Midwestern Memoir

Event Details

Jill Christman is the author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays, two memoirs (Darkroom: A Family Exposure and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood), and essays in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and Iron Horse Literary Review. A 2020 NEA Fellow and senior editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, she teaches at Ball State University. 

Acamea Deadwiler is the author of the memoir Daddy’s Little Stranger, which has been featured by Literary Hub, The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and deemed “arresting” by The BookLife Prize. Her writing has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, North American Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Randolph College—where she was awarded a Blackburn Fellowship. Acamea’s books have also been lauded by Publishers Weekly and Cosmopolitan, among other media outlets. She is a native of Gary, Indiana. 

Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of the memoir in essays, The Perils of Girlhood (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) and also the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) and the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press, 2006). Her fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies from Shenandoah and The Massachusetts Review to storySouth and Notre Dame Review. She has been a finalist for awards from Glimmer Train on multiple occasions, twice nominated for Pushcart Awards, and was the winner of the Sam Adams/Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Contest. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University and in the MFA Program in creative writing at Butler University in Indianapolis. She also offers instruction on the art and craft of writing at the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana.