PANELISTS: Christine Maui Rice
Christine’s novel, Swarm Theory, was called "a gripping work of Midwest Gothic" by NPR and won numerous awards. Christine was included in New City's Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago's Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of Hypertext Magazine and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University. Her novel, based on the Flint water crisis, will be published in 2026.
Kira Tucker is a poet and artist from Memphis. The 2024-2025 Artist in Residence in Creative Writing at Northwestern, Kira is an Associate Agent with the Shipman Agency and the current Assistant Managing Editor for TriQuarterly. Their poems appear in The Iowa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Jazz & Culture, and elsewhere. Kira is also at work on a hopeful debut collection—a poetic investigation spanning the mythos of the American Dream and the landscapes of our collective unconscious.
John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize; and Ghost County (Midwestern Gothic Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Best New Poets, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Pleiades, and Quarterly West, among others. John is the Managing Editor of RHINO.
Laura Joyce Hubbard's nonfiction and poetry appear in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere. Laura’s poetry manuscript was a recent semifinalist in Copper Nickel and Milkweed Edition’s Jake Adam York Prize. Writing awards include winner of The Iowa Review’s Veteran Writing Award, winner of the 2023 Porch Prize in Poetry, winner of the 2021 Nonfiction Contest at Southeast Review, and winner of the Individual Poem Prize (2021) and Essay Prize (2020) in the William Faulkner Pirate’s Alley Writing Competition. Her nonfiction was selected as a “Notable” in the Best American Essays 2022 and 2023 and won an AWP Intro Journal Award (2023). Laura’s work has been supported by the Ragdale Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts with a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a veteran US Air Force pilot, a fiction editor for TriQuarterly, an MFA candidate at Northwestern University, and currently the inaugural Highland Park Poet Laureate.
