Emily Mathis is a creative nonfiction and fiction writer from the U.S. She is currently revising a collection of lyrical essays focusing on the many lives of the female body and the dual yearnings of intimacy and autonomy against the backdrop of grief. Her essay, “Men Smoking,” was the 2024 nonfiction winner of Sonora Review’s The Erotic contest. Additional pieces have been finalists for contests through the Sewanee Review, Fourth Genre, North American Review, Epiphany, and Tucson Festival of Books. Her nonfiction manuscript was an honorable mention for Miami Book Fair’s 2024 Emerging Writer Fellowship and her flash pieces have been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize. Recent publications include Sonora Review, Hunger Mountain, Epiphany, Los Angeles Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and others. Recent publications can be found on her website at emilymathiswriting.com. She is on Instagram @emily_a_mathis.
In addition to the essay collection, Emily is also working on a surrealist novel in which women from a small island off the coast of South Carolina turn into alligators at the age forty, but with the advance of the beauty industry and the transformation of South Carolina’s coast into “master-planned communities,” one woman must decide between living her true nature in the swamps or undergoing a lifetime of invasive plastic surgery to remain with her family.
