JEN LUEBBERS LEONARD ’09 attended Reynolds as a high school student in 2005. Now, she teaches at Denison University. She has held scholarships and fellowships at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Indiana University, where she received her MFA in poetry and served as Editor-in-Chief of Indiana Review. She is the recipient of the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly finalist. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with the poet Keith Leonard and their two children. 

PETER GRANDBOIS is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University. He is the author of 12 books: three novels,  half-burnt,  Nahoonkara, and The Gravedigger; two memoirs, The Arsenic Lobster and Kissing the Lobster; a collection of short fictions, Domestic Disturbances; three novella collections or “monster double features”—Wait Your Turn, The Glob Who Girdled Granville, and The Girl on the Swing—and four collections of poetry, This House That,  Triptych: the Three-Legged World, Last Night I Aged A Hundred Years, and Everything Has Become Birds. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in over one hundred magazines and been shortlisted for Best American Essays, Best American Horror, and the Pushcart Prize. He is the Poetry Editor for Boulevard magazine and coaches Denison’s varsity fencing team.

AMY BUTCHER is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University. She is an essayist and the author of, most recently, Mothertrucker, which earned earned critical praise from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, CBS News, The Chicago Review of Books, The Oxford Review of Books, and Booklist, among others. Excerpts of her new book were awarded a 2024 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and additional essays have earned notable distinctions in the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021 editions of the Best American Essays series and have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, Lit Hub, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and Brevity, among others. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Colgate University, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, Word Riot Inc., and the Stanley Foundation for International Research. In addition to her work at Denison, she teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska.

ALISON STINE ’00was a student in the inaugural Reynolds Young Writers Workshop and has been a member of its faculty since 2002. She is the author of three poetry collections, a novella, and three novels. Her first novel Road Out of Winter (HarperCollins, 2020) won the Philip K. Dick Award, her second novel Trashlands (2021) was long-listed for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and her third novel Dust (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), a YA novel, received the Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Award. Recipient of an NEA Individual Artist Award, an Ohio Artist Grant, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, she was a reporter with the New York Times and the Staff Culture Writer at Salon. She holds a PhD from Ohio University, and is currently the Climate Justice Senior Editor at NPQ.

MALINA INFANTE ’24 is a 2024 English: Creative Writing and Educational Studies double major at Denison University. Outside of her coursework, she serves as an English Department Fellow as well as a Teaching Assistant for various Introduction to Creative Writing and Advanced Poetry Writing courses. She has worked as an editor for Exile Literary Magazine for the last three years. Over the summer of 2022, she completed an intensive 10-week creative project focused on drafting a literary fantasy novel under the direction of Dr. Peter Grandbois. She has recently been funded to continue that work with Dr. Margot Singer during the summer of 2023. After graduation, she is hopeful to pursue an MFA in either Poetry or Fiction and plans to one day teach high school English.

RILEY HALPERN ’22was raised in the suburbs of Chicago before moving to the city last summer. While she discovered her passion for poetry a bit later in her education, she quickly found her niche of writing weird things in short forms and received her BA in creative writing. This will be Riley’s third summer as a member of the Reynolds staff. She is ultimately planning to go back to school for her MFA and PhD so she can become a professor.

REBECCA HURTADO ’26 is a rising junior English: Creative Writing major and Spanish minor at Denison University. She contributes to various on-campus publications, serving as a Prose Editor for Exile and as Editor of Postscript, an anthology of senior creative writing. Her own creative work spans across poetry and creative nonfiction and is published in various undergraduate literary magazines such as Exile, Outrageous Fortune, and Sink Hollow. Rebecca grew up in North Carolina in a Cuban-American household.

CORDERO ESTREMERA ’23 was born and raised in Iowa City and prides himself on hiking hidden paths, scaling mountains, and fishing. He graduated Denison University in Spring 2023 and worked for eight months in Baltimore, MD as a publishing intern for Johns Hopkins University Press. He’s learned HTML and XML and converted too many AI audiobooks. He’s developed a deep curiosity for the technology and data that drive the academic publishing industry and recommends you read the books that slow down life. Fall 2024 he’ll be attending Miami University’s MFA program in fiction. “Read more than you write, write more than you know.”

ESTAN RODRIGUEZ ’27 studies Creative Writing at Denison University. His work has appeared in journals such as SOFTBLOW and Beaver Magazine. He attended Reynolds in 2022.