Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown Spark 2020), which was a Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice/Staff Pick, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Lightning Flowers was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, on the goop pocast, and in O, The Oprah Magazine and People Magazine. Standefer’s previous writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. She was a 2018 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and a 2017 Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge. She earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and lives on a piñon- and juniper-studded mesa in New Mexico with her chickens.

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Renée Branum’s stories and essays have appeared in several publications including The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Lit Hub. Her story “As the Sparks Fly Upward” was included in Best American Nonrequired Reading’s 2019 anthology. She has earned MFAs in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Nonfiction from the University of Montana. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts 2020 Prose Fellowship to aid in the completion of her first novel, Defenestrate, published by Bloomsbury in January 2022. She currently lives in Cincinnati where she is pursuing a PhD in Fiction Writing.

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Suzanne Roberts is a travel writer, memoirist, and poet. Her books include the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award-winning Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books, 2012), the award-winning memoir in travel essays Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), a collection of lyrical essays, Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, 2022), and four collections of poetry.



Her work has been listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays and published in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, CNN, Longreads, ZYZZYVA, ISLE, 1966, River Teeth, Terrain, National Geographic Traveler, The Normal School, and Litro, as well as anthologized in The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers, The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader, Tahoe Blues, Southern Sin: True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly, Poems Dead and Undead, and in two editions of Best Women's Travel Writing.

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Anna Qu is a Chinese American writer. She writes personal essays on identity and growing up in New York as an immigrant. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Lithub, Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, Vol.1 Brooklyn, and Jezebel, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her book Made in China was published by Catapult in August 2021.

Anna serves as the Nonfiction Editor at Kweli Journal, and teaches at the low res MFA program at New England College, Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their cat, Momo.

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Flash fiction, slashing word counts, and obliterating genre, oh my!

Nancy Stohlman’s latest book, Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction, was a 2021 Reader Views Gold Award winner, a Next Generation Indie Book Award finalist, an International Book Award finalist, and is forthcoming as an audiobook with Blackstone Publishing. She is the author of multiple flash fiction collections and flash novels including Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities, The Monster Opera, and The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories. Her work has been anthologized widely, appearing in the W.W. Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, Macmillan’s The Practice of Fiction, and The Best Small Fictions 2019, as well as adapted for both the stage and screen. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and around the world.

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When I started reading BLACKTOP WASTELAND in August, on recommendation from a friend, I don't think I realized quite how much S.A. Cosby would reveal about the contradictions and complexities of rural life in the South (U.S), especially for a Black man. In his review of the novel for NPR, Gabino Iglesias wrote, "The most surprising thing about S.A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland, which is marketed as a crime novel, is that crime is the least important element in the book." It wasn't the prescribed genre that drew me to his work, it was the fact that I knew he was going to give a voice to a Southern Black experience that I have been hungry for ever since he-who-shall-not-be-named took the highest office in the nation. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable work in the genre and is a well-earned contribution to the American canon of Southern literature.

Listen in as S.A. and I discuss race relations in the U.S., Southern cooking, what it's like to become the peer of our heroes, and how to tell a damn good story.

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About the Book:

Deborah A. Lott grew up in a Los Angeles suburb in the 1950s, under the sway of her outrageously eccentric father. A lay rabbi who enjoyed dressing up like Little Lord Fauntleroy, he taught her how to have fun. But he also taught her to fear germs, other children, and contamination from the world at large. Deborah was so deeply bonded to her father and his peculiar worldview that when he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him.



Sanity is not always a choice, but for sixteen-year-old Deborah, lines had to be drawn between reality and her own “overactive imagination.” She saved herself through an unconventional reading of Moby Dick, a deeply awkward sexual awakening, and entry into the world of political activism as a volunteer in Robert F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign.



After attending Kennedy’s last stop at the Ambassador Hotel the night of his assassination, Deborah would come to a new reckoning with loss. Ultimately, she would find her own path, and her own way of turning grief into love.

About Deborah:

Deborah A. Lott is a writer, editor, and college instructor. Her creative nonfiction has been published widely. Her work has been thrice named as Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, and thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Her book, Don’t Go Crazy Without Me has been acclaimed by writers Mark Doty, Abigail Thomas, Paul Lisicky, Karen E. Bender, Hope Edelman, among others. She is also the author of the book In Session: the Bond between Women and Their Therapists, which was widely praised for its unprecedented look at boundary and transference dilemmas in psychotherapy. Lott surveyed and interviewed several hundred women in gathering the research for that work. The book continues to be used to train psychotherapists nationwide and appears on multiple consumer websites as one of the top books ever written about the psychotherapy relationship.

Lott serves as a faculty member at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and literature courses, and serves as Editor to Two Hawks Quarterly. Among other courses, she has developed The Trauma Memoir, Lolita and Her Literary Sisters, and Representations of Childhood in Literature.

As an independent editor, Lott has worked with a number of published authors developing articles, web content, books, academic monographs, and other material

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