The Straw Dog Writers Guild Emerging Writer Fellowship Working Reader Panel is responsible for going through applications and selecting the shortlist and final recipient of the fellowship.
The 2024 reader’s panel was as follows.
K E Garland
K E Garland is a creative nonfiction writer and blogger based in Florida. She uses personal essays and memoir to de-marginalize women’s experiences with an intent to highlight and humanize contemporary issues. She has published essays with Midnight & Indigo, Raising Mothers, and For Harriet. Other works have appeared in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, I’m Speaking Now: Black Women Share Their Truth in 101 Stories of Love, Courage and Hope, All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World-Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom, and other anthologies.
Garland’s writing has been awarded twice with the Florida Writers Association for her unpublished creative nonfiction essay, “The Transition” and for her blogging series, “Mental Health Matters.” She is married with two adult daughters and is an associate professor at a community college.
To learn more about K E and her work, click here.
Minda Honey
Minda Honey’s essays on politics and relationships have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads.
Her work is featured in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger”, “A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South”, and “Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic.”
She is the editor of Black Joy at Reckon — the newsletter has nearly 60K subscribers. She was the director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University, a relationship advice columnist for LEO Weekly in Louisville, Kentucky, and founder of the capsule project, TAUNT, an alt-indie publication for Louisville that elevated the voices of the unaccounted during the height of the pandemic and ended in late 2021.
Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS (Little A, October 2023), is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time.
To learn more about Minda and her work, click here.
Nada Samih-Rotondo
Nada Samih-Rotondo is a multi-genre Palestinian American writer, educator, and mother. A graduate of Rhode Island College, she earned degrees in English and Education and an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. When she is not befriending trees or attuning to hidden stories, she is leading transformational educational experiences and addressing the social-emotional needs of historically underserved and multilingual youth.
Her writing has appeared in Masters Review, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and Squat Birth Journal. She lives in Providence with her husband and three children. All Water Has Perfect Memory (Jaded Ibis Press, 2023) is her first book. To learn more about Nada and her other work, click here.