Discover writers through their published books and Forum work.
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Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for 33 years on the college level and at the high school level to AP students. Her debut novel, Bells for Eli (Mercer University Press, March 2020; paperback edition March 2021), was selected the Gold Medal (first place) winner for Best First Book—Fiction in the 2021 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards), was a Foreword Indie Book Award finalist, a Winter 2020 Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, a 2020 Shelf Unbound Notable Indie 100, a 2020 finalist for American Book Fest Best Book Awards, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, 2021. Susan has won numerous awards for her short fiction, including the South Carolina Fiction Prize twice. Her second novel, The Girl From the Red Rose Motel, (Mercer University Press, 2023), has been chosen as a finalist in the American Book Fest Awards, a Shelf Unbound Notable Indie 100, and was highlighted in Kirkus Magazine, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The author lives in Spartanburg, SC.
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Michael Braswell is professor emeritus from East Tennessee State University and a former prison psychologist who taught courses on ethics and justice, human relations and peacemaking. He has published books on justice issues as well as several short story collections and two novels. His poetry and fiction have been published in a variety of publications including Red Dirt Forum, Literary Heist, Foreshadow, Feed the Holy, and Mobius. His most recent books are When Jesus Came to the Cracker Barrel, Gracious Plenty and Morality Stories (5th ed.).
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Heath Dollar is the author of Waylon County: Texas Stories and Old Country Fiddle, which won the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2021 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction and was named the March 2022 Read of the Month by Southern Literary Review. Dollar, whose work has appeared in a number of publications, was also a finalist for the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, and he won the 2018 Texas Observer Short Story Prize for “Ink Upon the Furrows.” He lives in Fort Worth.
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Yasser El-Sayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and is a physician and professor at Stanford University where he specializes in high-risk obstetrics. He was a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, 2016, and his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. His short story collection The Alexandria You Are Losing was published by Red Dirt Press in 2019, and the Arabic translation was released by the Cairo, Egypt based SEFSAFA Publishing House in 2021. “Sister in Arms” is part of a new short story collection he is developing.
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Kent Frates is the nonfiction author of the award-winning book, Oklahoma’s Most Notorious Cases, and Oklahoma Courthouse Legends. A Dubious Collection, The Road Runner Press, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, features a cast of colorful characters in stories, including a penny-pinching doctor, a corrupt sheriff, a conniving politician, and other assorted characters. Frates is also a poet and attorney. He resides in Oklahoma.
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Tammy Huffman lives in the rolling hills of Missouri on the family farm. Her work has appeared in Alpha, Front Porch Review, Adelaide, Literary Heist, WINK, and elsewhere.
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David Larsen is a writer who lives in El Paso, Texas. His stories have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines including Cholla Needles, The Heartland Review, Floyd County Moonshine, The Mantelpiece, Oakwood, and elsewhere.
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Toby LeBlanc lives in Austin, TX with his wife and children. He grew up in South Louisiana, surrounded by both prairies and swamps, English and French, as well as hot dogs and etouffee. Some of his writing can be found in Barrelhouse Magazine and Coffin Bell Journal. He is a review contributor for The Southern Review of Books. His novel, Dark Roux, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2022. Soaked, his short story collection, was released this year from Cornerstone Press.
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Allen Mendenhall is a writer and attorney who serves as an associate dean of the Sorrell College of Business at Troy University.
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Yurii Tokar was born in 1967 in the Soviet Union. He graduated from Dnipropetrovsk State University in 1988 and began teaching mathematics and physics in the region affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Yurii Tokar’s stories, essays, and poems have been published in newspapers and magazines in several countries, including Ukrainian, German, and American. For example, his work has appeared in the Russian-language magazine “Чайка” (Washington).
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Adam Van Winkle was born and raised in Texoma on both sides of the Oklahoma-Texas border and currently resides with his wife and two sons in South Carolina. His writing has appeared in places like Bull Men's Fiction, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature , Red Dirt Forum, Cheap Pop!, Crack the Spine, Vignette Review, Steel Toe Review, Dirty Chai, and Pithead Chapel. His debut novel, Abraham Anyhow, was published by Red Dirt Press in March 2017 and selected by The Southern Literary Review as the June 2017 Read of the Month and featured in Monkeybicycle's If My Book series in July 2017. An excerpt of the novel has also received a Pushcart Nomination. Its style has been compared to the likes of John Steinbeck and Billie Letts and Donald Ray Pollock among others. His second novel, While They were in the Field was released by Red Dirt Press in January 2019. In September 2019, his novella about wrestlers and some kids in a small town for an indie wrestling show one Fall night in 1997 called HARDWAY JUICE was published. In 2020 he published The Red Knife Plays, plays adapted from the Appalachian gothic fiction of Sheldon Lee Compton, and an original 3-act play about retired wrestlers in a nursing home, Two Eunices. In Summer of 2015 he founded Cowboy Jamboree Magazine, named for the cowboy end of workday campfire song tradition to publish and promote gritty rural and rough hewn stories influenced by the likes of Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Bobbie Ann Mason, Dorothy Allison, and Donald Ray Pollock among others. Cowboy Jamboree issues now receive thousands of readers. Since 2019, Van Winkle has been lead designer and editor for Cowboy Jamboree Press books. Van Winkle is named for the oldest Cartwright son on Bonanza.
