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, Allium, 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. Her photographs have appeared in The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, The Fight & the Fiddle, The Wilson Quaterly, 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, and a Pushcart nomination. In June of 2016 she was an artist in residence at Millay Arts. She teaches Creative Nonfiction Writing, Food Studies, Trauma Studies, and African American Literature at James Madison University where she currently directs the Creative Writing Program.
Photo by Rosie Grant, taken at Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia