ABOUT FOURTH GENRE
When Michael Steinberg and Robert Root founded Fourth Genre in 1999, they envisioned a magazine “devoted solely to works of contemporary nonfiction, extending from the personal essay—including nature, environmental, and travel writing—to memoir, literary journalism, and personal cultural criticism.” They hoped to “emphasize the personal, autobiographical, and ‘literary’ impulses” of discovery, exploration, and reflection, and to capture what they called “the spirit of Montaigne’s work.”
What Steinberg and Root couldn’t have known back then was that Fourth Genre would be part of a larger legitimization and expansion of literary nonfiction in the world of American Letters. That MFA programs across the country would expand to include tracks in literary nonfiction, that more and more literary magazines would open their pages to the genre, and that writers of literary nonfiction would push the boundaries of the genre into new and experimental places, including the lyric essay, the hermit crab essay, and the visual essay, just to name a few examples.
For the past two decades, Fourth Genre has promoted that expansion and experimentation, curating in two issues a year works across the full spectrum of creative nonfiction, showcasing the lyrical, self-interrogative, meditative, and reflective, as well as the expository, analytical, exploratory, and whimsical.
And more recently, with expanded web content that includes journal archives, craft essays, interviews, reviews, and multimedia essays, we hope to continue elevating and celebrating the best of creative and scholarly work in literary nonfiction.
Subscriptions and back issues are available from Michigan State University Press, and all our journal content is also available at Project Muse and JSTOR.
EDITORS IN CHIEF
Patrick Madden
Pat is a New Jersey Native with a PhD from Ohio University. His most recent books are the essay collections Disparates (Nebraska 2020) and Sublime Physick (Nebraska 2016).
Joey Franklin
Joey is originally from Portland, Oregon. He has a PhD from Texas Tech University, and his most recent books include The Writer’s Hustle (Bloomsbury 2022), and Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays (Nebraska 2020).
MANAGING EDITOR
ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR
Samantha Sorenson
Samantha is from Northern California and is currently finishing her MFA in creative nonfiction at BYU. Her work has appeared in Under the Sun, Water~Stone, Poets.org, and is forthcoming from Sweet Lit. She was a winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets Prize.
Julie Hollenbaugh
Julie Hollenbaugh is an MFA student at Brigham Young University. She is curious about everything and loves discovering connections in the world through writing. When not writing, she is likely to be found reading, practicing yoga, or spending time with her family.
CONSULTING EDITORS
Ashley Marie Farmer
Ashley Farmer is the author of the essay collection Dear Damage (Sarabande Books, 2022), winner of the 2022 International Rubery Book Award in Nonfiction and the 2020 Sarabande Series in Kentucky Literature, as well as three other books. Her work has been published in places like TriQuarterly, Southwest Review, The Progressive, Santa Monica Review, Salt Hill Journal, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Review’s Short Fiction Award, two Best American Essays notable distinctions, a 2023 Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from Syracuse University and the Baltic Writing Residency. Ashley lives in Salt Lake City, UT with the writer Ryan Ridge.
Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas graduated with both a creative nonfiction writing and a literary translation MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous press and Don’t Come Back, from Mad River Books, an imprint of the Ohio State University Press.
Jehanne Dubrow
is the author of nine poetry collections and three books of creative nonfiction, including most recently Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity (New Mexico State University Press, 2023). She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
Marya Hornbacher
Marya is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and novelist, and the New York Times bestselling author of five books. She travels full time, and is completing a work of longform journalism about the role of gender, body autonomy, and movement in American life.
Jericho Parms
Jericho Parms is the author of Lost Wax (University of Georgia Press). Her essays have appeared in The Normal School, Hotel Amerika, American Literary Review, Brevity, Passages North and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, noted in Best American Essays, and anthologized in Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, and Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays By Women. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a contributing editor at Fourth Genre.
Sarah Viren
Sarah is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University. She’s the author of Mine, winner of the River Teeth Book Prize, and To Name the Bigger Lie.
Huan Hsu
Huan grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and received his MFA from George Mason University. He is a former staff writer for the Washington City Paper and Seattle Weekly and the author of The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China (Crown 2015).
Ellen Wayland-Smith
Ellen Wayland-Smith is the author of two books of American cultural history, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table (Picador 2016) and The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (UChicago Press, 2020). Her book of collected essays, The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self, was recently published by Milkweed Editions. She lives in Los Angeles and is a professor teaching in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR
EJ Levy
EJ’s novel, The Cape Doctor (Little Brown 2021), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and 2022 Colorado Book Award winner; her stories, Love, In Theory, won a Flannery O’Connor Award; her anthology, Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, received a Lambda Literary Award.
Kyle Minor
Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the 2015 Story Prize Spotlight Award. His work appears online and in print at Esquire, The Atlantic, The Iowa Review, and three Best American volumes. A new collection of essays, How to Disappear and Why, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books.
Kate Caroll de Gutes
Kate Carroll de Gutes, Iowa City, Iowa, and Portland, Oregon, is a genderqueer writer whose work explores sexuality and the qualities of gender identity and expression in order to examine how butch women are dismantling traditional modes of masculinity and inhabiting a territory of masculine identity that has nothing to do with cis-men. As critics have become louder and more oppositional about issues of gender identity and expression, Kate feels an urgent need to counter and subvert traditional images and narratives. She is currently working on a new essay collection tentatively titled, Will We See You In Something More Feminine Tomorrow?
READERS
Brock Allen
Holly Baker
Whitney Brown
Courtney Bulsiewicz
John Carpi
Jessica Mohsen-Crellin
Tina Essmaker
Nancy Glass
Tessa Hauglid
Carma Hiland
Julie Hollenbaugh
Natalie Johansen
Mauri Johnson
Ben Langston
Stephanie LaRose
Susan Lerner
Alison Linnell
Susan Mack
Daniel Martin
Sarah Myers
Debbie Moreno
Scott Russell Morris
Martha Petersen
Erin Rhees
Mark Routhier
India Sorensen
Samantha M. Sorenson
Shelli Rae Spotts
Donna Stapely
Leslie Stonebraker
Michele Walker
Cheryl Wright-Watkins