About
Amanda Barusch
Amanda has worked as a janitor, online matchmaker, exotic dancer, editor, and college professor. She lives part-time in the American West, where she spends as much time as possible on dirt paths. The rest of the time, she is on a beach or in a lecture hall in New Zealand. Amanda emerged from Reed College in the 1970s eager to fight injustice. She studied social welfare at U.C. Berkeley and taught social work for 30+ years before completing her MFA at the University of Utah. Since then, she has published eight books of non-fiction, a few poems, and a growing number of short stories. She has edited two major academic journals and now looks forward to changing the world through beautiful writing.
Lisa Birman
Lisa Birman is a poet and novelist who splits her time between Australia and the United States. Her first novel, How To Walk Away, was awarded the 2016 Colorado Book Award in Literary Fiction. She is also the author of a hybrid poetry collection, For That Return Passage—A Valentine for the United States of, editor of Dearest Annie, You wanted a report on Berkson’s class: Letters from Frances LeFevre to Anne Waldman, and co-editor of the anthology Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. Lisa worked with Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program for over a decade and served as writing faculty and faculty director of Naropa’s Study Abroad Semester in Prague. She is a freelance editor and co-founder of The Refuge Journal Project 2025.
Jess Bowers
Jess lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she works as an Associate Professor of English at Maryville University. But she’s originally from York, Pennsylvania, the first capital of the United States (so they claim) and hometown of the 90s rock band Live (that one’s true). Her debut collection, HORSE SHOW, was published by Santa Fe Writers Project and was recently named one of “The Most Exciting Debut Short Story Collections of 2024” by Electric Literature. She’s also a co-editor at Cartridge Lit, an online journal publishing literature about video games, which she’s loved since she first played Fishing Derby on her Atari 2600. She holds a B.A. in English and creative writing from Goucher College, an M.A. in the same from Hollins University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri, where she studied fiction writing, film, and 19th-century literature and visual culture. In her free time, she thinks about the hungry ghosts of silent Hollywood while riding her little yellow pony through the woods. She also watches far too much TV.
Andy Hoffmann
Poet, editor, and publisher Andy Hoffmann emerged from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, inspired by the Outrider tradition of serving community through poetry and poetic exploration. While teaching literature and writing at the University of Utah’s Honors College, he co-founded Elik Press (2001–2023) with Michael Gills. His current interests include Black and Indigenous thought, shamanic poetics, and embodied practices.
Marnie Powers-Torrey
Marnie Powers-Torrey holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Utah and a BA in English and Philosophy from Boston College. Marnie is a Librarian at the Marriott Library, where she serves as Director of the Book Arts Program & Red Butte Press. She is the faculty mentor for book arts designations and teaches letterpress, bookbinding, artists’ books, and other courses for the Book Arts Program and elsewhere. Marnie identifies primarily as a book artist, and her book work is held in collections nationally.
David Sumner Smith
David studied British and American literature at UC, San Diego before earning a master’s degree in British and US literature at the University of Essex (Colchester, UK). In the years that followed, he taught high school, edited documents, and ventured on a wooden sailboat. Having retired, he now requires only a fifty-mile horizon in New Mexico where he lives with his wife, Eleanor. David is the source of the press's charming name.