JOSEPH BATHANTI is former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Donald Murray Prize, the Ragan-Rubin Award for Literary Achievement, the Mary Frances Hobson Prize, the Irene Blair Honeycutt Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts, the Roanoke Chowan Award, the Lee Smith Award, and many others. He is the author of nineteen books, including poetry, fiction and nonfiction, as well as two co-edited volumes of poetry. A new book of poems, Light at the Seam, from Louisiana State University Press, was released in spring of 2022. A new book of stories, The Act of Contrition, winner of the 2021 EastOver Prize for Fiction, is forthcoming in early 2023. A co-edited volume, The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry, will appear from UNC Press in the fall of 2023. Bathanti is Professor of English and McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education & Writer-in-Residence of Appalachian State University’s Watauga Residential College in Boone, NC. He also teaches in Carlow University’s low residency MFA Program in Creative Writing in Pittsburgh, the city in which he was born and raised. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program.