Masthead
Editor in Chief Karen Babine [she|her|hers] is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life. Her third book of nonfiction, The Allure of Elsewhere: Chasing Landscapes, Family, and the Road Ahead, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2025. She is the editor of Beyond Truth and Fact: Innovations in the Craft of Creative Nonfiction, the first Assay anthology, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2027. She is a UC Foundation associate professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. 
Associate Editor Julija Šukys is the author of three books (Silence is Death, Epistolophilia, and Siberian Exile), one book-length translation (And I burned with shame), and of many essays. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and, in Fall 2022, held the Fulbright Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto.
Senior Editor Christine Cusick lives in the foothills of the Laurel Highland mountains of western Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the intersections of ecology, story, and memory. She has published numerous ecocritical studies of contemporary literature and has been nationally recognized for creative nonfiction. Her most recent book is a coedited essay collection, Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment. She is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Seton Hill University.
Senior Editor Heidi Czerwiec [she|her|hers] is an essayist and poet; author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States (selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose), Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, and the poetry collection Conjoining; and the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay and editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com
Senior Editor Jenny Spinner is an associate professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University where she teaches writing and journalism and directs the university writing center. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, Fourth Genre, Assay and on NPR’s All Things Considered, among others. She is co-author of Tell Them I Didn’t Cry (Scribner’s, 2006) and author of the narrative blog Twin Prints at jennyspinner.com. 
Born in Calcutta and raised in New Delhi, Contributing Editor Sayantani Dasgupta  [she|her|hers] is the author of Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between—a Finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Creative Nonfiction—and the chapbook The House of Nails: Memories of a New Delhi Childhood. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, The Bellingham Review, The Southern Humanities Review, The Hindu, and others. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, and has also taught in India, Italy, and Mexico.
​Contributing Editor Joanna Eleftheriou [she|her|hers] is the author of the essay collection This Way Back (West Virginia University Press, 2020). A fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Joanna has published stories, essays, poems, and translations in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, and The Common. She is an assistant professor of English at Christopher Newport University and a faculty member at the Writing Workshops in Greece. Find her on Twitter at @JOANNAessayist and online at www.joannaeleftheriou.com
Contributing Editor ​Robin Micah McCrary is a Creole public health humanist. Author (as Micah McCrary) of Teaching Cultural Dexterity in Creative Writing (Bloomsbury) and Island in the City (University of Nebraska) his work also appears in College English, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and Essay Daily, among other publications. A contributing editor at Assay, Dr. McCrary lives on Haudenosaunee homelands where he teaches in the Writing Studies and Health Humanities programs at Syracuse University. He also serves as a mentor-teacher and low-residency faculty in Wilkes University’s Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing.
Contributing Editor/Conference Panel Reports Coordinator Stacy Murison ​[she|her|hers] holds an MFA in creative writing from Northern Arizona University (where she teaches composition) and an MA in humanities from Georgetown University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Hobart, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, River Teeth, and The Rumpus, among others.
Advisory Editors
Joy Castro, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Bob Cowser, St. Lawrence University
​Sarah Einstein, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
Sonya Huber, Fairfield University
Debra Marquart, Iowa State University
Dinty W. Moore, Ohio University
W. Scott Olsen, Concordia College
Michael Steinberg, Pine Manor College
​Ned Stuckey-French, Florida State University