Erica Cavanagh grew up in Rochester, New York, and served in the Peace Corps
in Benin from 1997-1999. She is a graduate of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Gastronomica, Bellevue Literary Review, Off Assignment, The Journal, and elsewhere, including the collections Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us and Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. She is currently editing a nonfiction collection, Come and Eat: An Anthology of Food for the Dispossessed (UVA Press). Her photographs have been published in The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, The Fight & the Fiddle, The Wilson Quarterly, and several literary journals. Erica is the recipient of the Ruth Murray Prize, Iowa Arts Fellowship, Missouri Review’s Editor’s Prize, Mid-Atlantic Arts Fellowship, Valley Arts Council Grant, Pushcart nomination, and an artist residency at Millay Arts. She teaches Creative Nonfiction Writing, Food Studies, Trauma Studies, and African American Literature at James Madison University.
Photo by Rosie Grant, taken at Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia