Writing the Experimental Essay

Elena Passarello is a writer and performer whose recent essays appear in New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s, National Geographic, The Paris Review, Audubon, & more. Her most recent collection, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was named one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. It also received the Oregon Book Award for non-fiction. Her book on Elvis Presley’s films and his cultural legacy will be released by Penguin Press in 2026. She directs the Oregon State University MFA program, and also teaches at Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Kenyon Writers Work-shops, Convivio, & Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Hanif Abdurraqib has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN America, The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, & The New York Times. His poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize. His essay collection, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, & others. Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest became a New York Times Bestseller, was finalist for the Kirkus Prize, & longlisted for the National Book Award. A Fortune For Your Disaster, won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. A Little Devil In America was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, & the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, and won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize.

Lawrence Lenhart is the author of the essay collections The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage; Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau; and Dry Safe & Together. Lenhart is co-librettist and composer of the cowpunk fantasia Pop Goes the Ferret!, a rock opera based on his essay collection. His prose appears in journals like Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Conjunctions, High Country News, & Orion. He is reviews editor of DIAGRAM and founding editor of Carbon Copy.  He is the Associate Chair of English at Northern Arizona University where he is also an Associate Professor of Creative Writing, as well as Executive Director of the Northern Arizona Book Festival.

Paisley Rekdal, Utah’s Poet Laureate (2017-2022) has written 4 books of non-fiction and 7 poetry collections, including Animal Eye (UNT Rilke Prize winner), Imaginary Vessels (2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize finalist), Nightingale (2020 Washington State Book Award for Poetry winner), & West: A Translation (longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award in Poetry and winner of the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Mountains & Plains Bookseller's "Reading the West" Poetry Book Award). Her newest works include The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam and Appropriate: A Provocation. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Tin House, Best American Poetry, & others. She teaches creative writing at the University of Utah and directs the American West Center.

Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. She's the author of Carousel (2026), Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (2021), Bright Archive (2020), & The Persistence of The Bonyleg: Annotated (2016). Minor's prose and visual poems have been collected in places like Best American Experimental Writing, A Harp in the Stars, and Welcome to the Neighborhood. She is the recipient of a Research Fellowship to Iceland from the American Scandinavian Foundation, a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her essay "Something Clear" was awarded the 2018 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose. She serves as the Video Essay Editor at Brink Magazine and is 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.