Like everything else, this is optional. If you're at the point in your writing where you'd rather just have time to write and don't really feel like you need an editor weighing in on your work, that is totally cool with us.  

If you choose to meet with an editor, we’ll connect you before camp via email, and the two of you can decide what might be the best use of your time together. For some people, that’s detailed feedback and line edits on a crucial chapter or poem. For others, it’s a broader discussion about editing and publishing. Let us know what you’re looking for, and we’ll do our best to match you up with somebody who understands what you're doing and can provide direct and helpful advice. 

We’re still finalizing our camp staff roster, but you’ll see a lot of these faces at camp in 2024.

Meet our editors

  • Sam will be at August camp.

    Sam Ashworth is an assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse, but he edits both fiction and nonfiction. He's a regular contributor to the Washington Post Magazine and Eater.com, and his fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Hazlitt, NYLON, Barrelhouse, Catapult, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Brooklyn Rail. He writes the semi-regular "Dispatches from the Swamp" column for The Rumpus, and his travel writing has appeared in Roads and Kingdoms. He lives in Washington, DC, and teaches creative writing at George Washington University. You can find out more about him at samuelashworth.com.

    Working with Sam: "I love working with writers on short or long fiction, or nonfiction--especially anything that involves research or reporting. I tend to emphasize theatricality and audience awareness in prose writing of any genre, i.e., how can you make sure that what you're writing is actually landing with a reader? I'm happy to go line-by-line on a story, or just set down by the water and spend an hour talking about your project on a much more macro level, and digging into resources that might help you. I should say, though, I'm not the right guy for flash. Flash intimidates me."

  • Becky will be at August camp.

    Becky Barnard is a Barrelhouse editor-at-large. She holds the whistle and carries the clipboard during camp - if you have a question, need anything, or just want to grab a beer and chat by the fire, find her. She is the co-author of the YA sci-fi novel The Greys (Pandamoon Publishing), written with fellow Barrelhouse editor Dave Housley.

    Becky loves camp so much that she recently moved from the upper peninsula of Michigan to Port Matilda, Pennsylvania.

    Working with Becky: “Straight up? I’m a book nerd and a web nerd who fell in with a crew of fantastic writers, and they haven’t kicked me out yet. I’m probably not your person if you’re looking for heavy analysis, line edits, or craft discussions. But if you need an everyperson first reader; you have questions about social media or creating your own website; or want to chat about how to get started, find your people, or feel like a little less of a phony? Let’s talk.”

  • Christina will be at August camp

    Christina Beasley is a poet and public servant in Washington, D.C. She is pursuing her M.F.A. in Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars and received her M.A. from Georgetown University. She is one of the poetry editors of Barrelhouse magazine. Her poems have or will appear in Copper Nickel, Hobart, Atlanta Review, Bridge Eight, The Pinch, The Southampton Review, and other publications. Her full-length manuscript was a finalist in the 2019 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.

  • Aaron will be at August camp.

    Aaron Burch grew up in Tacoma, WA. He is the author of the memoir/literary analysis Stephen King’s The Body; a short story collection, Backswing; and a novella, How to Predict the Weather. He is the founding editor of Hobart and, more recently, its offshoot journals, HAD and WAS. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

  • Katharine will be at June camp.

    Katharine Coldiron is the author of Ceremonials, a novella inspired by Florence + the Machine, and Junk Film, a collection of essays about bad movies. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Ms., Conjunctions, the Washington Post, The Guardian, LARB, the Rumpus, and many other places. She earned a BA in film studies and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College, an MA in English from California State University, Northridge, and a PhD in parapsychology from the Institute of Metaphysical Humanistic Science (IMHS). Find her at kcoldiron.com or on Twitter @ferrifrigida.

  • Tyrese will be our visiting writer at August camp.

    Tyrese L. Coleman is the author of the story and essay collection, How to Sit, a 2019 Pen Open Book Award finalist published with Mason Jar Press in 2018 and the forthcoming nonfiction book Spectacle by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Writer, wife, mother, attorney, and writing instructor, her essays and stories have appeared in several publications, including Washington Post Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Literary Hub, Parents Magazine and the Kenyon Review and noted in Best American Essays and the Pushcart Anthology. She is an alumni of the Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. Find her at tyresecoleman.com or on twitter @tylachelleco.

  • Erin will be at June and August camps.

    Erin Fitzgerald is the author of the novella Valetta78 (Outpost 19), as well as"This Morning Will Be Different," which appeared in Shut Up/Look Pretty (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2012). Her work has also been published in Hobart, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, PANK, and several anthologies. She is the Web Editor for Barrelhouse. She lives in western Connecticut, and online at erinfitzgerald.work.

    Working with Erin: “My job is to help you get the best out of the time you’ve carved out for yourself and your work. At previous Writer Camps, that’s included but hasn’t been limited to:

    - reading work of any fiction genre, and offering whatever level of feedback you’d like

    - suggesting online litmags to check out

    - brainstorming the solving of stuck/block issues

    - talking about navigating the writing world when one is a parent and/or a 9 to 5er

    - commiserating on what a pain it is to come up with names for elves”

  • Chris will be at August camp.

    Chris Gonzalez is a queer Puerto Rican writer living in New York. He is the author of the short story collection I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat, which follows the lives of messy and hunger-fueled bisexual Puerto Rican men who strive to satisfy their cravings of the stomach, heart, and soul in a conflicted unpredictable world.

    Gonzalez is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction for the New York Foundation of the Arts. His writing appears in the Nation, Catapult, the Millions, Little Fiction, the Forge, Lunch Ticket, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. A graduate of Vassar College, he was the recipient of the 2015 Ann E. Imbrie Prize for Excellence in Fiction Writing. His flash fiction was chosen for the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology and named one of Wigleaf‘s Top 50 for 2020. He currently serves as a fiction editor at Barrelhouse and spends his waking hours tweeting about Oscar Isaac, book publishing, trash television, and the Popeyes spicy chicken sandwich @livesinpages.

    Working with Chris: “The questions I most ask myself when revising are "Is this working?" and "Will anyone else get it?" and "Have I finally lost my mind?" During our editor meeting, I encourage you to bring those questions—the ones firing off in your head like airhorns while you write—to our session. Let's talk about them. This isn't a classroom workshop; there is no gag-rule. My goal here is to help you figure out how to get your writing to where you want it to be. And to reassure you that, no, you haven't lost your mind.”

  • Dave will be at June and August camps.

    Dave Housley is the author of four novels and four story collections, most recently the novel The Other Ones, and (along with Becky Barnard) the sci-fi YA novel The Greys. His work has appeared in Booth, McSweeneys, Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, Wigleaf, and some other online and print magazines. He is one of the founding editors of Barrelhouse and co-founders of the Conversations and Connections writer's conference. For money, he is the Director of Web Strategy at Penn State Outreach and Online Education.

    Working with Dave: I’m happy to work on a variety of things. I’ve written a paranormal crime novel, a sci-fi young adult novel (or half of one, with Becky), and four collections of increasingly strange short stories. I still think of myself mostly as a short story writer. I’m happy to dig in on a story and do a kind of intense but laid back one-on-one workshop. I’m happy talking about bigger picture projects, or publishing and writing and submitting your work or anything else in that general area.

  • Joe will be at June camp.

    Joe Killiany is one of the founding fiction editors of Barrelhouse. He has taught Barrelhouse online workshops and teaches at George Mason University.

  • Mike will be at August camp.

    Mike Ingram’s stories, essays, and journalism have appeared in a number of publications, including PHOEBE, The North American Review, The Smart Set, and Medium’s Human Parts. His first book, Notes from the Road, was published by Awst Press in March 2022.

    Mike is one of the founding editors of Barrelhouse. He is also an associate professor of instruction at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he teaches courses in creative writing, editing and publishing, and first-year writing.

    You can hear Mike on the Book Fight podcast, which he co-hosts with his friend and colleague Tom McAllister.

    Working with Mike: “I'm happy to dig in on a particular piece and offer workshop-style critique and suggestions, though I'm also happy to have more of a big-picture conversation about the direction of your work. Or a little of both! I can offer feedback on creative nonfiction and fiction, and I'm particularly interested in structure--how to locate the center of the story you want to tell, and how to shape it around that center. I'm also up for chatting about submitting your work, publishing, writing habits, etc.”

  • Michael will be a visiting editor/writer at June camp.

    Michael Wheaton is the author of the essay Home Movies (BUNNY, 2024). His writing has appeared previously in Essay Daily, DIAGRAM, Burrow Press Review, Rejection Letters, HAD, and other online journals. He publishes Autofocus Books and produces The Lives of Writers podcast.

  • Matt Perez is a fiction editor at Barrelhouse. He writes and publishes short prose sometimes but not enough. He likes the elderly, the out-of-doors, life's metaphorical roller coaster (but not actual roller coasters), a good party, live music, and his amazing and soulful friends at Barrelhouse and elsewhere. A former lecturer for the English Dept. at Penn State, he now lives in California. He also likes you just the way you are.

    Working with Matt: “I believe good writing is complex, both emotionally and at the paragraph level, and each piece is struggling against itself — its intentions versus its shortcomings — to find its heart and reason for being, just like people. Which is to say it’s really hard to get it “right.” In my head I use an audio engineer analogy: I kind of like to look at the piece and play with the mixing board to try and figure out how to best balance a story without, like, telling your writing how to live its life or whatever.

    The atmosphere at camp lends itself to a casual conversation about a project, and I tend to use moments on the page to highlight higher order moments that hold potential successes or shortcomings in the piece that can flow into the bigger conversation. Sometimes those moments are focused at the sentence level and sometimes they’re not. That said, I’ve been a writing instructor for 14 years or so and don’t mind getting down with your beast on the sentence level, but I prefer to do that via editing marks on the draft. Style and punctuation are tools to illuminate meaning and I don’t believe in all the rules when they apply themselves to artistic endeavor.

    (Also I’ve been using the wrong dashes my whole life bc I like the way they look. Like here — check this out — doesn’t that look nicer than—I don’t know—that dash stuff right there?)”

  • Monica will be the visiting writer at June camp.

    Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing and serves as Director of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem, How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem, Instructions for Temporary Survival, and Letters from the Other Woman. She is the managing editor of Santa Fe Writers Project and the co-author of the suffrage play, Pageant of Agitating Women, with Anna Andes. Her work appears in Wildness, The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee obsessed with maxi skirts with pockets and yoga, Prince writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation.

    Working with Monica: “I love poetry of all kinds: experimental, “literary,” performance, short, long, narrative, lyrical—the list goes on. I seek to assist writers who are just getting into poetry, who’ve been writing it their whole lives, or who want to move in a new direction that feels “weird.” I’m also deeply interested in how writers use space, language (literally words or languages not English), image, and performance on the page. I’d love to read and help improve poetry accompanying images, audio, comics, or anything that seems out there. But ultimately, I want to read poems. Whatever they look like, however they’re crafted.”

  • Dan will be at June camp.

    Dan Brady is the author of the poetry collections Strange Children (2018) and Subtexts (forthcoming 2020), both from Publishing Genius Press, along with two chapbooks, Cabin Fever / Fossil Record (Flying Guillotine Press) and Leroy Sequences (Horse Less Press). Dan’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Apt, Big Lucks, Sink Review, and So & So Magazine among others. He is the poetry editor of Barrelhouse and lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife and two kids.

    Previously, Dan served as the editor of American Poets, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, and worked in the Literature Division at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he received a Distinguished Service Award for his work on the Big Read, the largest community reading initiative in US history.

  • Matt will be at June camp.

    Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University, where he directs the ASU Worldbuilding Initiative.