Montana Book Festival

Ari Laurel is a writer and editor from Oakland, CA whose work deals with Asian American icons, and youth identity in the ever-shifting Bay Area. In addition to her feature in the 2015 Kearny Street Workshop APAture Festival, she was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/USA Emerging Writers Fellowship, recipient of University of Montana’s Candace K. Brown Memorial Scholarship, and her work has appeared in The Conium Review, Passages North, Yellow... Read More →

Jeffery Renard Allen is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Allen is the author of five books, most recently the novel Song of the Shank (Graywolf Press, 2104), which is loosely based on the life of Blind Tom, a nineteenth century African American piano virtuoso and composer who was the first African American to perform at The White House. The novel was featured as the front-page review of both The New York Times Book... Read More →

Tod Marshall was born in Buffalo, NY.  His first collection of poetry, Dare Say, was the 2002 winner of the University of Georgia’s Contemporary Poetry Series. He has also published a collection of his interviews with poets, Range of the Possible (EWU Press, 2002), and an accompanying anthology of the interviewed poets’ work, Range of Voices (2005).  These volumes include interviews with and poems... Read More →

Rob Schlegel is the author of the The Lesser Fields (Center for Literary Publishing, 2009), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and January Machine (Four Way Books, 2014) which won the Grub Street National Book Prize. Of January Machine, Cathy Park Hong writes, "...part discursive meditation and part stirring lyric, these poems search for an utterance that can be wakeful to despair and fear, an utterance that can... Read More →

Randall James Tyrone is a Poetry MFA Candidate at the University of Wyoming. He is the recipient of the Bentley-Buckman Poetry Fellowship and the 2015 Tin House Summer Scholarship. He is an Editor for Essay Press and he is very excited for you.