Tina Mozelle Braziel is the author of Known by Salt (Anhinga Press), winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Alabama Library Association Author Award for poetry, and Rooted by Thirst (Porkbelly Press). Her work has also appeared in POETRY, The Cincinnati Review, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She has been awarded a fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and an artist residency at Hot Springs National Park. As the Magic City Poetry Festival's inaugural Eco Poet, she collaborated with the Cahaba River Society to develop eco-poetry curriculum and videos. She holds an M.F.A in Poetry from the University of Oregon, an M.A. in Poetry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a B.A. in Intercultural Studies at the University of Montevallo. She directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand in rural Alabama.
James Braziel grew up in South Georgia on his father's farm. They had cattle, peanut and melon crops, and pines for cutting for pulpwood. Days were for working, nights for walking the dirt road that split the land. In winter, the sky. His writing comes from the humid air, the sand-grit of that place.James' collection of stories, This Ditch-Walking Love, winner of the Tartt First Fiction Prize, is set in the Murphrees Valley section of the Cumberland Plateau where he now lives, where ridges lift above what creeks and small rivers have made. Because the characters in these stories don't have enough money to carry them, they rely on a network of plateau fields, creeks, woods, and clay roads. It might be enough, a field row in August for walking and gathering tomatoes and okra up, or a bluff for jumping off of into the Locust Fork River, or a drive out to Jick's Chevrolet just to see his hellfire cars. These are the places everyone goes to, looking for what they can't make full on their own.
