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 ’00 was 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.

KT AMRINE ’24 (she/they) is a current MFA candidate at the University of Alabama where she reads and edits for Black Warrior Review. She earned her BA in creative writing from Denison University in central Ohio, where she was born and raised. At Denison, they served as president and editor in chief of Exile, the student run literary magazine, and as a TA for creative writing courses. Kt is a queer writer who grapples with the complexities of grief, death, and family within her work, often through hybrid forms. Their previous work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in Sandpiper Review and fifth wheel press’s digital anthology light ‘em up.  

ELIZABETH KOEPPEN ’27 is a rising junior Creative Writing major from Delaware, Ohio. She spent much of her younger years writing novellas and short stories but has devoted much of her writing time to poetry and essays since coming to Denison. She served as an editor for Story Magazine and currently works as a prose editor for Exile and editor-in-chief of Postscript. When she’s not busy writing or reading, you can catch her at a concert, baking cookies, or adding on to her unending movie watchlist.

MAGGIE MALIN ’25 has just graduated from Denison with a BA in English: Creative Writing and a minor in American roots music. At Denison, she’s been able to hone her skills in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, scholarly criticism, and journalism, and has been published across genres in Exile, Articulāte, and the Denisonian. When she isn’t writing or talking with her friends about all the wonderful ideas she could be writing, Maggie can be found playing the mandolin, browsing secondhand record shops, and listening to podcasts.

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. He attends Miami University’s MFA program in fiction. “Read more than you write, write more than you know.”

 ZOE WARD ’28 is the Tennessee Youth Poet Laureate and a National Gold Medalist in Poetry. She is a creative writing and philosophy student at Denison University. Zoe is a graduate of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, The Adroit Journal Poetry Mentorship, and the Columbia Multi-Genre Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has been recognized by The Atlanta Review, DIALOGIST, Gannon University, and the JFK Foundation, among others. You can find her at @zoegward on Twitter.