Crystal Oliver – Director
Crystal Oliver is a poet and songwriter living in Southern Maryland with particular interests in literary citizenship as community service, studies in songwriters, and professional literacy. She is a lecturer of English, an adjunct professor of Music, the Director of the Chesapeake Writers’ Conference, and the Poetry Editor at EcoTheo Review. Her areas of teaching specialization include creative writing, the poetics of song, and feminist and multicultural critical approaches to the literature of music, magic, and addiction. She has also taught at Pratt Institute, The City University of New York, and Brooklyn College, among other places. She has released four albums: Fixing to Break (MW Records, 2002), Bessie’s Last Stand (2003), Voter (2007), and Light it Up (2012). Her writing has appeared in Bluestem, The Brooklyn Review, The Delmarva Review, Woman, and Southern Maryland: This Is Living.
Oliver received the 2022 Jordan Teaching Exemplar Award and the 2022 Andy Kozak Faculty Contribution to Student Life Award. She received the Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award from the University of Maryland, College Park, and earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College.
Matt Burgess
Fiction
Matt Burgess is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Dogfight, A Love Story and Uncle Janice. He has published short stories in a variety of magazines, written extensively for film and television, and is currently the chair of the English and Creative Writing department at Macalester College.
Eva Freeman
Writer-in-Residence
Eva Freeman is a writer whose work has appeared in Granta, Citizen, The Catamaran Literary Reader, Salt Hill Journal, and Black Renaissance Noire, among others. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland and a BA in English from Yale University. She has received support from the de Groot Foundation, Hedgebrook and Kimbilio. Her personal essay, “The Coptic Cross,” was included on the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’ “Reading List for Black History Month 2025,” and her debut novel, The Blood of Both, is represented by Lauren Abramo at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. She is a former network news producer and currently lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Jerry Gabriel
Fiction
Jerry Gabriel’s first book of fiction, Drowned Boy, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and was published in 2010 (Sarabande Books). It was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick and was awarded the 2011 Towson Prize for Literature. His second book of fiction, The Let Go, was published in 2015 (Queen’s Ferry Press). His stories have appeared in One Story, Epoch, Fiction, Five Chapters, The Missouri Review, failbetter, and Big Fiction, among other publications. His work has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize, and he has received grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2004), the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2011), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2016). He is the Project Director for SlackWater: A Journal of Environmental and Cultural Change in Southern Maryland. His first novel, Deserters, will be published by Acre Books in May 2026.
Heather Green
Poetry
Heather Green is the author of No Other Rome (Akron Poetry Series, 2021) and the translator of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won (Octopus Books, 2018). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Everyday Genius, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her translations of Tzara’s work have appeared in Poetry International, Ploughshares, AGNI, and several anthologies, as well as Asymptote, where she serves as the Visual Editor. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Hopscotch Translation, Harriet Books, On the Seawall, Words Without Borders, and Poetry Daily, where she serves on the editorial board. She teaches as an Assistant Professor in the School of Art at George Mason University and as a member of the poetry faculty of Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European MFA program.
Robin McCullough
Youth Workshop
Robin McCullough is a Literature and Creative Writing teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School, where she has led several youth writing workshops focusing on memoir and creative non-fiction, short story, and poetry over the past 10 years. She has a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Maryland, College Park, a MA in Secondary English from Pace University, New York, and a MFA in Poetry from Hunter College, New York, where she was a Thomas Hunter Fellow, working alongside the poet Joan Larkin. McCullough is originally from Covington, GA, and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY with her family.
Allison Glaser
Conference Assistant
Allison is a Junior at St. Mary’s College of Maryland studying English with minors in Philosophy and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies. She is the Assistant to the Chesapeake Writers’ Conference, a Writing & Speaking Center peer tutor, and the English Program Student Ambassador. Additionally, she serves as the Acting President of the SMCM AVATAR Literary Magazine. She is passionate about literature and writing, specifically poetry and creative non-fiction. She is acutely interested in how writing shapes our understanding of the world and ourselves.
Angela Pelster
Creative Nonfiction
Angela Pelster’s new essay collection The Evolution of Fire: Meditations on Crises is forthcoming with Milkweed Editions. She is a 2021 McKnight Artist Fellow chosen by Hanif Abdurraqib, and her first non/fiction essay collection Limber won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for best new book in Nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work has previously appeared in Orion, LitHub, Ploughshares, Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, River Teeth and The Gettysburg Review among others. She’s been a Katharine Bakeless Nason Bread Loaf Fellow in nonfiction, a Minnesota State Arts Board grantee, and was an Iowa Arts fellow during her MFA at the University of Iowa (2012). Her first short story collection for children The Curious Adventures of India Sophia (2005, River Books), won the Golden Eagle Children’s Choice Award.