Margot Singer is a Professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, USA, where she directs the creative writing program. She is the author of a novel, Underground Fugue (2017), winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and short-listed for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and a collection of linked stories, The Pale of Settlement (2007), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her essays have appeared in the Normal School, Ninth Letter, Conjunctions, the Sun, River Teeth, and elsewhere, have been recognized as Notable in Best American Essays, and with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021), Sustainability: A Love Story (2018), and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet (2019), as well as the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010). The co-president of NonfictioNOW, she teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ, USA and serves as the Crux Series Editor for University of Georgia Press.

Introduction to the Second Edition
I. Hybrids
1. Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don't, Lia Purpura
2. Queering the Essay, David Lazar
3. The Everbent Genre, Patrick Madden
4. Don't Let Those Damn Genres Cross You Ever Again!, Lawrence Sutin
5. Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries, Kazim Ali
6. On the EEO Genre Sheet, Jenny Boully
7. Reading Samuel R. Delany, T Clutch Fleischmann
8. Beautiful Muddied Waters: On Genre and Veracity, Sean Prentiss
9. Listening for the Sound, Sejal Shah
10. Split Tone, Lee Martin
11. Lyrebirds in the Impasse, David Carlin
12. Headiness, Karen Brennan
13. What's in Your Purse?: Essays Through the Eyes of a Character Actor, Elaine Passarello
14. Propositions; Provocations: Inventions, Mary CapelloII. Structures
15. On Scaffolding, Hermit Crabs, and the Real False Document, Margot Singer
16. Text Adventure, Ander Monson
17. Adventures in the Reference Section, Kevin Haworth
18. Meeting the Ancestor on the Road, Tina Makereti
19. Autogeographies, Barrie Jean Borich
20. Dissolving Genre: Writ with Water, Ingrid Horrocks
21. "Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!": Courage and Creative Nonfiction, Brenda Miller
22. Traumatized Time, David McGlynn
23. Escapology, Justin Hocking
24. Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics, Wayne Koestenbaum
25. A Sequence of Thoughts Without Any Kind of Order, Ira Sukrungruang
26. My Mistake, Nicole WalkerIII. Unconventions
27. On Convention, Margot Singer
28. Losing Language, Camille Dungy
29. What the Bottles Know, Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
30. 44 Tattoos, David Shields
31. Creative Exposition-Anther Way that Nonfiction Writing Can Be Good, Dave Madden
32. This Photograph is Evidence of You, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil
33. Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago: Thucydides and the Invention and Deployment of Lyric History, Michael Martone
34. On Fragmentation, Steve Fellner
35. Single Mindedness and Whole Heartedness in the Essay Writing Workshop: An Essay in Many Parts, Jenn Ashworth
36. Positively Negative, Dinty W. Moore
37. Study Questions for the Essay at Hand: A Speculative Essay, Robin Hemley
38. A Brief History of Disquiet, Deficit & Disbelief by FeiMan, Xu Xi
39. The Inclusivity of Metaphor, Nicole WalkerIV. Resistances
40. The Funk of Defiance, the Freedom of Refusal, Catina Bacote
41. The Essay as Resistance, Aviya Kushner
42. Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly Francesca Rendle-Short
43. Exposition as Resistance: Tell Me the Moon Is Shining, Matthew Batt
44. The Lyric Essay as a Mode of Resistance, LaTanya McQueen
45. It Is What It Is, Eula Biss
46. How It Is: Writing Towards Wonder, Jessica Hendry Nelson
47. On Not Being Able to Write It, Wendy Rawlings
48. Hermes Goes to College, Michael Martone
49. The Convex View, Karen Lloyd
50. The Moral Map, Stephanie Elizondo Griest