Meg Cass
Fiction
Saint Louis, MO
Meg Cass is a trans fiction writer, crafter, and teacher based in St. Louis, Missouri. Their first collection of stories, ActivAmerica, was chosen by Claire Vaye Watkins as winner of the 2016 Katherine Anne Porter Prize. Stories from their collection-in-progress have appeared in Ecotone, Black Warrior Review, Foglifter, ANMLY, Passages North, Honey Literary, Smoke and Mold, Mississippi Review, and others, and have been selected for The Wigleaf Top 50 2024, The Best Small Fictions 2024, and the Best of the Net 2025 anthologies. Their writing has received support from the Jentel Artist Residency and The Dairy Hollow Writers’ Colony.
They are especially interested in how fiction writing morphs when it intersects with crafting, visual art, and zine making. They were a participant in Telephone (2025), a project in which nine St. Louis writers and visual artists responded to each other’s work sequentially in-order to create a ‘telephone’ style story. For their contribution to the OuLiPo-inspired magazine 7x7, they collaborated with photographer Hannah Ryan for a two-week period to assemble a hybrid story set in a museum. Their handmade fiction zines combine collage, embroidery, painting, and saddle stitch to add another embodied dimension to work that has already appeared in traditional literary venues. They’ve offered their zines at two iterations of SLICE (St. Louis Independent Comics Expo) as well as at readings at Goodie House reading series (St. Louis) and PO Box reading series (Chicago).
Meg has taught creative writing for a decade in the English Department at the University of Illinois Springfield where they received the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching, and the Faculty Mentor Award in the Humanities. They’ve given craft workshops and readings at Washington University in St. Louis, University of Tennessee, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Indiana State University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Aurora Writers Workshop, and more. They co-founded Craft Chaps, the educational chapbook series published by Sundress Publications, and have served as an assistant editor for Sundress.
In St. Louis, Meg offers community workshops in writing and publishing. In the Spring of 2020, they founded Works-in-Progress, a virtual reading series in which writers were asked to share unfinished work. In collaboration with Crystal Odelle, they organize Changeling, a series which invites community members to a quarterly potluck and performance featuring a queer artist to guide us in deepening our creative and care practices.