Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other non-fiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain based on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.
Michael Martone is an American author. Since 1977, he has written nearly 30 books and chapbooks. He was a professor at the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where he taught from 1996 until his retirement in 2020.
Dan Schneider is an American poet and critic of literature and film who runs the criticism and literary website Cosmoetica.
Peter Biskind is an American cultural critic, film historian, journalist and former executive editor of Premiere magazine from 1986 to 1996.
Lia Purpura is an American poet, writer and educator. She is the author of four collections of poems, four collections of essays and one collection of translations. Her poems and essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares. Southern Review, and many other magazines.
Rigoberto González is an American writer and book critic. He is an editor and author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual children's books, and self-identifies in his writing as a gay Chicano. His most recent project is Latino Poetry, a Library of America anthology, which gathers verse that spans from the 17th century to the present day. His memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He is the 2015 recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle, the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the 2024 recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Xu Xi is an English-language author and lecturer from Hong Kong.
Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer and author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir from Coffee House Press and The Song Poet from Metropolitan Press. Her work has appeared in the Paj Ntaub Voice Hmong literary journal, "Waterstone~Review," and other publications. She is a contributing writer to On Being's Public Theology Reimagined blog. Additionally, Yang wrote the lyric documentary, The Place Where We Were Born. Yang currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Some of his work concerns his experience with neurological damage caused by a virus contracted in 1988.
Debra Monroe is an American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, and essayist. She has written seven books, including two story collections, a collection of essays, two novels, and two memoirs, and is also editor of an anthology of nonfiction. Monroe has been twice nominated for the National Book Award, is a winner of the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and was cited on several "10 Best Books" lists for her nationally-acclaimed memoir, On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain.
Michael Perry is an American author, born and raised in New Auburn, Wisconsin.
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Whip Smart (2010) and the essay collections Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).
Kelly Cherry was an American novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
Richard Terrill is an American author and jazz musician who plays with the Larry McDonough Quartet.
Max Garland is a notable poet and author, known for his contributions to American literature. He has authored several poetry collections, including "The Postal Confessions," which won the Juniper Prize for Poetry in 1995; "Hunger Wide as Heaven," the winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Competition in 2006; and "The Word We Used for It," which received the Brittingham Poetry Prize in 2017.
Steven Church is an American essayist and writer of memoir and literary nonfiction. Winner of the Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner, Recipient of Colorado Book Award in Creative Nonfiction for The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record, "Auscultation" chosen by Edwidge Danticat for inclusion in the 2011 Best American Essays. Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record (2005), Theoretical Killings: Essays & Accidents (2009), The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst (2010),Ultrasonic: Essays.(2014), One with the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters between Humans and Animals (2016)
Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for prominent magazines such as The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads,. She was an editor at theKenyon Reviewand a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
Nickolas Butler is an American novelist and short story author. He is the author of four novels: Shotgun Lovesongs (2014), The Hearts of Men (2017), Little Faith (2019), and Godspeed (2021). He also authored the short story collection Beneath the Bonfire (2015).
Alison Stine is an American poet and author whose first novel Road Out of Winter won the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. Her poetry and nonfiction has been published in a number of newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, and Tin House.
Joan Constance Browning is a Freedom Rider and civil rights activist known for her participation in non-violent protests in the southern United States in the 1960s.
