Rachel Toliver’s fiction, nonfiction and craft essays have appeared in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, West Branch, TriQuarterly, Puerto Del Sol, The Chattahoochee Review, The New Republic, Brevity and elsewhere. Her short story, “Legion,” was the winner of American Literary Review’s 2017 fiction contest. Her essay, “Catharsis, Diagnosis,” won the Chattahoochee Review’s 2020 Lamar York Prize, judged by Alice Bolin.

In 2017, Rachel was an AWP Intro Journals Project winner. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Ohio State University, where she was awarded a Thesis and Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award (2017) and a Haidee Forsyth Burkhardt Award (2018). Her essay, “My Cartographies,” was named a Best American Essays 2018 notable essay. Last year, she was the Milton Postgraduate Fellow in Creative Writing at Seattle Pacific University. She is currently finishing a book of linked essays, tentatively entitled HERE.