Samantha Deal’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Quarterly West, Hunger Mountain, The Journal, Word Riot, The Boiler, Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, Ninth Letter, and others; she also has poetry forthcoming in the 2017 Best New Poets anthology. A finalist for poetry prizes from the Mississippi Review, River Styx, and The American Literary Review, Samantha has been the recipient of Western Michigan University’s 2015 Gwen Frostic award for creative nonfiction as well as a 2016 creative nonfiction fellowship from Writers at Work. She holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and The University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Currently, she splits her time between Boone, North Carolina, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she is a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University and serves as co-coordinator for the Poets-in-Print reading series and an intern for New Issues Press.