Dr. Rachael Peckham, an associate professor of English at Marshall University, received her PhD in Creative Writing (Creative Nonfiction) from Ohio University, where she specialized in the art of the contemporary personal essay. Her secondary interests include autobiography, memoir, the lyric essay, the prose poem, and 20th-century African-American and Jewish-American Literature. Her scholarship has appeared in Composition Studies, Xavier Review, and Phi Kappa Phi's The Forum. Her prose and poetry can be found in numerous journals and magazines, including Brevity, Briar Cliff Review, Calliope, Diagram, Dos Passos Review, Edge, Gulf Coast, Inkwell, Hotel Amerika, Passages North, Sentence, Southloop Review, Southwest Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Under the Sun, and elsewhere. In 2010 her chapbook Muck Fire won the Robert Watson Poetry Award at Spring Garden Press. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received a notable mention in the 2012 Best American Essays. Most recently, she was a finalist in the 2014 National Poetry Series Open Competition. Peckham lives in Huntington, West Virginia, along with her husband, poet and essayist Joel Peckham, and their son, Darius.