Moderators
Our 2026 moderators.
Margaret Bates
Margaret Bates is a master’s student in Towson University’s Professional Writing Program. They conduct research related to fanfiction culture and on how values drive romance readers’ book-purchasing behavior. They’ve presented their research at conferences for the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, the Pop Culture/American Culture Association, and the Women’s Writing Conference. They also have been editing self-published and small press authors since 2017 and run their own editing company for speculative fiction at Otherlands Editing.
Geoff Becker
Geoff Becker is the author of the novels Hot Springs (Tin House Books) and Bluestown (St. Martin’s Press), as well as two story collections: Black Elvis (University of Georgia Press), and Dangerous Men (University of Pittsburgh Press). His awards and honors include: the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction, The Nelson Algren Award from The Chicago Tribune, an NEA Fellowship, multiple awards from the Maryland Arts Council, and inclusion in the Best American Short Stories anthology. He’s taught fiction writing at The University of Arizona, Colgate University, The Colorado College, Emory University, and other schools; he is professor emeritus of English at Towson University, where he taught from 2000-2026.
Miriam DesHarnais
Miriam DesHarnais is a research and instruction librarian at Towson University’s Albert S. Cook Library, primarily serving the College of Education. She has reviewed books for kids and teens for School Library Journal and Library Journal and freelanced for several Baltimore-based publications. Her teaching and research interests include combatting educational censorship and teaching educators to increase their use of high quality, recent and culturally varied texts in K-12 classrooms.
Emily Dillon
Emily Dillon is a writer and educator from Maryland whose creative work ranges from nonfiction to poetry and all the lyrical places between. As an avid reader and a teacher for more than a decade, she also publishes book reviews and teaching guides. She is an assistant teaching professor in the English department at Towson University, holding a Master of Education in English Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Maryland and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. She has also served as managing editor for Speculative Nonfiction and assistant editor for Brevity Magazine, and her writing can be found in Brevity Blog, Complete Sentence, Crab Creek Review, Essay Daily, Hippocampus Magazine, and River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, among other publications. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and, more importantly, several of her students have been published for the first time with her encouragement. Read more at www.emilydillonwriting.com.
Heather Harris
Heather Harris is an associate professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County, where she teaches composition, structure and style, and creative writing. She hosts the Mess & Friction Reading Series at Fadensonnen on the first Thursday of each month and edits nonfiction for JMWW, a weekly online journal of writing. Before joining the full-time faculty at CCBC in 2009, she worked as an editor and writer for multiple publications and as a public relations writer for CUNY. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College.
Jasmine Thomas
Jasmine Thomas (she/her) is the research and instruction librarian for First Year Engagement at Towson University’s Albert S. Cook Library, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in history. She also received a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2022 and is currently working on a Master of Arts in African American Studies at Morgan State University.
At Towson University, Jasmine provides information literacy instruction, supports student and faculty research, and teaches the library’s credit bearing course LIBR 300: The Information Experience. Her research interests include citation justice and Black feminist librarianship.
Jeannie Vanasco
Jeannie Vanasco is the author of A Silent Treatment, which was named a best book of 2025 by NPR, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her other memoirs include Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl — a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, among others — and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University. Her fourth book is under contract with Tin House, publisher of her other memoirs.
Paula Weinman
Dr. Paula Weinman teaches first year writing at Towson University. As a scholar of contemporary multiethnic literature, she researches how popular understandings of representation, race and diversity have evolved in response to rapidly shifting conversations about the nature of American history and the possibility of American democracy.