Chapbook Lab Director & Workshop Facilitator
Kathie Collins, co-founder and creative director of Charlotte Lit and editor-in-chief of Charlotte Lit Press, is a poet, mythologist, and lifelong student of Jungian psychology—which, consciously and unconsciously, makes its way into her work. She earned her graduate degrees in mythological studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she also served as adjunct faculty. Kathie is author of Jubilee (Main Street Rag). Her poems have appeared in Flying South, Immanence, Kakalak, Major 7th Magazine, Pedestal Magazine, and Santa Fe Literary Review. She’s a 2023 Pushcart nominee, and her poetry manuscript Grass Widow was named a finalist in both the Iron Horse Lit Review and Palette Poetry 2023 Chapbook competitions. Contact: kathie@charlottelit.org.
Workshop Facilitator
Julie Funderburk is the author of The Door That Always Opens, a poetry collection from LSU Press, and Thoughts to Fold into Birds, a chapbook from Unicorn Press. She is the recipient of fellowships in poetry from the North Carolina Arts Council and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her recent work appears in The Southern Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Pleiades, and the anthology In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press). She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte.
2023-24 Mentors
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at three different animal sanctuaries. She writes about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature. Her work speaks in a queer, Southern-trash-talking way about nature beautiful, damaged, and in desperate need of saving. To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published in 2020.
Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road (Viking), a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues (Penguin), Dig Safe (Penguin), Backwards Days (Penguin), Children with Enemies (Chicago), and the forthcoming The Lookout Man (Chicago) and the collaborative Andalusian Visions. His poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly, The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and numerous national and international anthologies. A recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Lola Haskins’ poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, London Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle and elsewhere, as well as having been broadcast on NPR and BBC radio. She has published fourteen collections of poems, a poetry advice book and a non-fiction book about fifteen Florida cemeteries. Ms. Haskins has been awarded three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships, the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and several prizes for narrative poetry. She retired from teaching Computer Science at the University of Florida in 2005 and served from then until 2015 on the faculty of Rainier Writers Workshop.
AE Hines’s debut collection, Any Dumb Animal, received Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest, and was a daVinci Eye finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book award. His poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary journals, including more recently: Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Rhino, Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, The Greensboro Review, and I-70 Review. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Writing at Pacific University.
