Matthew Nienow & Wayne Scott

Matthew Nienow’s recently released collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, Publishers Weekly, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

Wayne Scott’s writing has appeared in The Sun, Poets and Writers, Huffington Post, The Psychotherapy Networker, The Oregonian, and The University of Chicago Magazine, among others. His New York Times essay, “Two Open Marriages in One Small Room” (January 2020) was adapted for the Modern Love podcast (summer 2021), then “dutchified” for Modern Love (Amsterdam), the television series, in 2022. He is a writer, psychotherapist, and teacher in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his partner. In a starred review, Library Journal called his memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined (Black Lawrence Press, 2025) “emotional, raw, and real … a deep dive into one couple’s trials and triumphs to redefine marriage to fit their lives and needs.”