Carolyn Dekker is the author of North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac (Black Lawrence Press, 2023). She holds a BA in Biology and English from Williams College and a PhD in literature from the University of Michigan. She lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Since the demise of Finlandia University, she has been teaching at Michigan Technological University and leaning into her role as a local eccentric. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Identity Theory, Up North Literary Journal, and Waccamaw. She has published scholarship on Jean Toomer, Leslie Marmon Silko, Willa Cather, and Emily St. John Mandel, and edited Jean Toomer’s A Drama of the Southwest for the University of New Mexico Press.