Sara Heise Graybeal

As a white single mom in the South, stories are my tool for sorting through a world at constant odds with itself. I read Facebook debates about immigration, then worry about undocumented family and friends getting pulled over without a license. I proclaim my feminist ideals while shouldering the emotional and financial weight of raising a child. Stories give me a way to peer inside these juxtapositions. My close relationships blur “typical” boundaries of race and class privilege, and I write from this vantage point, disentangling what I perceive to be under-reported nuances of power, injustice, and connection across difference. I am at work on a collection of hybrid nonfiction pieces, in which I frame semi-reported, issue-oriented writing in a lyric essay format

SaraHeiseGraybeal_ChasetheGold_spokenword_2016_SpotlightonJazz&PoetryPhiladelphiaPA

Sara Heise Graybeal is a writer, performer, and teaching artist from rural North Carolina. She is particularly interested in hybrid forms of creative nonfiction and the use of ethnography and oral history methods in producing nonfiction for the general public. Sara has taught poetry and spoken word in Philadelphia public schools, coached multiple slam poetry teams, and taught creative writing at numerous Philadelphia and North Carolina summer programs. She also taught fiction and playwriting to female middle school students at Centro del Muchacho Trabajador (Center for Working Children) for nine months in Quito, Ecuador. Sara was the co-founder and artistic director of The Poeticians, a spoken-word and Hip-Hop performance group in the neighborhood of Point Breeze, Philadelphia. Her work has been published in Hobart, The Rumpus, Beloit Fiction Journal, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a National College Board Award for the Teaching of Creative Writing, the Jan-Ai Scholarship, the Randall Jarrell Fellowship, the Sterling Watson Fellowship, and more, and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she currently teaches in the English department.

Shruti Swamy

At the center of my work is a desire to write about what is often termed the “unthinkable,” to mine the wells of secrets and shames that ordinary people carry and bring them to light. Unthinkable, we call the death of a child, unspeakable grief. But there are smaller things too: that first confusing fizz of desire, the functions of the female body. Ambition. Wanting kids. Wanting things you're not supposed to want: wanting them desperately. Before I can write anything, I must listen for this; un-named, un-spoken, un-thought, a kind of listening that takes many forms. Writing is not exactly an act of healing for me—it is a different art—but is something akin to it: an act of understanding.

Shruti Swamy is the author The Archer, a novel, and the story collection A House Is a Body, both from Algonquin Books. The winner of two O. Henry Awards, her work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeny's, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fiction Fellow, and lives in San Francisco.