist, and other national publications. She writes at the intersection of ecology, myth, and self-trust, helping others remember who they are through story, ritual, and land connection. Dowd is the founder of Forager Wildlife. Subscribe to her Substack at mdowd.substack.com for weekly field notes from the untamed path.

Nick Flynn ’s most recent book is Low (Graywolf, 2023). His bestselling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004) was made into a film starring Robert De Niro (Focus Features, 2012) and has been translated into fifteen languages.

Stephanie Foo is the New York Times bestselling author of What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. She has written for Vox and The New York Times. She

worked as a radio producer for This American Life and Snap Judgment, and her stories aired on Reply All, 99% Invisible, and Invisibilia. A noted speaker and instructor, she has taught at Columbia University and has spoken at venues from the Sundance Film Festival to the Missouri Department of Mental Health.

Gabriela Denise Frank is a literary artist, editor, educator, and winner of the Fern Academy Prize. Her writing, interviews, and visual art have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Poet Lore,

EcoTheo Review, Chicago Review, Epoch, DIAGRAM, Northwest Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. The author of How to Not Become the Breaking (Gateway Literary Press, 2025),

she serves as creative nonfiction editor of Crab Creek Review.  www.gabrieladenisefrank.com

Susan Ito is the author of the memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She coedited the literary anthology A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, AGNI, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, the Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Blue Mountain Center. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater.

Danielle Jernigan is a writer and Buddhist-inspired meditation guide and the founder of Ink & OM Studio, a contemplative space for women in mother-wound recovery. A former community doula and maternal mental health peer counselor, her work helps parent survivors of childhood abuse reimagine love as a capacity, not a performance. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times parenting newsletter, YourTango, and The

Nourishing Word Blog. Her current project blends memoir and cultural critique to explore how modern self-love culture fails survivors. Learn more at www.daniellejernigan.com.

noam keim is a trauma worker, medicine maker, and flâneur freak. Their first essay collection, The Land Is Holy, was a 2024 Foreword Indies Bronze winner. keim’s writing has

been supported by Lambda Literary, Tin House, Sewanee, Roots.Wounds.Words, and Periplus, and they have been awarded residencies by Space A Kathmandu, Pocoapoco Oaxaca, and Nawat Fes among others. Their work can be found in the Michigan Quarterly Review, ALOCASIA, The Massachusetts Review, The Kenyon Review, and others. Connect on Instagram at @noamkeim or at noamkeim.com.

Erika Krouse is the author of four books of fiction and nonfiction, including her new short story collection, Save Me, Stranger. Her memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Colorado Book Award and Housatonic Book Award. Krouse is a two-time winner of the Edgar Award, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Krouse mentors for the Book Project and the Portfolio Year at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she received the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence.

Monique Laban is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Offing, Clarkesworld, and elsewhere. She has received support from Hedgebrook, the Center for Fiction, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Tin House Summer Workshop, Viable Paradise, and VONA.

Cassandra Lewis is a recipient of the PEN America/L’Engle Rahman Prize for Mentorship and was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Belladonna Comedy, and Broad Street Review. She earned an MFA in writing from New College of California. Her debut narrative nonfiction manuscript, The Biting Kind, was short-listed for the SFWP Literary Awards. More information can be found on CassandraLewis.com.

Kate Lewis ’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net, appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and more, and has been supported by time at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is online at @katehasthoughts, and at Substack, she writes The Village, conversations on craft and community.

Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of the USA Today bestselling memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, selected for The Best American Essays 2024, and short-listed for a National Magazine Award. Originally from New York City, she lives outside of Boston with her family.

Tiffany Aldrich MacBain is a professor in the English department at the University of Puget Sound, where she teaches writing, editing, and nineteenth-century American literature. Her scholarly work on the archived travel diaries and life writing of Progressive Era artist Abby Williams Hill appears in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. MacBain also writes personal essays about her experiences as a mother and a daughter and is coauthoring a series of mystery novels set in the Pacific Northwest, featuring a middle-aged academic who moonlights as a forensic linguist and amateur sleuth.

Jamal Mahjoub was born in London and has since lived in a number of cities, including Cairo, Århus, Paris, Barcelona, and currently Amsterdam. His work has won critical acclaim and has been widely translated. He writes literary fiction, crime fiction (as Parker Bilal), and creative nonfiction. His work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, as well as various other publications. He is the recipient of several awards including the Guardian African Short Story Prize, the NH Vargas Llosa prize (Spain), and the Etonnants Voyageurs Prize (France). He was long-listed for the Theakstons Old Peculier Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and short-listed for the Prix Le Point du Polar Européen and the Caine Prize.

Onita Morgan-Edwards holds an MFA in creative writing from Ashland University. Her work has appeared in Mom Egg Review, Facing Gun Violence: It’s Always Close to Home for Someone, Glide Literary Magazine, A Gathering of Flowers: An Anthology in Essay, and Family Justice Journal. Morgan-Edwards was the second-place winner in the Dayton Metro Library Poetry Contest (adult category) in 2025. She is an amateur photographer and adjunct professor of English at a community college in Ohio. Visit her at OnitaMorganEdwards.com.

Emi Nietfeld is the author of Acceptance (Penguin Press, 2022), a memoir of her journey through foster care and homelessness, interrogating the true meanings of resilience, ambition, and success. Today, Nietfeld writes about inequality and families for The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and other publications. Hailing from Minnesota, she lives in New York with her family.

Geneva Phillips is a 2025 Writing Freedom Fellow and the author of the memoir Disappearing in Glimpses (Mongrel Empire Press, 2020). She cofacilitates with Poetic Justice, a nationally recognized nonprofit that helps incarcerated women find their voices and discover hope and empowers change through writing in community.

Deesha Philyaw ’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 Los Angeles

Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Philyaw’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.

Anna Qu is a Chinese American writer. Her critically acclaimed debut memoir, Made In China: A Memoir of Love and Labor, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. Her

essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, and Kweli Journal, among others. She was a 2023 Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellow and has received support from Yaddo and Ragdale. She teaches at New England College and the Book Project at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and recently moved to Denver with her partner and their two cats.

Domenica Ruta is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir With or Without You and the novels Last Day, a New York Times Notable Book of the year, and All the Mothers. She coedited the anthology We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor. She’s published short fiction and essays in the Iowa Review, the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, Epoch, Ninth Letter, The Cut, People, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized a handful of times, most recently in Wanting.

Oslyn Serratos (pseudonym) is a Pacific Northwest city planner and a published journalist and historian. Serratos holds undergraduate degrees in journalism and history from the University of Southern California, and master’s degrees in historic preservation and urban planning from Columbia University. Her work is inspired by her experiences breaking generational cycles as a first-generation, multiracial, multicultural woman. She has published research for the World Monuments Fund, the National Register of Historic Places, and SurveyLA. Her poetry appears in We Need a Reckoning (Blue Cactus Press, 2021) and the online journals The Bijou Poetry Review and amphibi.us.

Alyson Shelton is an award-winning screenwriter and essayist. Her writing is published at outlets including The New York Times, Ms., and The Rumpus. She’s a coeditor and contributor to The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope. Shelton is best known for her Instagram Live series inspired by George Ella Lyon’s poem “Where I’m From,” which celebrated its 200th episode in summer 2025.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Her bestselling collection of Dear Sugar columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, was adapted for an Emmy-nominated television show and as a play that has been staged in theaters around the world. Strayed is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel Torch and the bestselling collection Brave Enough. Her award-winning essays and stories have appeared in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author, most recently, of Touching the Art, finalist for a Washington State Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her previous title, The

Freezer Door, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, she’s the author of seven books, and editor of six anthologies, most recently Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. Sycamore’s new novel, Terry Dactyl, is just out from Coffee House Press.

Raksha Vasudevan is a writer and former aid worker. She has reported stories of race, environmental justice, and “progress” for The New York Times, VICE, The Guardian, Outside, WIRED, and High Country News, where she was also a contributing editor. Her essays and commentary on colonial legacy and family estrangement appear in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, Hazlitt, The Washington Post, and Literary Hub, among others. Her debut nonfiction book, Empires Between Us, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press and Knopf Canada.

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James,

2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the US Fulbright Program, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Ucross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. She grew up in a Chinese American takeout restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an associate professor at Western Washington University.

Kristen Millares Young is a prize-winning journalist, essayist, and the author of the novel Subduction, named a staff pick by The Paris Review. Published by Red Hen Press, Subduction won Nautilus and IPPY awards and was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards. On October 6, 2026, Red Hen Press will release her memoir-in-essays Desire Lines. Called “searching, generous, and unrelenting” by Melissa Febos, “alive with style and poetic lyricism” by Weike Wang, and “explosive and daring” by Luis Alberto Urrea, Desire Lines is a forensic investigation into the emotional topography of being a woman,

a writer, and a mother. @kristenmillares

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