Dr. Rachael Peckham earned a B.A. degree in English from Hope College in 2002, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Georgia College and State University in 2004 and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Ohio University in 2009. She is the author of Alight: Flights of Prose (Uncollected Press) and the forthcoming titles Muck Fire: Prose Poems and Other Cultivations (Compass Press) and Flight 932: The 1970 Marshall Plane Crash and the Story of an American Town (University Press of Kentucky), co-authored with Dr. Joel Peckham. Flight 932 grew out of Dr. Peckham’s 2017 Drinko fellowship project, a long-form literary journalism essay titled “The Outer Marker: A Kaleidoscopic Rendering of the 1970 Marshall Plane Crash.” Her articles, essays, and poems have received numerous awards and distinctions, including two honorable mentions in the Best American Essays series, the ½ K Prize at Indiana Review, the Orison Anthology Nonfiction Award, and the Special Feature Literary Nonfiction Award at Crab Orchard Review. Since joining the creative writing program at Marshall University in 2009, Dr. Peckham has been awarded a Distinguished Artists and Scholars Award for junior faculty, a Pickens-Queen Teaching Award, a Hedrick Teaching Fellowship, the Hedrick Outstanding Faculty Award, a Notable Alumni Award from Ohio University, and, most recently, the 2024 West Virginia Professor of the Year, sponsored by the Faculty Merit Foundation of West Virginia.