Mississippi Delta expat Deirdre Sugiuchi spent her adolescence in a Christian nationalist reform school in the Dominican Republic. Her debut memoir, Unreformed: An Evangelical Captivity Narrative, which is about how she survived and thrived despite being imprisoned, was a finalist in the 2025 Vine Leaves Press International Voices in Creative Nonfiction Competition. It will be published February 16, 2027. Sugiuchi’s essays and excerpts have been featured in Action, Spectacle, Dame, Huffington Post, Literary Hub, Salon, the anthology Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving  the Church, and other places. Sugiuchi’s 2025 Unreformed excerpt, “Certificate of Affection,” published in The Midwest Review, was nominated for a Pushcart. The Albee Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Wildacres have all supported her work. Sugiuchi has been awarded the Key West Writers’ Seminar Teacher and Librarian Award, the Mark Austin Segura Award for Nonfiction, and a 2023 Deming Award for feminist nonfiction. She’s conducted over fifty interviews with authors at Electric Literature, Guernica, The Rumpus, Scalawag, and her Substack, Everything Amazes Me. A former public school librarian, Sugiuchi is also the co-founder of The New Town Revue, a music and literature series. Sugiuchi lives in Athens, Georgia with her partner, Chris, and Lucy, her dog.