THE NONFICTIONOW BOARD
Nicole Walker
Co-President, Flagstaff, AZ USA
Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021) Sustainability: A Love Story (2018) and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet. (2019). She has previously published the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010).
David Carlin
Co-President, Melbourne, Australia
David Carlin’s nonfiction books include the forthcoming How to Dress for Old Age (Upswell, 2026), co-written with Peta Murray. Also: The After-Normal (2019), 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (2019), Our Father Who Wasn’t There (2010), The Abyssinian Contortionist (2015), and the co-edited A–Z of Creative Writing Methods (2023). His award-winning essays have been widely published, and he has written and directed for radio, film, theatre, and circus. David is Emeritus Professor at RMIT University and co-founder of WrICE and the non/fictionLab research group.
Patrick Madden
Vice-President, Provo, UT USA
Patrick Madden is the author of four essay collections, Recenses/Recencies, Disparates, Sublime Physick, and Quotidiana, and coeditor of Fourth Genre: 25 Essays from Our First 25 Years and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays. With David Lazar he coedits the 21st Century Essays series at Ohio State University Press; with Joey Franklin he coedits the journal Fourth Genre, and he curates http://quotidiana.org. A former Fulbright and Howard Foundation fellow, he teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Robin Hemley
Founder, Brooklyn, NY USA
Robin Hemley founded NonfictioNOW in 2005 at The University of Iowa. He has published fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently, the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (Gold Wake, 2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (Nebraska, 2020, Penguin SE Asia, 2021). He is Director of the Polk School of Communications at Long Island University, Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing at LIU-Brooklyn, and Parsons Family Chair in Creative Writing. Learn more at Storiesthatcount.org
Elena Pasarello
Iowa City, IA USA
Elena Passarello's essays have recently appeared in National Geographic, Audubon, McSweeney's, and Paris Review. She is the author of two collections, Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, both with Sarabande Books. Animals Strike Curious Poses was translated into five languages and appeared on "Best Books" lists in The Guardian, Publisher's Weekly, and New York Times Book Review. A 2015 Whiting Award winner, Elena teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts and Oregon State University and appears weekly on the nationally syndicated radio program LiveWire.
Dionne Irving
South Bend, IN USA
Dionne Irving is originally from Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of Quint (7.13 Books) and The Islands (Catapult Books). Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. The Islands was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Scotiabank/Giller Prize, The New American Vices Award and The Clara Johnson Award. Irving teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame.
Paul Cunningham
South Bend, IN USA
Paul Cunningham currently manages the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame, where he also co-manages Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. He is the author of Fall Garment (Schism Press, 2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism Press, 2020). His creative nonfiction has appeared in Notre Dame Review, SnailTrail, and Quarterly West. Beyond the Action Books Blog, his book reviews have appeared in DIAGRAM, Fanzine, Harvard Review, Transmotion: An Online Journal of Indigenous Studies, Heavy Feather Review, Kenyon Review, and others.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Ann Arbor, MI USA
Aisha writes about swimming pools, road trips, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s obsession with Gray’s Anatomy, glaciers, and the anxiety of seeking chiropractic treatment. She writes through the fractured lens of art, film, tv, and pop culture. Her family believes in ghosts and the tv show Succession made her want to re-read the works of Shakespeare. She is the recipient of a 2017 CLMP Firecracker award, the 1913 Book Prize, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing, a 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction, the 2022 Jean Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and a 2025 Whiting Award.
Hattie Fletcher
Pittsburgh, PA USA
Hattie Fletcher is one of the co-founders of Short Reads, a free literary email featuring flash nonfiction, and the prose editor at Autumn House Press. She has also been a senior editor at Belt Publishing and is the former managing editor of Creative Nonfiction and True Story magazines. Fletcher also teaches “Editing for Writers” at the University of Pittsburgh. Essays she has edited have been reprinted in The Best American Essays, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing series and have been awarded the Pushcart Prize. She has worked on books covering such topics as end-of-life care, personalized medicine, education, mental health, parenting, and philosophy. Before becoming an editor, she taught middle school Latin.
Joey Franklin
Provo, UT USA
JOEY FRANKLIN is author of The Writer's Hustle (Bloomsbury, 2023), Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays (Nebraska, 2020) and My Wife Wants You to Know I'm Happily Married (Nebraska, 2015). His essays and articles have appeared in Poets & Writers, Gettysburg Review, The Norton Reader, Brevity, and elsewhere. He serves as co-editor of the literary magazine Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, and recently published Fourth Genre: 25 Essays from our First 25 Years (Michigan State UP 2025) with his co-editor Patrick Madden. He and Pat are also the essay nerds behind the NonfictionWOW! quiz show (which will be celebrating its 7th iteration in Dublin), and his active projects include a memoir about the saints and scoundrels in his family tree, and a collection of spiritual essays about Nietzsche, nihilism, and the pitfalls of cult celebrity.
Jessica Wilkinson
Melbourne, Australia
Jessica Wilkinson is the author of three poetic biographies, Marionette: A Biography of Miss Marion Davies (2012), Suite for Percy Grainger (2014) and Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine (2019), with a fourth-in-progress on artist Mirka Mora. She is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry and the Rabbit Poets Series. Jessica co-edited the anthologies Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (2016) and Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours (2021). She is Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Sarah Minor
Iowa City, USA
Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. She's the author of Carousel: An Essay on Seeing from Yale University Press (2026), Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press, 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press, 2016).
Minor serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry Editor at Brink Magazine and on the Nonfiction editorial team at TriQuarterly Review. She holds a PhD from Ohio University, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction MFA Program.