One Page Salon

Jennifer duBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the winner of the Housatonic Book Award. DuBois’s third novel, The Spectators, was a recipient of a National Endowments for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Stanford University Stegner Fellowship, duBois teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University. The Last Language is her fourth novel.

Mike Hall writes about criminals, musicians, the law, and barbecue. Mike graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979 with a degree in government. He wrote for various publications, including Trouser Press, Third Coast Magazine, the Austin American-Statesman, and the Austin Chronicle. In 1997, he joined Texas Monthly, where he has won two Texas Gavel Awards from the State Bar of Texas and four Stephen Philbin Awards from the Dallas Bar Association. He was named Writer of the Year at the City and Regional Magazine Awards in 2015. His stories have appeared in The Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Da Capo’s Best Music Writing, the New York Times, and Men’s Journal. Mike is also a musician and has played in Austin bands the Wild Seeds, the Setters, the Lollygaggers, and the Savage Trip. He pitches for the Burkas, the Texas Monthly softball team.

Amanda Johnston is a writer, artist, and the 2024 Texas Poet Laureate. Born in East St. Louis, IL, and raised in Austin, TX, she began writing poetry while living in Kentucky. Her writing is published widely, and she has presented at numerous literary conferences and events. ​She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, and the anthologies, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founder of Torch Literary Arts. Named one of Blavity’s “13 Black Poets You Should Know,” Amanda’s work has been featured on Bill Moyers, the Poetry Society of America’s series In Their Own Words, The Moth Radio Hour, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. She was commissioned to curate a collection of poems for the Poetry Coalition on the theme Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body. ​She has facilitated creative writing workshops and presented at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Hugo House, Langston Hughes House, Frye Museum, Carver Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Prizer Arts and Letters, NeoSoul Poetry Lounge, Nuyorican Poet’s Café, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pillsbury House Theater, Rude Mechanical Theater, and at numerous universities and literary venues across the country. ​Amanda Johnston is the creator of the genesis – a poetic form comprised of seven poems. Five individual poems in columns create a sixth prose poem when read left to right, and italicized words that create the final seventh poem when read independently as a visible erasure.

Taisia Kitaiskaia was born in the Soviet Union and raised in the United States. She is the author of THE NIGHTGOWN AND OTHER POEMS (Deep Vellum, 2020); LITERARY WITCHES (Hachette/Seal, 2017), a collaboration with artist Katy Horan celebrating magical women writers and an NPR Best Book of 2017; a divination deck, THE LITERARY WITCHES ORACLE (Clarkson Potter, 2019); and two books of advice from the witch of Slavic folklore, ASK BABA YAGA: OTHERWORLDLY ADVICE FOR EVERYDAY TROUBLES (Andrews McMeel, 2017) and its follow-up, POETIC REMEDIES FOR TROUBLED TIMES: FROM ASK BABA YAGA (Andrews McMeel, 2020). She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the James A. Michener Center for Writers, and her fiction and poetry have been published in journals such as A Public Space, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, StoryQuarterly, Fence, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Pleiades, and Guernica. She has written for The Hairpin, Electric Literature, Jezebel, and Bitch Media. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, the writer Fernando A. Flores.