Rachel M. Hanson is a prose writer, author of The End of Tennessee: A Memoir (University of South Carolina Press, 2024), and recipient of the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship in Nonfiction at Colgate University. Her work has won the University of Minnesota’s Walter Allen essay prize and appears in The Great River River, and other nonfiction works have won Best of the Net and earned Notable Mention in Best American Essays. Her essays can be found in Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, South Dakota Review, American Literary Review, and many other literary journals. Her poetry was selected for Best New Poets and has been published in The Minnesota Review, Juked, New Madrid, and elsewhere. Excerpts from her novel-in-progress appear in Joyland Magazine.

Rachel holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and the founding director of the literary nonprofit, Punch Bucket Lit.