Graywolf Press publishes risk-taking, visionary writers who transform culture through literature. When writers are free to do their most ambitious work, their books serve as portals to new possibilities and enable deeper understanding between people. Readers are changed by Graywolf’s books, which are fearlessly acquired, attentively edited, and energetically promoted.

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PocketMFA is a twelve-week mentoring and workshopping program, designed to make more accessible the rigor, community, and guidance of a graduate-level writing program. Based on the low-residency MFA model, PocketMFA places up to ten writers with a creative nonfiction mentor of their choice, to work through our three distinct and entirely virtual phases of Direct Instruction, Mentorship & Workshopping, and Writing Life Residency. All fifteen shortlisted creative nonfiction writers will receive a $1,000 scholarship to PocketMFA.

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OPTIONAL EDITORIAL FEEDBACK:

You may choose to receive editorial feedback on your work. We will provide line-level marginal editorial notes, as well as a two-page global letter discussing the strengths of the writing and the recommended focus for revision. While editorial feedback is inherently subjective, our criticism is always actionable and encouraging. Work that we critique is not eligible for future CRAFT contests. If your piece is chosen for publication, feedback will not be given and your feedback fee will be returned.

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EDITORIAL FEEDBACK TEAM:

JOANNA ACEVEDO (she/they) is the Pushcart-nominated author of three books and two chapbooks. Her work has been seen across the web and in print, including Free State Review, The Rumpus, and The Adroit Journal. She received her MFA in fiction from New York University in 2021 and also holds degrees from Bard College and The New School. Find her on Twitter @jo_avocado.

MELISSA BENTON BARKER is the flash fiction section editor at CRAFT. A graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, her writing appears in Longleaf Review, Moon City Review, Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Best Small Fictions 2021. She has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

KATE BLAKINGER is a writer and editor. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Epiphany, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Offing, and other journals. She is a Tin House Workshop alumna and holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. The Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Jentel, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center have supported her writing with fellowships. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

ALYSE BURNSIDE is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The Believer, and elsewhere. She’s working on a book.

HENRY CHRISTOPHER is an Ohioan writer living in Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Mount Vernon Nazarene University in 2018, and his MFA from the University of Washington in 2023. While attending school in Mount Vernon, Ohio, Henry served as editor in chief for Penmarks Journal of Literature and Art, news writer for The Viewer, and presented in a roundtable conference on small press lit journals at the Sigma Tau Delta International English Honors Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the past, he has worked with CRAFT as section editor for critical essays and interviews, art and marketing assistant, and fiction reader; currently, he works as a marketing assistant for Fernwood Press. His creative writing has been presented at events such as Cleveland Drafts, Black Jaw, and Castalia, and has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Henry’s debut novel, No One Dies in Palmyra Ohio, was published in October 2022 through What Books Press. He feels strongly about experimental works and queered forms, with passion for those composed outside traditional literary backgrounds. Currently, he publishes his writing through handmade, freely distributed zines around the Seattle area.

KYLE COCHRUN (he/him) is a writer living in Seattle, Washington. He is a contributing writer for PopMatters, where he writes features, interviews, and album reviews. His essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Akron Anthology, Watershed Review, Echo, and CRAFT. He received an MFA in creative writing from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts graduate program.

ALEXA DORAN recently completed her PhD in poetry at Florida State University. Her full-length collection DM Me, Mother Darling won the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was published in April 2021 (Bauhan). She is also the author of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019). Look for work from Doran in recent or upcoming issues of Pleiades, Witness, Salt Hill Journal, and Gigantic Sequins, among others.

BRANDON DUDLEY is the author of Hazards of Nature: Stories, selected by Sigrid Nunez as the winner of the 2020 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Chapbook Contest. His writing, interviews, and criticism have appeared in New South, The Millions, The Forge, Fiction Writers Review, North by Northeast 2, and others. He holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. He lives in Maine with his wife and two sons. Find him on Twitter @brandondudley8.

ROSS FEELER’s fiction has appeared in Electric Literature’s “Recommended Reading,” The Common, New South, Potomac Review, Story | Houston, Hypertext, and others. His novel-in-progress received the Marianne Russo Award from the Key West Literary Seminar and was a finalist for James Jones First Novel Award. He teaches English at Texas State University.

B. B. GARIN is a writer living in Buffalo, New York. Her echapbook, New Songs for Old Radios, is available from Wordrunner Press. Her work has appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review, Luna Station Quarterly, Palooka, 3rd Wednesday, Crack the Spine, and more. She is currently a prose reader and blog contributor for The Masters Review. She continues to improve her craft at GrubStreet Writing Center, where she has developed several short fiction pieces, as well as two novels. Connect with her online @bb_garin.

COURTNEY HARLER (she/her) is a queer writer, editor, and educator based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe (2017) and an MA in English (Literature) from Eastern Washington University (2013). Courtney is currently editor in chief of CRAFT and editorial director for Discover New Art, and has read and written for UNT’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize, The Masters Review, Funicular Magazine, Reflex Fiction, and Chicago Literati in recent years. She hosted the literary podcast PWN’s Debut Review, and teaches and edits for Project Write Now, a nonprofit writing studio in New Jersey. For her creative work, Courtney has been honored by support from Key West Literary Seminar, Writing By Writers, Community of Writers, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and Nevada Arts Council. Courtney’s work has been published in multiple genres in literary magazines around the world. Find her on Instagram @CourtneyHarler.

KATELYN KEATING (she/her) was the editor in chief of CRAFT from 2018 to 2021 and now serves as editor at large. She was a 2017 fellow of the LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop and has been on their faculty since 2018, overseeing PubLab, leading the magazine track as a program manager, and serving as the publisher coordinator for LITLIT: The Little Literary Fair. She is a production manager with Berrett-Koehler Publishers, and was the production and operations manager at Prospect Park Books until it left California in 2021. Her essays appear in Crab Orchard Review, Flyway, Lunch Ticket, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Katelyn has an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, where she worked for two years on Lunch Ticket, serving as editor in chief for issues 11 and 12. Find her on Twitter @katelyn_keating.

JILL KOLONGOWSKI writes the Substack Tiny True Stories and is also the author of the essay collection Life Lessons Harry Potter Taught Me (Ulysses Press, 2017). Her work also appears in Electric Lit, Insider, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Her essays have won Sundog Lit’s First Annual Contest series and the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Nonfiction at Lunch Ticket, and she earned her MFA from St. Mary’s College of California. Jill teaches writing at the College of San Mateo, and lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter. Find her on Twitter @jillkolongowski.

VAL M. MATHEWS is a big-hearted, fun-loving editor who teaches courses in developmental editing for the University of California Berkeley Extension, Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and the Editorial Freelancers Association in New York City. Val also freelances on the side and works as an editorial consultant for CRAFT and The Masters Review. Previously, she was an editor for The Wild Rose Press, a small traditional publishing house in New York. She earned an MA in professional writing from Kennesaw State University and a BFA from the University of Georgia. Fun fact about Val: She’s been an FAA-certified flight instructor for over twenty-five years, and in the past, she flew Lear jets for a living.

GABRIEL MOSELEY is a writer from Seattle, Washington. He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and certificates in both editing and literary fiction from the University of Washington. His short story, “A Man Stands Tall,” was awarded The Masters Review Anthology Prize in 2017, selected by Roxane Gay. He received the General Motors’ Future Fiction Scholarship to attend Aspen Summer Words in 2023 and was chosen for the Jack Straw Writers Program in 2024. He has been selected for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Centrum Artist Residency, and Seattle Public Library’s Writers’ Room Residency. He has also been named as a finalist for the Made at Hugo House Writing Fellowship, LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the Haleakalā National Park Residency. He has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Disquiet International, among others. His work appears in The Masters Review, Stratus, and Nordic Kultur Magazine.

JUSTINE PAYTON is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington where she is a recipient of the Philip Gerard Graduate Fellowship and the Bernice Kert Fellowship in Creative Writing. She has been published or has work forthcoming in the Bellevue Literary Review, Isele Magazine, The Masters Review, The Keeping Room, and others. She is currently the managing editor of ONLY POEMS, an editor for Ecotone, and an editorial intern with Tin House. Find her on Instagram @just_a_rose4.

REBECCA REYNOLDS has an MFA in creative writing. Her short fiction has been published in various literary magazines, including Ascent, MudRoom, and The Boiler, and her story collection This Is How We Speak is forthcoming with Cornerstone Press. She lives outside Boston with her husband and three boys, and by day she is a children’s librarian. Find her on Twitter @rsreynolds611.

GAGE SAYLOR is the assistant director of creative writing at Oklahoma State University. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Passages North, Tampa Review, Crab Creek Review, Iron Horse, and elsewhere. He has won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize at Nimrod and is a previous semifinalist for the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize at North American Review. He received his MFA at McNeese State University, where he was awarded the Robert Olen Butler Prize for Fiction.

CHLOE CHUN SEIM is the author of CHURN, an illustrated novel-in-stories, which won the 2022 George Garrett Fiction Prize and was named a finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Texas Review Press published CHURN in late 2023. Chloe’s fiction has appeared in LitMag, where she won the 2021 Anton Chekov Award for Flash Fiction, and in Split Lip Magazine, The McNeese Review, Potomac Review, and more. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

After retiring from full-time work, DAVID K. SLAY completed a two-year program of short fiction writing workshops in the University of California, Los Angeles, Writers’ Program. His short stories, flash fiction, and microfiction can be found in a group of diverse literary journals, including Door Is A Jar, Gold Man Review, ImageOutWrite, The Magnolia Review, Random Sample Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, American Writers Review, and others. Nonfiction craft articles are in CRAFT and Submittable’s “Content for Creatives,” and he has served as a guest editor for Vestal Review. He has been a submissions reader for CRAFT since 2019, and is currently an associate editor for the short fiction section.