Cheri Johnson (Sigrid Brown) has received awards and residencies from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation, the Bush Foundation, Yaddo, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She studied writing at Augsburg University and the University of Minnesota and her novel Annika Rose won the 2021 Women’s Prose Prize from Red Hen Press. The Girl in Duluth, published under the name of Sigrid Brown, is a literary mystery about several characters in northern Minnesota pulled into the ugly world of sex trafficking. Publishers Weekly has called it an “affecting debut …. Brown easily creates engagement with [her main character] June, and poetic prose is a plus …. Fans of thoughtful crime fiction will hope for more from Brown.”

Phil Adamo has had many jobs in his life, including circus clown, graphic designer, truck driver, sandwich maker, and dog walker. In 2001, he earned a Ph.D. from Ohio State University and for the next two decades taught history at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. In his novel The Medievalist, controversial Yale professor Abe Kantorowicz enlists two grad students to fight neo-Nazis on the battlefield of propaganda. Set in today’s America, the novel is chock full of real history, yet resonates with present-day issues: the dangers of racism and white supremacy, the uses and abuses of the past, and the responsibilities of academia.