Erika Randall is a dance professor and interim dean and vice provost for undergraduate education at the university of Colorado Boulder. She co-authored and co-directed the award-winning feature film, “Leading Ladies,” in 2010. In 2014, Ira Glass awarded her “Best Dance on the Radio” for “Hello, Blue Soul,” a piece that merged storytelling and sound. Her choreography has been seen in four countries and 16 states over the last decade and her internationally award-winning screendance works, including “Paula + Francesca,” “Down for the Count,” “less,” “more,” and “self defense,” have screened at festivals such as the Beirut International Women Film Festival, the Beyond the Curve International Film Festival in Paris, France, the Starz Denver Film Festival, the Florence Queer Festival in Italy, and the Façade Film Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She co-writes and hosts the podcast “The Ampersand,” which can be found wherever you get your podcasts. Her newly released novel, Music for Leaving, can be found on her website.
https://www.erikarandall.com/
Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W. Norton) which was an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. Her seventh book, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs is forthcoming from Norton in 2026. A contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire and other outlets, she lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, MS.
