Tamara Dean
Tamara Dean is the author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, an essay collection forthcoming in 2025 from the University of Minnesota Press. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, Seneca Review, The Southern Review, Story Magazine, and other publications.
Tamara Dean is the author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, an essay collection forthcoming in 2025 from the University of Minnesota Press. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, Seneca Review, The Southern Review, Story Magazine, and other publications. She’s also the author of a book on sustainable living, The Human-Powered Home, and bestselling college textbooks on computer networking. She earned an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her essay "Safer Than Childbirth" received a 2024 Pushcart Prize Special Mention and "Slow Blues" was named a 2021 National Magazine Award finalist.
Deshawn McKinney
Deshawn McKinney is a writer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin working in whatever medium is best to tell the story. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work appears in journals such as Lolwe, Ploughshares, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. Deshawn has created and performed around the world, from Italy to England. His debut chapbook, father forgive me, was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press in 2021.
Deshawn McKinney is a writer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, whose work appears in journals such as Lolwe and Glass. His debut chapbook, father forgive me, was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press in 2021.
Deshawn has performed for and built with audiences around the world, including as one of the headlining acts at the Boys and Girls Club’s Keystone Conference – one of the largest gatherings of teen leadership in the US – meeting with students in Kingston, Jamaica, to share art and speak to collective freedom, and headlining Toast Poetry at the Norwich Arts Centre in Norwich, England, with an exhilarating set that blended poetry and rap in novel ways.
His work focuses on intersectional, diasporic liberation. He seeks to build coalition across peoples and movements to create sustainable, proactive, and effective bases of power. His art, grounded in hip-hop, is used to invite folks into the conversation and disrupt the status quo, with a focus on opening up spaces to those who have historically been absent or barred from them.
As a member of the First Wave Hip-Hop arts community at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he earned a BA in Creative Writing, pursuing his passion for service through his creative enterprises. He is a Truman Scholar, the nation’s premier public service fellowship, as well as a recipient of the prestigious Marshall Scholarship for graduate study in the United Kingdom. He holds a Master in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Master in Creative Writing – Poetry from the University of East Anglia.
Sara Roahen
Sara Roahen writes, edits, coaches, teaches, and otherwise dabbles in storytelling—for fun and for hire.
Her memoir, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, was the chosen reading for the One Book One New Orleans reading initiative in 2009, and it received the Louisiana Library Association’s Louisiana Literary Award in 2010.
Sara Roahen writes, edits, coaches, teaches, and otherwise dabbles in storytelling—for fun and for hire.
Her memoir, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, was the chosen reading for the One Book One New Orleans reading initiative in 2009, and it received the Louisiana Library Association’s Louisiana Literary Award in 2010. Sara co-edited and contributed writing to The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook, and she self-published How to Begin Writing Your Life Stories: Putting Memories on the Page in 2024. Her work has additionally appeared in Saveur, Bon Appetit, Tin House, Oxford American, and Garden & Gun magazines, and in/on a host of other magazines, newspapers, books, and websites.
Conducting extensive fieldwork for the Southern Foodways Alliance’s extraordinary oral history initiative helped Sara hone her listening, documentarian, and backroad-driving skills.