Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, literary critic and the author of Fast Fat Girls In Pink Hot Pants (2012), a collection of poetry. More recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as the Harvard Review, Poet Lore, Ecotone, The Account, Pleiades, and Solstice. White earned a master’s degree in creative writing from New York University and a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. She is a visiting assistant professor of American cultural studies at Albright College in Pennsylvania. She has received The Mona Van Duyn Scholarship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Mary Hambidge Distinguished Fellowship from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts for her nonfiction, and a writing residency at the Tupelo Press/MASS MoCA studios. New essays, “Sonny Boy” and “A Lynching in North Carolina,” appear in The Hopkins Review and Tupelo Quarterly. Her most recent literary/cultural criticism, “Appalachian Literature and Race Relations in the Newer South: Homogeneity and History in Ron Rash's Burning Bright and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard,” appears in Seeking Home: Marginalization and Representation in Appalachian Literature and Song (University of Tennessee Press, 2017). Her chapter examines how contemporary writers are providing new ways to talk about the history of the Civil War in the wake of continued debates on the legacy of the Confederacy.

Congratulations to our finalists for the 2018 Trio Award (in alphabetical order):

Ash Sonata by Steve Bellin-Oka

The Dreams of Weapons by Melissa Ginsburg

Crybaby Bridge by Kathy Goodkin

Loudest When Startled by Lukas Hall

A House on Fire by Charles Malone

Brilliant Dust by Amelia Klein

The Things by Jeff Oaks

The Limits of the World by Michael Opperman

Dream of Low Houses by Max Schleicher

Jerusalem: A Love Story by S.A. Stepanek

The Swan Wife by Sara Moore Wagner

Orpheum by Reed Wilson