Elizabeth Beck is a professor in the School of Social Work at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Her major research interests are in the areas of mass incarceration, forensic social work, restorative justice, and violence.

Dr. Beck has authored 29 peer-reviewed articles, one law review article, numerous book chapters and three books. Her 2018 book, “The Homelessness Industry a Critique of US Social Policy,” published with Lynne Rienner Press, explores the way in which the United States produces the condition of homelessness through neoliberal policy and the medicalization of a social justice issue. Her book, “In the Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Death Row Families,” published by Oxford University Press, received the American Library Association CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title of 2007. She has an edited volume, “Social Work and Restorative Justice: Skills for Dialogue, Peacemaking, and Reconciliation,” also published by Oxford University Press.

Beth Gylys is the Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars and an award-winning poet and Distinguished Professor at Georgia State University. Her fifth book of poems (a collaboration with the poets Cathy Carlisi and Jennifer Wheelock), The Conversation Turns to Wide-Mouth Jars, was published in August 2022 and has been named a Book All Georgians Should Read in 2023. Her fourth collection, Body Braille, also received that honor in 2021. Her third collection Sky Blue Enough to Drink was chosen as finalist for the Georgia Author of the Year. She has also published two chapbooks, Balloon Heart (winner of the Sam Quentin chapbook prize) and Matchbook and has another chapbook (After My Father) forthcoming. Awarded a MacDowell Fellowship and residencies in Spain and France, she has published poems in many journals and anthologies including the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, the New Republic, Ploughshares, the Southern Review and the Best American Poetry blog.

Sarah Higinbotham serves as a co-Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars and she studies and teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature at Emory’s Oxford College, focusing on the intersections of literature and law. She writes about the violence of the law in early modern England, critical prison theory, and human rights in literature. Her scholarship has appeared in Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Contemporary Justice Review, The Social History of Crime and Punishment in the United States, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, Wake Forest Law Review, and Reading Milton. As a way of exploring the constructive aspects of law, she co-authored a book through Oxford University Press, Human Rights and Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law.

Megan Sexton is the author, Swift Hour, a collection of poems and the Insects & Mystics, a chapbook. Her poetry and nonfiction have been widely published in anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, The Literary Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She received the Adrienne Bond Award and the Redbone Chapbook prize and has been a finalist for the Georgia Author of the Year Award and has been nominated for the PEN/Newman First Amendment Award. She is the editor of Five Points: A Journal of Literature & Art, published by the Department of English at Georgia State University, where teaches and is the director of the NYC Publishing Field School. Her musical work includes playing drums for the Atlanta-based band, The Skylarks.

Nellie Cox (she/her) is a poetry PhD student at GSU and poetry editor at Beyond Bars. Her poetry explores the doomsday cult of her youth in Long Beach, California, and the patriarchal mechanisms of high-control fundamentalism. Her work can be found in Jet Fuel Review, Underwood Press, and Last Resort Literary Journal, among others. When she isn’t reading or writing, Nellie can be found photographing turtles along the banks of the Chattahoochee River.

A fat, queer, and neurodivergent writer, Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a graduate student editor for Beyond Bars and a PhD candidate at Georgia State University where she also serves as the Nonfiction Editor for New South. Emily is the author of the poetry collection Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as two chapbooks: The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press) and Pharaoh’s Daughter Keeps a Diary (forthcoming form Kissing Dynamite Press). Her essays and poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Pleiades, OxMag, So to Speak, Still: A Journal of Literature, Atticus Review, SWWIM, and Up the Staircase Quarterly among others. A recent finalist for the Page Prize in Nonfiction and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, Emily lives in Atlanta with her very loud family and teaches creative writing at Agnes Scott College.

Kiyanna Hill (she/her) is a Black writer from Virginia. Her writing has been published in Honey Literary, Peach Mag, Vagabond City, and Porter House Review with her debut chapbook forthcoming from Variant Literature. She is currently a third-year PhD candidate at Georgia State University with a focus in poetry.

James A. Jordan (Editor) is pursuing his PhD at Georgia State. He has served as a contest coordinator for the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and as an assistant editor for Five Points. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bitter Southerner, Carve, The Greensboro Review, New South, North American Review, Quarterly West, The Saturday Evening Post Online, and The Trinity Review among others. He received his MFA from the University of New Orleans.

Jada Fordis a poet and writer set to graduate with an MFA in Fiction Writing in Spring 2024. She is the communications specialist for Beyond Bars and an editor at Five Points. Her work, inspired by religion and Black girls who live in small towns, can be found in Passages North, Mistake House, The Lumiere Review, and in her collaborative zine HOT PROPAGANDA.

Maria-Paula Ramirez Wong is a second year MFA fiction student at Georgia State University. She was born in Peru and immigrated to the United States with her parents at two years old. Her work explores inter-generational trauma, immigration, folklore, and hauntings. Two of her most recent research projects are “The Legend of La Llorona: The Life and Function of a Myth in Mexican/Chicanx Identity” and “The Literature of Siu Kam Wen and Julia Wong Kcomt: Disrupting Universalism in Peru’s Popular Narratives.”

Chris Ketchum is from Moscow, Idaho, and received an MFA from Vanderbilt University. He is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week, and elsewhere.

Shane Erich views the journal as a platform for the incarcerated and their families to express themselves as fully human and for the world to see that they are more than their greatest mistake. Beyond Bars’ vision and goal is to overcome stereotypes and break down stigmas associated with the incarcerated and their families.

R.C.’s vision for Beyond Bars is to extend opportunities for the incarcerated to make our voices heard. I want this project to feature many top-quality writers so that they can bring life to their ideas, thoughts, and creativity. Those who have been long forgotten by society can find themselves in this way. Not only do I want everyone to be successful on this project, but to be an example for the world.

Declaration endeavors to connect the concrete, steel, barbed wire, and surveillance to what is hidden deep in the imagination. His desire to be a credible academic is rooted in years of imaginative ambitions. Dec believes that education without vision is merely a fable if not put into action. Likewise, he sees the merging of life experiences with academic pursuits is a beautiful way to use creativity useful to reach and achieve goals.