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.
2025 Poet Mentors
Sandra Beasley is the author of four poetry collections: Made in Explode; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, which won the 2009 Barnard Women Poetry Prize, selected by Joy Harjo; and Theories of Falling, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize judged by Marie Howe. She is also the author of Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir and cultural history of food allergies. In 2018, she edited the anthology Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Her freelance nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Psychology Today.
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.
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.
Junious “Jay” Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press, 2020) and Composition (Button Poetry, 2023). Jay currently serves as Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate and is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Ward has attended Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole and Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal and elsewhere.
