Emma Galloway Stephens – Poet & Professor

…climbing bloody-knuckled
from the copperhead pit
to the open mouth of God.
EGS, “Snakebelly Low”

Emma Galloway Stephens hails from the Appalachian foothills in Greenville County, South Carolina. Raised on a steady diet of early American literature, Shakespeare, the Bible, and family ghost stories, her poetry settles in that space between the known and the unknown, things certain and things unseen—tied to worlds both natural and supernatural. Her poems are informed and inspired by her faith and her love for the natural world. She writes in the southern gothic tradition, carving poems out of what Flannery O’Connor called the “Christ-haunted” landscape of the American southeast.

Emma has taught English and creative writing courses on a university level since 2017. She earned her MFA from Converse University in 2023. In addition to teaching and writing, she performs annually with the Greenville Shakespeare Company. She is a co-founder of Arbor Institute for the Arts in Greenville, SC, where she serves as the Director of Education. She shares her life with her spouse and their small menagerie of cats and reptiles.