Phil Scearce is an award-winning writer and artist-blacksmith from Tennessee. He is a husband, father, cat dad, and an ally. He earned a BA from the University of North Carolina and completed his MFA through the Mountainview Low Residency Program. His first book, Finish Forty and Home (UNT Press, 2011), won First Place – Literary Excellence at the 2010 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Some of his shorter works, fiction and nonfiction, have appeared in journals and magazines.