Paul Reali is co-founder of Charlotte Lit, a nonprofit literary arts center in Charlotte, NC. He won the 2023 Doris Betts Fiction Award and is a past winner of the Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Story and Ruth Moose Flash Fiction awards. His fiction can be found most recently in North Carolina Literary Review. In nonfiction, he is co-author of "Creativity Rising," which is used in introductory creativity classes at colleges worldwide, and his writing on creativity and business has been widely published. He was awarded a Wildacres residency in 2022, and received a Regional Artist Project Grant from Charlotte’s Arts & Science Council in 2018. He has an M.S. in Creativity from Buffalo State University, and an M.B.A. from Syracuse University.