Masthead
Editor in Chief Karen Babine [she|her|hers] ​holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota, 2015). Her third book of nonfiction, Acadie, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. Her work has twice been listed as a Notable in the 2014 Best American Essays. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. Find her on Twitter and online at www.karenbabine.com.
Associate Editor Julija Šukys (PhD, U Toronto) [she|her|hers] is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she teaches the writing of creative nonfiction. She is the author of three books, including Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning and Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaite. Epistolophilia won the 2013 Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Literature. ​
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 Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec [she|her|hers] is the 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, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She holds an MFA from UNC-Greensboro and a PhD from the University of Utah, and was a professor for twelve years before absconding to write and teach in Minneapolis, where she is a Senior Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. 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. 
Social Media Editor ​Creighton Brown [he|him|his] ​departed Higher Education. Before his departure, he taught literature, writing, and research courses exploring social and environmental justice at the Universities of Kansas and North Dakota; led inclusion initiatives at North Dakota State University; and managed Fellows in the Center for Community and Civic Engagement at Carleton College. Creighton lives, writes, and dog walks in Moorhead, MN.
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 [he|him|his] is author of Island in the City (University of Nebraska Press), a memoir-in-essays. As Micah McCrary, his work also appears in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Essay Daily, and The Essay Review, among other publications. A contributing editor at Assay, Dr. McCrary lives in New York, where he researches Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Internationalization in creative writing pedagogies and teaches at Syracuse University.
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