Nonfiction: Melissa Febos

Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the nationally bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, which is a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and named a notable book of 2021 by NPR, Time, The Washington Post, and others. Her craft book, Body Work (2022), is also a national bestseller, an LA Times Bestseller, and an Indie Next Pick.

The recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, Melissa’s work has appeared in publications including The Paris Review, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue.

Her essays have won prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, and The Center for Women Writers at Salem College. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

Poetry: A Van Jordan

Award-winning poet A. Van Jordan is the author of four collections, most recently The Cineaste, (W.W Norton, 2013), which Terrance Hayes described as “dazzling.” His other books include Quantum Lyrics (W.W. Norton, 2007), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (W.W Norton, 2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times, and Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry.

Jordan has taught at a number of institutions including the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; the University of Texas at Austin, where he was tenured as an Associate Professor; Rutgers University-Newark, where he served as the Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor; the University of Michigan, where he served as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature. He is currently a professor at Stanford University.

Fiction: Bryn Chancellor

Bryn Chancellor is the author of the novel Sycamore (Harper/ HarperCollins 2017), a Southwest Book of the Year, and the story collection When Are You Coming Home? (University of Nebraska Press 2015), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize.

Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Brevity, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. A native of California raised in Arizona and transplanted to the South, she is a grateful recipient of fellowships from the Arizona, Alabama, and North Carolina arts councils and the Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in fiction. A graduate of Vanderbilt University’s MFA program, she makes her home in Charlotte, NC, with artist Timothy Winkler and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is at work on a linked story collection and a novel.

Open September 1 – November 1! Current and past residents from North Carolina and its border states — Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia — are invited to enter their work in three categories:

• Poetry: 1-3 poems, up to five pages
• Fiction: up to 4000 words
• Nonfiction: up to 4000 words

Prizes in Each Category:

• 1st: $1,500
• 2nd: $500
• 3rd: $250
• Honorable Mentions: $50

…plus publication in the Spring 2023 issue of Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit.