Memoir Panel: Renee Gilmore, Kelly Foster Lundquist, & Tracy Youngblom

Renee Gilmore is the author of WAYFINDING: A Memoir: (October 1, 2025; Trio House Press). She earned degrees from University of New Mexico and Hamline University, and her work has also been published in The Louisville Review, Hippocampus, Fatal Flaw, Pink Panther Magazine, and other literary journals. She lives in suburban Minneapolis with her husband, Steven, and works in corporate learning and development.

Kelly Foster Lundquist is the author of Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage (Eerdmans; October, 2025). She teaches writing at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, MN. Originally from Mississippi, Lundquist has taught writing all over the United States (Boston, Chicago, Mississippi, Seattle, California, etc), as well as in Slovakia and Scotland. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many places, including Villain Era Lit, Last Syllable Lit, Whale Road Review, and Image Journal. Her work has been nominated for a 2024 Best of the Net Award as well as a Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board as well as the Central Minnesota Arts Board. She lives in a little red house in Minnesota with her spouse and daughter.

Tracy Youngblom earned an MA in English from the University of St. Thomas and an MFA in Poetry from the Warren Wilson College low-residency program. She has been writing and publishing poems since the early 1990s. She has published two chapbooks of poems, Driving to Heaven and One Bird a Day, as well as two full-length collections, Growing Big and the recent Boy. Her awards and honors include two Pushcart nominations, including one in 2017 for a poem from Boy. In addition to poems, her memoir, Because We Must, won the Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in March 2025.

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. He is the author of My Weight in Water, a memoir about his complicated relationship with lap swimming (forthcoming with Spiegel & Grau, 2026). Michael’s debut poetry collection, Worldly Things, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. His poems and essays often explore themes of intimacy, community, empathy, and grace, practices he believes are simultaneously distinct and interdependent. Michael is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature, and he teaches creative writing at Augsburg University and through the Minnesota Pr*son Writing Workshop.

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