People

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.

Randle Browning

Randle Browning is a writer from Texas interested in art, family, and landscape. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, The New York Review of Architecture, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere, and has been supported by the Jentel Artist Residency. Randle holds an MA in English Literature from Boston College and an MFA from Columbia University, where she served as print editor of the Columbia Journal and now teaches creative writing. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter and is working on a nonfiction book about five generations of her Texas family.

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.

Erik Dionne

Youth Workshop
Erik Dionne is a songwriter, musician, producer, and poet living in Southern Maryland where he has been teaching high school English for 14 years. He teaches several courses including digital composition and creative writing, while also facilitating extracurricular clubs which provide opportunities for students to collaborate, create, and share their art with their school and local communities. He released his first album, Questionable Motives, under the artist name Dog Army in 2021, and will release his second album, Woodwose: Exigence & Exodus, in 2026. His music has appeared in Plectrum Magazine, American Pancake, and Alt77, among other publications. His poetry has appeared in the journals Noir Nation and Wingless Dreamer, and featured on BBC Future. Additionally, Erik contributes album reviews for the online magazine Groove Art Universe.

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.

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.

Natalie J. Graham

Writer-in-Residence
Natalie J. Graham, a native of Gainesville, Florida, earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Florida and Ph.D. in American Studies from Michigan State University. Graham is an award-winning poet and performer. Her poetry collection, Begin with a Failed Body, was selected by Kwame Dawes for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Graham served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Orange County, California. In August 2024, she joined the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as a professor in Africana Studies and currently serves as the Interim Department Head.

Kaia Sand

A poet, artist, nonfiction writer, community organizer and teacher, Kaia Sand is the author of three books of poetry — A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff, Remember to Wave (both Tinfish Press), and interval (Edge Books). She co-authored a book on poetry in public space with Jules Boykoff, Landscapes of Dissent, and her poetry comprises two books in Jim Dine’s Hot Dream series (Steidl Editions). As artist-in-residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center, she made art responding to police surveillance of activists; and as a Despina resident artist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she embroidered poetry in public spaces. Her poem “There are these old fires” was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets. She ran a street newspaper in Portland, Oregon for seven years, writing weekly columns on homelessness. Through commissions with the Economic Hardship Project, she published an essay about poetry and homelessness in Orion Magazine and performed a poem, “This is How I Drew You,” for public radio’s To the Best Of Our Knowledge. She is writing a nonfiction book, Unwanted Persons. Find more about her poetry at kaiasand.net/poetry and teaching at kaiasand.net/teaching