Past Forward

Bradley Sides ’ writing appears at Chapter 16, Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Rumpus, Southern Review of Books, and elsewhere. He holds an MA in English from the University of North Alabama and is an MFA candidate at Queens University of Charlotte. He lives in Florence, Alabama, with his wife. Those Fantastic Lives City of Light Publish...

Marilyn Peterson Haus  learned to read and write in a one-room school set in the midst of a sea of corn, and then rode a rickety yellow school bus seven miles to the nearest town (population 700) for middle and high school. Everything was oriented around the railroad that sliced through the tallgrass prairie, heading west.  Marilyn’s own journey took her in the opposite direction, and after attend...

Jenn Shapland is a writer and archivist living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and won the Lambda Literary award. She has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently working on a collection of essays about the entanglement of toxicity, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy called Thin Skin....

Marilyn Peterson Haus  learned to read and write in a one-room school set in the midst of a sea of corn, and then rode a rickety yellow school bus seven miles to the nearest town (population 700) for middle and high school. Everything was oriented around the railroad that sliced through the tallgrass prairie, heading west.  Marilyn’s own journey took her in the opposite direction, and after attend...

Philip J. Kowalski has taught courses in critical thinking and American literature at Wake Forest University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Canine in the Promised Land Atmosphere Press, 2021 A World Without Books was created to help writers connect with readers during the pandemic. This Micro-Podcast provides authors a platform to sh...

Mary Dixie Carter ’s debut novel The Photographer will be published in May 2021 by Minotaur Books - St. Martin’s Publishing Group in the US and by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK. Mary Dixie’s writing has appeared in TIME ,  The Economist , the San Francisco Chronicle , the Chicago Tribune , The Philadelphia Inquirer ,  The New York Sun , The New York Observer and other print and online publications....

Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. She holds a B.A. in English from Old Dominion University and an M.A. in English/Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire. She is currently the Assistant Dean of Curriculum & Assessment for Champlain College Online, where she is an Associate Professor. Her fiction and poetry have been published i...

Keith Madsen is a retired minister who is using his retirement to pursue a lifelong interest in writing fiction. Keith has published short stories in Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Talking River, Short Story America and Adelaide. He is a member of the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association. Keith lives in East Wenatchee, Washington with his wife Cathy, where he enjoys teaching chess to grad...

Courtney Zoffness ’s debut, Spilt Milk (McSweeney’s, 2021), received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and BookPage, and was named “most anticipated” or “must-read” book by Good Morning America, LitHub, Refinery29, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, and others. Zoffness won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest international prize for short fiction, amid entries from 3...

Donna Koros Stramella is a writer from Maryland whose fiction and nonfiction pieces have been published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Scarlet Leaf Review, Columbia Magazine, and the Baltimore Sun. She is a previous award-winning journalist and video writer-producer. A graduate of the University of Tampa MFA in Creative Writing, she authored Coffee Killed My Mother and is currently working on a se...

Khalisa Rae is a poet and journalist in Durham, NC that speaks with furious rebellion. She is the author of Ghost in a Black Girl's Throat  (Red Hen Press 2021). Her essays are featured in Autostraddle, Catapult, LitHub, as well as articles in B*tch Media, NBC-BLK, and others. Her poetry appears in Frontier Poetry , Florida Review, Rust & Moth , PANK, Hellebore, Sundog Lit, HOBART, among countless...

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Steven Armstrong is an award-winning filmmaker, screenwriter, and author. He spent several years in the nonprofit world of maternal health, becoming inspired by countless stories of resilience, while working as an editor and staff writer reviewing films. Steven holds a BA in Creative Arts from San Jose State University and an MFA in Writing and Consciousness from t...

Rebecca Handler is a writer who lives and works in San Francisco. Rebecca’s stories have been published and awarded in several anthologies, and she blogs regularly at  www.onewomanparty.com .  Edie Richter is Not Alone is her debut novel, and in a Starred Review,  Booklist writes, "Handler's Edie has joined the ranks of unforgettably eccentric, intelligent women protagonists.” Kirkus Starred Revie...

Jennifer Acker is founder and editor in chief of  The Common , and author of the debut novel The Limits of the World , a fiction honoree for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her memoir “Fatigue” is a #1 Amazon bestseller, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post , Literary Hub , n+1 , Guernica , The Yale Review ,and Ploughshares , among other place...

Ty Seidule is the Chamberlain Fellow at Hamilton College, a New America Fellow, and was recently named to the Confederate Base Naming Commission. In 2015, his five-minute video lecture, “Was the Civil War About Slavery?” became a social media sensation with more than 30 million views. He served in the U.S. Army for thirty-six years, retiring as a brigadier general in 2020, after teaching at West P...

Joshua M. Greene is a popular lecturer on Holocaust history and an author whose biographies have sold more than a half-million copies worldwide. Greene’s groundbreaking book on the Dachau war crimes trials,  Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor,  was deemed “riveting—history writing at its best” by Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian for CNN. His renowned work on survivor t...

Joshua M. Greene is a popular lecturer on Holocaust history and an author whose biographies have sold more than a half-million copies worldwide. A former instructor at Hofstra and Fordham Universities, Greene is the recipient of numerous awards for his books and films. He sits on the board of Yale University Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and has served as director of strategic planning f...

S. Kirk Walsh is a writer living in Austin, Texas. Her work has been widely published in The New York Times Book Review , Longreads , StoryQuarterly , and Electric Literature , among other publications. Over the years, she has been a resident at Ucross, Yaddo, Ragdale, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Walsh is the founder of Austin Bat Cave, a writing and tutoring center that provides fr...

Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress, activist, and author of five books including The New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort. She’s written for The New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Magazine and Hadassah amongst other publications.  Without These Books is a thank-you-inspired Video/Podcast. Each episode celebrates authors, bo...

Peter Friedrichs is a pastor of a religiously liberal and socially progressive church. He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania with his wife and biggest supporter, Irene. They are the proud parents of two adult daughters and grandparents of three elementary-aged boys. And the Stars Kept Watch Atmosphere Press, 2021 A World Without Books was created to help writers connect with readers during the pand...

Scott O’Connor is the author of  A Perfect Universe: Ten Stories , the novels  Zero Zone, Untouchable , and  Half World  and the novella  Among Wolves . He has been awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and his stories have been shortlisted for the Sunday Times/EFG Story Prize and cited as Distinguished in  Best American Short Stories . Additional work has appeared in the  N...

Jacqueline T. Johnson is an avid reader, who dared to fulfill a dream with her debut novel Test of Time. "Writing is an expression of who I am. It's where my emotions, thoughts, and dreams come alive." Test of Time Createspace, 2013 A World Without Books was created to help writers connect with readers during the pandemic. This Micro-Podcast provides authors a platform to share stories about writi...

Seth Greenland is the author of five novels. He is a playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and one of the original hosts of the Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour. His first memoir, A Kingdom of Tender Colors , was published in 2020. Greenland’s play,  Jungle Rot , won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund For New American Plays Award and the American Theater Critics Association Award.  Telev...

Bella Masala is a creator of art of all sorts. She recently quit her job to pursue her passion in writing, which she crafts with love. She currently lives in Silver Spring, MD. The Ghost Queen Atmosphere Press, 2020 A World Without Books was created to help writers connect with readers during the pandemic. This Micro-Podcast provides authors a platform to share stories about writing, discuss curre...

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, & neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Their poems appear in outlets such as Empty Mirror, Ghost City Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Juke Joint Magazine, & trampset, while their personal essays can be found in journals such as Cold Mountain Review & Glassworks Magazine, among others. They received their MFA in C...