E. G. Cunningham is a writer, singer-songwriter, and educator born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1985 and raised in Italy and Florida. Her poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid work has appeared in or is forthcoming from a wide range of national and international publications, including:
The Abandoned Playground, Abstract Magazine, antiphony, AUTOCORRECT, A Bad Penny Review, BANG!, Barrow Street, Bear Review, Blackbox Manifold, Breakwater Review, The California Quarterly, Cloudbank, Colorado Review, Deluge, Drunken Boat, em—a review of text and image, FUGUE, The Gettysburg Review, La Vague, The Lincoln Review, Litro Magazine, Locomotive, Nailed Magazine, The Nation, Northwest Review, The Operating System, Pith, Plume, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Prick of the Spindle, Propeller Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Quiddity, RHINO, Rust + Moth, Salt Hill, SAND: A Berlin Literary Journal, Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art, The Shore, Small Po[r]tions, Southern Humanities Review, The Spectacle, Sprung Formal, They Will Sew the Blue Sail, Verse Daily, Waccamaw, ZYZZYVA, 1110, 3:AM Magazine, and 45th Parallel.
Cunningham's essay “The Exedra” was awarded the 2017 LUMINA Nonfiction Prize, judged by Leslie Jamison. Her most recent chapbook, Oranges for Venus, was selected as the 2023 1br/3bath Editor’s Choice from Tilted House Press. Cunningham's work has been nominated for several Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, and she was named as a finalist in the Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction, Bateau Press’s Boom Chapbook Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction. In 2025, her collection of documentary fiction, Women and Children, was awarded the second place Judith Pearson Siegel Award, judged by Alise Alousi.
Her work investigates the phenomenologies of place, memory, and ecology, often exploring issues related to exile, climate disaster, class, desire, and systems of power.
Cunningham holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia.
You can find her music on Apple, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Tidal.
She lives in Washington state.