Brinson Leigh Kresge
writing.
Brinson Leigh Kresge is a writer, freelance developmental editor, and writing consultant (see: editing).
She writes fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary and craft analysis. Kresge is interested in writing into archival gaps and uses fabulist elements to reveal mundanity as inherently profound. Somatically informed, her creative work often exists in the creases between genres, employing formulaic experimentation and constraints, graphics, or collage, and sometimes slips into other mixed modalities (see: art & movement).
Kresge’s nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in the New York Times, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Passages North, and Grist. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in 805 Lit + Art, The Underway Review, and Lavender South was a UNCW nomination to the AWP Intro Journals Project Award in 2024 and 2025, and was a 2024 NCWN’s Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition finalist.
She was awarded a Dr. Ralph W. Brauer Fellowship and was selected as a 2023-2024 Research Fellow by the UNCW Gender Studies & Research Center to support research for her novel And the Water Goes on in Both Directions, a story about home, belonging, and the enduring complexity of becoming—work that embraces fluidity of process over resolution, and the radical experience of living with, versus overcoming—a novel for which she was longlisted in the 2025 CRAFT First Chapters Contest.
Her other full-length projects-in-process: As the Mobile Moves, a memoir in literary experiments, reflects identity as a process of dismantling through a shifting interplay of form, and her poetry collection, i dream in cow death.
Publications & Recognition:
(forthcoming) Passages North
running jokes (flash prose)
from: i dream in cow death: a poetry collection
Issue 48, Spring 2027
(forthcoming) Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts
A Deconstruction of Tendencies (lyric essay)
from: As the Mobile Moves: A Memoir in Literary Experiments
Issue 19, 2026
(forthcoming) The Lavender South
Introduction: A Beetle Erasure (poetry collage)
from: As the Mobile Moves: A Memoir in Literary Experiments
2026
Semifinalist - 2025 North Carolina Literary Review: Doris Betts Fiction Prize Competition
Exhumed (short story)
2025
Longlisted - CRAFT: 2025 First Chapters Contest
And the Water Goes On In Both Directions: a Novel
2025
The Underway Review
from: i dream in cow death: a poetry collection
August 2025
UNCW AWP Intro Journals Project Awards Nominations
"Mary in the Mouth like Moths Mating" (poem)
2025
"Toad Season" (poem)
2024
Finalist - NCWN's Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition
"too soon; too late for another chance at harvest" (poem)
2024
The New York Times -
Modern Love: Tiny Love Stories (flash cnf)
from: As the Mobile Moves: A Memoir in Literary Experiments
February 2023 - Sunday Styles NYT
805 Lit + Art
"Lake Leavings" (poem/lyric essay)
2021 - Pushcart Prize Nomination
2022 - Best of the Net Nomination
Public Readings:
- Salonaganza, The Roasted Bookery, Wilmington, NC -- Aug 2025
- Claymont ECJ Performance, Charles Town, WV – May 2025
- Thesis Reading, Morton Hall UNCW, Wilmington, NC – April 2025
- Holiday Reading, WHQR, Wilmington, NC – Dec. 2024
- First Drafts, Discovery Hall UNCW, Wilmington, NC – Sept. 2024
- End-of-Year Reading, Fermental, Wilmington, NC –April 2024
- LGBTQIA+ Art Showcase, UNCW, Wilmington, NC – Oct. 2023
- Out of Genre Reading, Gravity Records, Wilmington, NC – Feb. 2023
- First Year Reading, Hey Beer, Wilmington, NC – Sept. 2022
Kresge organized and emceed readings for UNCW’s Creative Writing MFA Reading Crew from Fall 2023 through Spring 2025.