Carly Gates is a communications teacher and the publications adviser for Marquee, The Muse, and Seeds at Dreyfoos. She is also an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of the South’s School of Letters. Her essay “How Service Learning Cultivates Empathy and Social Responsibility” was published in the textbook Creative Writing in the Community in 2014, and her poetry has been published in Flint Hills Review, Hawai’i Review, and So to Speak, among others. In 2015 she was the Sinclair Writing Award’s first place winner for adult fiction and an MFA scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.