ABOUT AJ

AJ (Andrew) Romriell is a storyteller, photographer, and educator. He is the author of Wolf Act (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), a memoir-in-essays about his experience growing up queer and neurodivergent in the Mormon religion, which earned first prize in the Utah Original Writing Competition and was a finalist for the Writers' League of Texas Manuscript Contest. He is a 2025 Pushcart nominee, and his essays, stories, and poems have been featured in Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. He has been the recipient of the Vandewater Prize in Poetry, the Kenneth W. Brewer Creative Writing Award, and the Ralph Jennings Smith Creative Writing Endowment, and his work has been shortlisted for Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, CRAFT’s Hybrid Writing Contest, and the Black Warrior Review and New Ohio Review contests for creative nonfiction.

 

AJ earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Utah State University before going to obtain his MFA at The Ohio State University. Born and raised in Sandy, Utah, he now lives in Columbus, Ohio with his partner, Terrence O'Brian Henderson, a fashion and drag designer from North Carolina, and their feline companion, Sokka the Wildcat.

 

AJ's current projects include a second collection of linked personal essays (this one about video games, apocalypses, and his 2020 HIV diagnosis), a poetry chapbook, and the first book in a new series of queer fantasy novels. When not writing, AJ enjoys dying his hair, hiking, reading, watching movies, playing video games, long walks in storms, and long talks over coffee.