Jacob M. Appel’s books include the story collection Einstein’s Beach Home, as well as the essay collection, Phoning Home. His fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Appel has received the William-Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for best short story and a Sherwood Anderson Foundation grant. He teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop and practices medicine in New York City.
Garrett Ashley’s work has appeared in The Normal School, Asimov’s Science Fiction, DIAGRAM, PANK, and Sonora Review, among other places. Garrett is an Assistant Professor of English at Tuskegee University.
Lesley Bannatyne received the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award first place for fiction and won the 2018 Bosque Literary Journal fiction prize. Her work has been published in the Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Christian Science Monitor, and Zone 3, Pangyrus, Craft, and other literary magazines. As a freelance journalist, she’s covered stories ranging from druids in Massachusetts to relief workers in Bolivia. Bannatyne also writes extensively on popular culture, and her most recent non-fiction book, Halloween Nation, was short-listed for a Bram Stoker Award. Her debut short story collection, Unaccustomed to Grace, was published by Kallisto Gaia Press in 2022.
Roy Bentley, a finalist for the Miller Williams prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has published eight books; including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, who is bringing out a new & selected. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Ohio Arts Council. His poems have appeared in Cleaver, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Shenandoah among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his latest, won the Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award and will appear next year.
Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) is the author of the poetry book The Transparent Body (Wesleyan University Press) and the chapbook Anorexia (Five Fingers Poetry). Her poems have appeared in more than 60 anthologies and periodicals, including The Kenyon Review, Tikkun, Ploughshares, Lilith, Brilliant Corners, Field, and City Lights Review. She won creative writing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and others. Lisa is also a jazz and neo-soul singer-songwriter-poet. Her sixth album, I Get A Kick: Cole Porter Reimagined, will be out in January 2018 on the Jazzed Media label.
Sean Bernard holds degrees from Arizona, Oregon State, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He directs the creative writing program at the University of La Verne, where he also edits Prism Review. Bernard’s first novel, Studies in the Hereafter, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press, and his collection Desert Sonorous won the 2014 Juniper Prize and is forthcoming from UMass Press. Bernard’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Glimmer Train, LIT, Cutbank, Gigantic, Front Porch, and Quarterly West, among others.
Alethea Black’s recent memoir (You’ve Been So Lucky Already, Little A, 2018) was reviewed by The New York Times. Her short story collection (I Knew You’d Be Lovely, Broadway, 2011) was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover program. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Narrative Magazine, and many others, and has been shortlisted for The Best American Short Stories and won the Arts & Letters prize. Born in Boston, she graduated from Harvard in 1991 and lives in Los Angeles.
Emma Bolden is the author of Malificae (GenPop Books, 2013), and medi(t)ations, forthcoming from Noctuary Press. She is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and one of nonfiction. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Conduit, the Indiana Review, the Greensboro Review, Feminist Studies, and Copper Nickel. She’s been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University.
Jeff Bond’s stories have been published in the Carolina Quarterly, Fatal Flaw, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Bridge Eight. He lives in New York City, where he was for many years a staple of Manhattan daylife as a Happy Hour bartender. He also creates and edits video, which can be found on his website, jeffbond.nyc. He serves as a reader for the Masters Review.
Nora Bonner writes and teaches in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is a PhD student in fiction at Georgia State. Her stories have appeared in various journals and anthologies including Shenandoah, the North American Review, the Bellingham Review, the Indiana Review, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
Marion de Booy Wentzien was a recipient of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award (twice) and The New Letters Literary Award. The Chicago Humanities for the Arts presented one of her stories in their Stories on Stage. Her stories have appeared in The Sonora Review, The San Francisco Chronicle (twice), Scholastic Books, Seventeen Magazine, Blue Penny Quarterly, Story Magazine, On the Page, Big Ugly Review, The Quotable, Prime Number, Bareback Lit, Tattoo Highway, Red Fez, Cossack Review, Citron Review, Extract(s), Drafthorse, Solstice, ROAR, Spry, Literary Orphans and other literary journals.
Janet Bowdan’s poems have appeared in APR, Best American Poetry, Frakture, The Rewilding Anthologyand elsewhere. Her chapbook, Making Progress, came out from Finishing Line Press in 2018. She teaches at Western New England University and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband, their son, a cat and a chinchilla.
Elya Braden is a writer and mixed-media artist living in Ventura County, CA, and is Assistant Editor of Gyroscope Review. Her chapbook, Open The Fist, was released in 2020. Her second chapbook, The Sight of Invisible Longing, was a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Competition and will be published in 2023. Her work has been published in Calyx, Prometheus Dreaming, Rattle Poets Respond, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Coachella Review and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have received several Best of the Net nominations. www.elyabraden.com.
James Braun’s work has appeared and is forthcoming in Fiction International, Laurel Review, the minnesota review, Camas, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Herbert L. Hughes Short Story Award. Summers, James resides in Port Huron, Michigan.
Renée Branum lives in Cincinnati where she is pursuing a PhD in Fiction Writing. Renée was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts 2020 Prose Fellowship to aid in the completion of her first novel (which will be published by Bloomsbury in January 2022). In May of 2017, Renée finished her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Montana. She received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2013 where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and a recipient of the Prairie Lights Jack Leggett Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Lit Hub, and Alaska Quarterly Review among others, and her short story “As the Sparks Fly Upward” was featured in Best American Nonrequired Reading (2019).
Amy Bridges is a television writer whose work has appeared on Discovery Health, TLC, and HGTV. She is the recipient of the San Francisco Writers Conference First Prize Award for Fiction. Her play, “Women of the Holocaust,” was published by the Kennedy Center in their Volume I anthology of Best Student One-Acts. She is the winner of the Edward Albee Playlab Award, presented by Edward Albee, for her play, The Day Maggie Blew Off Her Head. She is a Hedgebrook Alumna and holds a BA in Theatre from the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
Sarah Browning is the author of two books of poems, Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. She is co-founder and for 10 years was Executive Director of Split This Rock and currently teaches with Writers in Progress. An Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, Browning received the Lillian E. Smith Award and fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Yaddo, Mesa Refuge, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She holds an MFA in poetry and creative non-fiction from Rutgers University Camden and lives in Philadelphia. For more info: www.sarahbrowning.net
James Brubaker is the author of two books Liner Notes and Pilot Season. His stories have appeared in venues includingZoetrope: All Story, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hobart, Booth, The Collagist, web Conjunctions, The Normal School, and Beloit Fiction Journal, among others. Brubaker teaches creative writing at Southeast Missouri State University and serves as Associate Editor of The Collapsar.
Lisa K. Buchanan lives in San Francisco. Notable, Best American Essays 2023; First Place, Short Fiction Prize, CRAFT, 2022; Finalist, Lascaux Review Prize in Flash Fiction, 2021. Here’s what she has been reading lately: The Nightstandwww.lisakbuchanan.com X: @lisakbuchanan
Trent Busch, a native of rural West Virginia, now lives in Georgia where he writes and makes furniture. His recent books of poetry, not one bit of this is your fault (2019), Plumb Level and Square (2020), West Virginians (2021), and Through the Cracks (2022) were published by cyberwit.net. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, Threepenny Review, North American Review, Chicago Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, New England Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Northwest Review, Kenyon Review, American Scholar, Shenandoah, Boston Review, and Hudson Review.
Michael Campagnoli’s awards have included the New Letters Poetry Award, the All Nations Press Chapbook Award, and The Chiron Review Novella Prize. Campagnoli’s fiction and poetry have appeared in New Letters, Nimrod, Southern Humanities Review, Descant, Crab Creek, and elsewhere. Michael’s published four chapbooks and my poems and stories have been anthologized in Best New Writing of 2010, ISFN’s Anthology #1, The Bethany Reader, Nothing To Declare, Vine Leaves, America Is Not The World, Poets to Come, and The Two Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank.
Bill Capossere’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, AQR, Rosebud, and other journals, along with anthologies such as In Short and Brief Encounters. Several pieces have garnered mention in the “notable essays” section of Best American Essays and/or received Pushcart Prize nominations. Bill lives in Rochester NY where he works as an adjunct English instructor at several local colleges. Bill’s education background includes an MFA from the Mt. Rainier Writing Workshop.
Caroline Chavatel is the author of White Noises (Greentower Press, 2019), which won The Laurel Review’s 2018 Midwest Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Sixth Finch, Poetry Northwest, AGNI Online, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and The Journal, among others. She is editor and co-founder of both Madhouse Press and The Shore and is currently a PhD student at Georgia State University.
George Choundas has published a book of essays (Until All You See Is Sky), a book of stories (The Making Sense of Things), and work in over seventy-five publications. He is half Cuban, half Greek, and mostly garlic. He hates humorless confidence and profiteroles. He loves atrium hotels and calling a phone to find a phone.
Chloe N. Clark holds an MFA in Creative Writing & environment. Her work appears in Bombay Gin, Drunken Boat, Glass, Hobart, and more. She is co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph and her chapbook, The Science of Unvanishing Objects, is out from Finishing Line Press.
Garnett Kilberg Cohen has published four collections of short stories, most recently, Cravings, released in October 2023 from the University of Wisconsin Press. Her fiction has been published widely in journals, and has won awards from the Illinois Arts Council, Crazyhorse, december Magazine, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. She also writes nonfiction; her piece, “My Life in Smoke,” was published in the New Yorker online in 2019. Other published essays appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Antioch Review, Witness, The Rumpus, Memoir Magazine, as well as other journals.
Jennifer M. Colatosti holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Ohio University and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, where she teaches literature and writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The MacGuffin and Southeast Review, among others.
Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, etc. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She has published 16 books including Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press which received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize and Ribcage from Glass Lyre Press which has been awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.
Michael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 40 journals and magazines, including Grist, Kenning Journal, PANK, SOFTBLOW and Smartish Pace. His first chapbook, How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water, won the Exact Change Press Chapbook Contest in 2014. A full-length collection, Psalmandala, was published later that year.
Rebecca Cook holds an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Vermont College and teaches creative writing and literature at University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Her recent books include the novel Click (New Rivers Press) and the poetry collection I Will Not Give Over (Aldrich Press). Cook’s writing has appeared in journals including Georgia Review, Pank, Poet Lore, New England Review, Story South, Seneca Review, and Carve, among many others.
Angela Corbett is from Ohio. Her short story, “Grievers” won the 2015 Sonora Review fiction contest judged by Stuart Dybek and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has her my MFA in Fiction from California State University, Fresno where she worked as Online Managing Editor for the Normal School. Someday, she’d like to run away from all this and go to clown school.
Katie Cortese holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a PhD from Florida State. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Third Coast, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Willow Springs, and The Baltimore Review, among other journals. Cortese currently teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University where she also serves as the fiction editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.
Charlotte d’Huart grew up in France and England and lived as a teacher in Hanoi and Buenos Aires before settling in San Francisco, where she works as an editor, writes, and is constantly preoccupied with what to cook next.
Ja’net Danielo is the author of This Body I Have Tried to Write, winner of the MAYDAY 2022 Poetry Micro Chapbook Editors’ Choice Award, and The Song of Our Disappearing (Paper Nautilus, 2021). A recipient of a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council for Long Beach and the Telluride Institute’s Fischer Prize, her poems have appeared in Frontier Poetry, Mid-American Review, GASHER, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja’net teaches at Cerritos College and lives in Long Beach, CA, where she facilitates Word Women, a free virtual poetry workshop and retreat series for women and gender nonbinary writers. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.
Allison A. deFreese is a poet and literary translator. She has traveled to or lived in places such as Abilene, Aguascalientes; Ambato; Anacortes; Andalucía; Andorra; Antofagasta; Arequipa, and Asunción, and previously published work in Analecta, Anomaly, Apofenie, Arkana, Asymptote, and Atención.
Josh Denslow’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, Cutbank, Wigleaf, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, and Black Clock, among others. Josh plays the drums in the band Borrisokane and edits at SmokeLong Quarterly.
Rochelle Distelheim’s work has appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, Ascent, Press 53 Anthology, “Everywhere Stories,” Other Voices, StoryQuarterly, Salamander, JewishFiction.net, PersimmonTree.org, and awarded the Katharine Anne Porter Prize, Salamander Second prize, Finalist, Glimmer Train’s Emerging Writers, Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and Fellowships, Ragdale Foundation Fellowships, Nominations for The Best American Short Stories and The PushCart Press Prize.
Will Donnelly’s work has appeared previously or is forthcoming in Zone 3, Barrelhouse, Silk Road, [PANK], The Potomac Review, and elsewhere. Will is a fiction editor for Juked. He has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Houston. He teaches creative writing at Berry College in Rome, Georgia.
Madison Dorsey is a sophomore studying at Jacksonville University with a major in Communication Sciences and Disorders. She has previously worked as the Poetry Editor and Community Engagement Manager at Élan, an international student literary magazine. Dorsey’s fiction and poetry have also appeared in Élan, The Aquarian, and placed in the top three in the Young Authors Competition with Columbia College in Chicago. Dorsey wants to thank her parents and her teachers, Ms. Flaisig and Mrs. Melanson for all giving her the space to cultivate her voice. She is very excited to have her work in Sequestrum and to have this poem among such a high caliber of art.
Brian Doyle is an award-winning author, essayist, and editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. Doyle’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Georgia Review, and Best American Essays anthologies. He is the author of several books, notably the sprawling Oregon novel Mink River. His new novel The Plover will be published in April by St Martin’s Press.
Morgan Eklund’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, The Louisville Review, ABZ, Whiskey Island, and the Whale Road Review. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best New Poets anthology. She received the 2012 Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council and is the winner of the 2008 Sarabande Books’ Flo Gault Poetry Prize. Originally from Kentucky, she now lives in Chicago and is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Northwestern University. You can find her on Instagram at morgan_eklund_poetry.
Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as the winner of New Delta Review’s 8th annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry, his work has been anthologized and widely published in print and online publications: The New York Times, Houston Public Media, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Texas Review, New England Review, and Write About Now, among others. You can find more information about him at afalomo.com.
Jordan Farmer received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His stories have appeared in the Southwest Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Baltimore Review, Pembroke Magazine, Day One Magazine and many other publications. His novel, The Pallbearer, will be released November 6th 2018 (Sky Horse Publishing).
Jennifer Fandel’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland, Measure, museum of americana, RHINO, Floating Bridge Review (a special issue on work selected by Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen), The Baltimore Review, Midwestern Gothic, and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. She lives in St. Louis and works in the publishing industry.
Jen Fawkes lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her work has appeared in One Story, The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have won prizes from Washington Square, Writers @ Work, Blue Earth Review, and Salamander. She holds an MFA from Hollins University, a BA from Columbia University, and is at work on a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing, at the University of Cincinnati.
Brad Felver’s fiction has recently appeared in the Colorado Review, the Minnesota Review, and Beloit Fiction Journal among other journals. He teaches at Bowling Green State University.
Marta Ferguson is the co-editor of Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana Press, 2014), the author of Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Pickett (Main Street Rag, 2005), and a manuscript reader for Spark Wheel Press (https://sparkwheelpress.com/site/). Her poetry has appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including The Cortland Review, Poet Lore, So to Speak, Spillway, Rattle, and Prairie Schooner. A former poetry editor for The Missouri Review, Marta has been the sole proprietor of Wordhound Writing & Editing Services, LLC for 13 years.
Ken Fifer’s poetry collections include Architectural Conditions (2012, with architect Larry Mitnick), After Fire, Water Presents, The Moss That Rides on the Back of the Rock, and Falling Man. His work has appeared in about one hundred different journals and magazines including Barrow Street, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Literary Review, and California Quarterly. Fifer holds an MA and PhD from Michigan and is a professor of English at Penn State University.
Barbara A. Fischer’s stories have appeared in Nimrod International, Louisville Review, Tampa Review, Calyx, and the Sycamore Review, among others.
Andy Fogle is the author of Across from Now and seven chapbooks of poetry, including the forthcoming Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. His work, including a variety of nonfiction and collage, has appeared in Anomaly, Blackbird, Gargoyle, Image, Parks and Points, and Right Hand Pointing. Music at fogle.bandcamp.com. He’s from Virginia Beach and the DC area, and now lives in upstate NY.
H.E. Francis is author of two novels and four collections of stories, many reprinted in anthologies, notably the O. Henry, Best American, and Pushcart Prize volumes. He lives in Huntsville and Madrid and translates distinguished Argentine literature. His collections have won the Iowa school of Letters Award and other awards.
Laurie Frankel is an author, short-story writer, and humorist, who knows pain is the root of all comedy and is thrilled her life is so damn funny. Her books include I Wore a Thong for This?! and There’s a Pattern Here & It Ain’t Glen Plaid, about which Kirkus Reviews has this to say: “. . . laugh-out-loud funny . . . great practical suggestions . . . A quirky, earnest guide to regaining self-esteem for the modern woman.” Frankel’s literary work has appeared in a variety of journals including Shenandoah, The Literary Review, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Pedestal Magazine. She is the winner of the 2014 Time and Place Prize in Brittany, France.
George Franklin is the author of Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition in 2018), a bilingual collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (Katakana Editores), and a broadside, “Shreveport” (Broadsided Press). He is also the winner of the 2020 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize. His individual publications include: Into the Void, The Threepenny Review, Salamander, Pedestal Magazine, Cagibi, and The American Journal of Poetry, and poems are forthcoming in The Woven Tale Press Magazine and Cider Press Review. He practices law in Miami, teaches poetry workshops in Florida state prisons and is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day (Katakana Editores). His chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow, is forthcoming from Blue Cedar Press, and a new full-length collection, Noise of the World, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.
Seth Freeman writes for the stage, print and film and television, for which he created the series Lincoln Heights. His short stories have been published in literary magazines and won awards. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Southern Theatre Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Stars and Stripes, The Hill, YaleGlobal, and numerous other periodicals. There have been over two hundred sixty productions and readings of his plays in the U.S. and around the world. His work in television has received multiple Emmys, Golden Globes, Writers Guild and other awards. In 2019 he graduated with a Master’s degree from UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. He dedicates non-writing time to institutions devoted to health care, education, the empowerment of women, and human rights.
Brandon French is the only daughter of an opera singer and a Spanish dancer, born in Chicago at the end of the Second World War. She has been assistant editor of Modern Teen Magazine, a topless Pink Pussycat cocktail waitress, an assistant professor of English at Yale, a published film scholar, a playwright and screenwriter, director of development at Columbia Pictures Television, an award-winning advertising copywriter and creative director, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and a mother. French was nominated for the Kirkwood Prize in Fiction at UCLA and her work has been published in literary journals including Blue Lyra Review, Thrice Fiction, Calliope, The Nassau Review, Specs, and Soundings Review, among many others.
Cate Fricke’s fiction has been published in The Masters Review, Jabberwock Review, Fairy Tale Review, the Tin House Open Bar, and other venues, with the short story ‘Fox and Girl’ winning the 2012 Sycamore Review Wabash Prize, judged by Aimee Bender. Fricke’s play “In the Forest Grim” is published and licensed by Stage Partners. In addition, Cate’s book reviews have appeared in Slate, Bookslut, and The Brooklyn Rail. Cate has written a semi-regular column series for Catapult on fairy tales and their lasting power and influence.
John Fulton has published three books of fiction: Retribution, which won the Southern Review Fiction Prize, the novel More Than Enough, and The Animal Girl, which was long listed for the Story Prize. His fiction has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and been published in Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The Southern Review. New stories are forthcoming or have recently appeared in The Sun, Fiction, Ploughshares, and The Missouri Review, and his third story collection The Flounder will appear in the spring of 2023. He teaches fiction writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland. His first full-length collection, breaths, is available from VanZeno Press. Intrinsic Night, a collaborative project he wrote with J. E. Stanley, was published by Sam’s Dot Publishing. His most recent collection, Inhuman: Haiku from the Zombie Apocalypse, is available on Poet’s Haven Press. He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He has a penchant for Pendleton shirts, rye whiskey and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs.
Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio,resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His last collection of poems is entitled, Meteors, published by Lux Nova Press. His poetry was recently featured in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Azahares Literary Magazine, Gyroscope, Hawaii Review, Hispanic Culture Review, Newtown Review, Panoply, Prachya Review, Shoreline of Infinity, Somos en Escrito, Stillwater Review, West Texas Literary Review, and the Winter 2018 issue of UU World. He is a Shortlist Winner Nominee in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Award for Best Poem. Recently, his poems are featured in Puro ChicanX Writers of the 21st Century and in Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought. His forthcoming books of poetry are Undesirable: Race and Remembrance, Somos en Escrito Foundation Press, and The Shadow of Time, Adelaide Books.
Weaving together a love for folktales, myths, and the natural world with a desire to translate found materials into works of art, Dolan Geiman speaks the language of paper, wood, & metal. Each work of art is handcrafted from an array of materials salvaged & collected from abandoned farms, warehouses, & forgotten fields. From paper collages to metal wall sculptures, the artwork weaves tales of bygone eras & untamed wilderness in an attempt to ignite our sense of wonder for the rugged American landscape & its icons.
Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s story collection, What You Are Now Enjoying, was selected by Stewart O’Nan as winner of the 2012 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and chosen as winner of Late Night Library’s Debut-litzer Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee for both fiction and poetry and a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the Italo Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction, Sarah has received scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ragdale, Grub Street, SAFTA’s Firefly Farms, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her stories and poetry have appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, The New Guard, The Massachusetts Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, B O D Y, Hobart, and Cream City Review, among others. Her story “Ramona” was featured in a Huffington Post piece on flash fiction and also selected by Lily Hoang for the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology. Sarah was the 2012-13 Pen Parentis Fellow. She received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University and now lives and writes in her home state of Indiana, where she is a winner of the Indiana Authors Award.
D. Gilson is the author of I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays (Sibling Rivalry, 2015); Crush (Punctum Books, 2014), with Will Stockton; Brit Lit (Sibling Rivalry, 2013); and Catch & Release (2012), winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and his work has appeared in PANK, The Indiana Review, The Rumpus, and as a notable essay in Best American Essays.
Sonia Greenfield is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who calls Los Angeles home where she lives with her husband, son, and feral dog. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including The Massachusetts Review, The Antioch Review, Rattle, and 2010 Best American Poetry, and her chapbook, Circus Gravitas, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her latest pieces of fiction can be found in PANK online, and her latest essays can be found on Role Reboot. She teaches writing at USC.
Ryane Nicole Granados is a Los Angeles native and she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in various publications including Pangyrus, The Manifest-Station, Forth Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, The Atticus Review and LA Parent Magazine. Her storytelling has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and showcased in KPCC’s live series Unheard LA.
Sue Granzella was a long-time elementary school teacher in the Bay Area. Her creative nonfiction has been named Notable in Best American Essays; she has also won the Naomi Rodden Essay Award and a Memoirs Ink contest, and was runner-up in a contest with Teachers and Writers Magazine. Sue has received numerous awards in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, a contest for which she now judges the Humor category. Her work has been extensively published in literary magazines, including McSweeney’s, The Masters Review, Teachers and Writers Magazine, Night Shift Radio, Full Grown People, Ascent, Citron Review, Hippocampus, and many others. She has completed a collection of essays about teaching, and is searching for a publisher.
Devin Guthrie is a disabled, genderqueer, asexual completing a PhD in Existential Psychology at Texas A&M University. In addition to academic works on eco-anxiety and narrative psychology, their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction has appeared in PRISM International, The Notre Dame Review, Confrontation, Hubbub, TheAdirondack Review, and others.
Matt Hall has an MFA from Virginia Tech. Hall’s fiction has appeared in Redivider, The McNeese Review, and Fiction Southeast. He currently teaches at Monmouth University in New Jersey.
Pauletta Hansel’s eighth poetry collection is Friend, epistolary poems written in the early days of the pandemic; her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal and New Verse News, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018), and is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/.
Works by Elizabeth Logan Harris have appeared in Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Fiction Southeast, Glimmer Train, Longreads, Mississippi Review (2018 Nonfiction Prize), New England Review, The Rupture, and elsewhere.
Lois Marie Harrod’s most recent collection Nightmares of the Minor Poet appears in June from Five Oaks. Her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016, and her 13th and 14th poetry collections, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. She is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey.
William Heath has published three poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, and Going Places; a chapbook, Night Moves in Ohio; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, and Going Places; a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He lives in Annapolis.
Garrett Highley was, is, will be a speculative fiction writer and book artist, who currently works out of a closet in rural Eastern Washington. He received his B.S. and B.A. from Western Washington University, his M.A. in English from East Carolina University, and is collecting still more letters to append to his name. You can find his other work in the past, but mostly in the future, and this is doubly true of his presence online. He’s got an ancient LinkedIn that’s good for a laugh. He’ll have a website eventually.
Linda Hillringhouse holds an MFA from Columbia University. She was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (2014) and the second-place winner of Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (2012). She has received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared inPrairie Schooner, The Paterson Literary Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, and elsewhere.
Joshua J. Hines spent four years as a military journalist in the U.S. Marine Corps. He has been published in The 2015 Piney Dark Collection, The Subplots Lesson’s Chapbook, and The Blue Route: A national literary journal for undergraduate writers, and was also awarded the SFA 2015 Literary Award for Best Creative Nonfiction.
Jody Hobbs Hesler lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her fiction, articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, The Georgia Review, [PANK], South85, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Steel Toe Review, Prime Number, Buffalo Almanack, Pearl, A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah, Charlottesville Family Magazine, and other publications. One of Hesler’s stories was a Pushcart Prize nominee and several have appeared in regional prize anthologies.
Gabriel Houck is originally from New Orleans, and studies in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has MFAs in writing from the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Iowa, and his work appears inDrunken Boat, Flyway, Spectrum, Sweet, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, Grist, PANK, The Pinch, Moon City Review, The Adirondack Review, Fourteen Hills, Lunch Ticket, Fiction Southeast, and Mid American Review, where he was lucky enough to win the 2014 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize. He is currently working on his first short story collection, along with a nonfiction manuscript about a creationist museum in Kentucky.
Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press 2017), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in South Carolina, where he is an assistant professor of English at Francis Marion University.
Kelly Houle’s poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, The Meadow, Radar Poetry, Red Rock Review, The Round, Visitant, and others. She has an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University, where she received a Virginia G. Piper Summer Creative Writing Fellowship. Kelly is also a visual artist.
Tim Hunt’s publications include the collections Fault Lines and The Tao of Twang and the chapbooks Redneck Yoga and Thirteen Ways of Talking to a Blackbird. Hunt’s poems have appeared in many journals including Epoch, CutBank, and others. He has been awarded the Chester H. Jones National Poetry Prize and twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives, oddly, in Normal, Illinois.
Saba Z Husain was a finalist for the 2020 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and semifinalist for the 2020 Philip Levine Prize and Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and journals including Bellevue Review, Barrow Street, Bangalore Review, Cimarron Review, Texas Review, Dallas Review, Natural Bridge, Glass Poetry and elsewhere. Saba studied Creative Writing at University of Houston.
Nicole Inge received her MFA from George Mason University. She has worked with Fall for the Book, was the assistant poetry editor for So to Speak, and teaches elementary schoolers creative writing. Her work has appeared in Remington Review, Moonchild Magazine, and Cauldron Anthology.
Anthony Immergluck is a writer, critic, musician, and publishing professional with an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from NYU-Paris. Some of his recent work appears or is forthcoming in Nimrod International Journal, Sonora Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, World Nomads, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Anthony works as a traveling representative for W. W. Norton and as the Senior Marketing Associate for Tupelo Press. Originally from Chicago, he now lives and works out of Madison, Wisconsin.
Born and raised in the Midwest, Judy Ireland’s poetry benefits from the verdancy and barefaced authenticity of that working class culture which keeps her work grounded and focused in the ordinary world where extraordinary ideas reside with great subtlety and power. Her first book, Cement Shoes, won the 2013 Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. Her poems have been published in Hotel Amerika, Calyx, Saranac Review, Cold Mountain, and Folio.
Dev Jannerson is the author of the queer YA novel The Women of Dauphine (NineStar Press, 2019), which was praised by Kirkus Reviews and was a finalist in the 2019 Best Book Awards’ in the Fiction: LGBTQ category. Jannerson also has two collections of poetry, Rabbit Rabbit (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and Thanks for Nothing (Finishing Line Press, 2018); the latter was a finalist for the Golden Crown Award. They have written viral articles for Bitch magazine; won short prose contests with The Writer, So to Speak, and The Flexible Persona; and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. They live in New Orleans with their wife.
Andrea Jurjević is a native of Croatia. Her poetry collection Small Crimes won the 2015 Philip Levine Prize (Anhinga Press, 2017). Her poems appear in journals such as Epoch, TriQuarterly, Raleigh Review, The Missouri Review, and her translations of contemporary Croatian poetry in Gulf Coast, Lunch Ticket, and Drunken Boat. She is the recipient of the 2013 Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, the 2015 RHINO Translation Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches English at Georgia State University where she graduated from the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Matthew Kabik is the editor in chief of Third Point Press. He earned his MFA from Arcadia University and lives in Lancaster PA. His work appears in Structo Lit Mag, Duende, Pithead Chapel, and Luna Luna Mag, among others.
Margaret Karmazin’s credits include stories published in literary and SF magazines, including Rosebud, Chrysalis Reader, North Atlantic Review, Mobius, Confrontation, Pennsylvania Review, The Speculative Edge, Aphelion, and Another Realm. Her stories in The MacGuffin, Eureka Literary Magazine, Licking River Review, and Mobius were nominated for Pushcart awards. She has stories included in several SF anthologies, published a YA novel, Replacing Fiona, a children’s book, Flick-Flick & Dreamer, and a collection of short stories, Risk.
Tom Kelly earned a PhD in poetry from FSU’s Creative Writing Doctoral program. His fiction and poetry in New South, Ninth Letter, decomP, Redivider, Passages North, ALR, and other journals. He lives in Tallahassee, FL.
James S Kendall’s fiction has appeared in The Antioch Review, West Branch, Blood Tree Literature, and has been long-listed for the Santa Fe Writer’s Project Award. West is also a recipient of a Loft Literary Center Mentorship Award. James was born in New York City and grew up in Florida, Indiana, rural Pennsylvania, and all the roads between. He now live in Minneapolis with his wife and son.
Michael Kennedy (aka Malangeo) is an artist from New Zealand who creates wonderfully weird portraits of “creepy-cute” critters, fragile floral beings & zombie couch turnips. His work is a unique blend of traditional oil painting techniques and contemporary pop surreal style. Brought up on the irreverent humour of cartoons and comics like The Farside and Calvin & Hobbes; his artwork oozes whimsical charm, dark humour and pop culture references.
Steven Kenny was born in Peekskill, New York in 1962. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1984. His final year of art school was spent studying independently in Rome. First gaining notoriety as a freelance commercial illustrator, Steven later devoted his full attention to the fine arts. His award-winning paintings are exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe.
James R. Kincaid has been a Guggenheim Fellow, won teaching awards, and run two prestigious seminars for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Kincaid’s writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, PMLA, Nineteenth-Century Literature, JEGP, ADE Bulletin, Yale Review, New York Times Book Review, and the New Yorker. Kincaid has published many non-fiction and academic books in addition to the novels A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond (co-authored with Percival Everett) and Lost (2012). James is Professor Emeritus of English and Aerol Arnold Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Southern California and currently teaches at Pitt.
Jessica Kinnison’s work has appeared in Columbia Review, Phoebe, Entropy, and The Southern Humanities Review, among other publications. A 2018 Kenyon Review Peter Taylor Fellow, her story ‘Star Party’ placed second in the 2019 Tennessee Williams Festival Short Short Fiction Contest. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In April 2020, she was listed as the first of eight New Orleans poets to watch in POETS & WRITERS. She serves as Director of Programs at Project Lazarus, a housing facility for people living with HIV/ AIDS. A Mississippi native, she is co-founder of the New Orleans Writers Workshop and host of the Dogfish Reading Series in New Orleans.
Laurence Klavan has had short work published in The Alaska Quarterly, Conjunctions, The Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Pank, Failbetter, Stickman Review, and Anomaly, among many others, and a collection, The Family Unit’ and Other Fantasies, was published by Chizine. His novels, The Cutting Room and The Shooting Script, were published by Ballantine Books. He won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His graphic novels, City of Spies and Brain Camp, co-written with Susan Kim, were published by First Second Books at Macmillan and their Young Adult fiction series, Wasteland, was published by Harper Collins. He received two Drama Desk nominations for the book and lyrics of “Bed and Sofa,” the musical produced by the Vineyard Theater in New York and the Finborough Theater in London. His one-act, “The Summer Sublet,” is included Best American Short Plays 2000-2001, and his one-act, “The Show Must Go On,” was the most produced short play in American high schools in 2015-2016.
Jen Knox is the author of After the Gazebo (Rain Mountain Press, 2015), and her short work can be found in The Adirondack Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, Cosmonauts Avenue, Crannóg Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Istanbul Review, Room, and The Saturday Evening Post. She grew up in Ohio and now lives in San Antonio, where she teaches writing and directs the Writers-in-Communities Program at Gemini Ink.
Susan Knox writes creative nonfictions, short stories and is the author of Financial Basics, A Money Management Guide for Students published by The Ohio State University Press, 2nd edition 2016. Her stories and essays have appeared in Blue Lyra Review, CALYX, Cleaver, Forge, The MacGuffin, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. She and her husband live in Seattle, near Pike Place Market where she shops most days for the evening meal.
A.C. Koch’s work has appeared in F(r)iction, the Columbia Journal, Mississippi Review, and Exquisite Corpse; two short stories have been awarded first place in the Raymond Carver Short Story Award (2003, 2007). Koch lives in Denver where he teaches linguistics at the University of Colorado and plays guitar in a power-pop trio, Firstimers.
Sandra Kohler is the author of three collections of poetry: Improbable Music (Word Press, 2011), The Ceremonies of Longing (2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry; University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), and The Country of Women (Calyx Books, 1995). Kohler’s poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Sequestrum, The Colorado Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Natural Bridge, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, and others.
Chrissy Kolaya is a poet and fiction writer, author of Charmed Particles: a novel (Dzanc Books) and two books of poems: Any Anxious Body and Other Possible Lives (Broadstone Books). Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies and literary journals. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida, where she also directs the Writers in the Sun Reading Series. You can learn more about her work at chrissykolaya.com
Raphael Kosek’s latest book of poetry and short prose, Harmless Encounters, won the 2021 Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest. American Mythology, a finalist at Brick Road Poetry Press, was released in 2019. Her poems and prose have appeared in numerous journals such as Southern Humanities Review and Poetry East, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and selected for the Writer’s Almanac. She served as the 2019-2020 Dutchess County, NY Poet Laureate where she teaches at Dutchess Community College. www.raphaelkosek.com
Len Krisak’s work has appeared in Agni, The Antioch Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, PN Review, Raritan, The Southwest Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. His books include The Carmina of Catullus(Carcanet Press, 2014) Afterimage (Measure Press, 2014) Rilke: New Poems (Boydell & Brewer, 2015) Ovid’s Erotic Poems (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and Virgil’s Eclogues (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) He is the recipient of the Richard Wilbur Prize, Robert Frost Prize, Robert Penn Warren Prize, and is a four-time champion on Jeopardy!
Judy Kroenfeld’s books include the poetry collections Shimmer (WordTech Editions in 2012) and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize, 2nd edition, Antrim House, 2012), and the chapbook Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005). Her poems have appeared in journals including Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, Poetry International, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Women’s Review of Books, and The Pedestal; and anthologies including Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse, 2012), and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State, 2009). She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Dept., University of California, Riverside, and Associate Editor of the poetry journal, Poemeleon.
Alexis Kruckeberg received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. She tends to cook more food than is necessary and daydreams about traveling to Mexico. Her poetry has appeared in Barely South Review, Qu Literary Magazine, CALYX, and others. Alexis’ chapbook received first runner-up in the Chestnut Review 2021 Poetry Chapbook contest.
Scott Lambridis work has appeared in The Chicago Review, Slice, Memorious, Cafe Irreal, and other journals. Scott’s first novel received the 2012 Dana Award, and is represented by Katherine Boyle of Veritas Literary Agency. A MFA graduate from San Francisco State, Scott received the Miriam Ylvisaker Fellowship and three literary awards. Before that, Lambridis earned a degree in neurobiology, and co-founded Omnibucket.com, in addition to co-hosting the Action Fiction! performance series. Read more at scottlambridis.com.
Loe Lee is an illustrator, designer, and muralist living in New York City. She’s had the pleasure of working with clients such as: Coca-Cola, Grubhub, Adobe, Scholastic, and more. When she’s not drawing, she’s either trying out new Cantonese recipes or getting squished by her two large dogs. Additionally, Loe works as a senior designer for VICE Media Group and is represented by Gerald & Cullen Rapp.
Sara Lefsyk received her MFA from New England College in 2009. Her first book – We Are Hopelessly Small and Modern Birds (Black Lawrence Press) – was released in 2018. She is Managing Editor of Trio House Press and Head Seamstress and Creator of Ethel Zine and Micro Press. Past publications include such places as Tinderbox, The Greensboro Review, The New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Anthem Journal, and Bateau, among others.
Andrea Lewis writes short stories, prose poems, and essays from her home on Vashon Island, Washington. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cutthroat, Catamaran Literary Reader, and elsewhere. Two of her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is a founding member of Richard Hugo House, a place for writers in Seattle.
Xiaoly Li is a poet, photographer and computer engineer who lives in Massachusetts. Her poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Spillway, American Journal of Poetry, PANK, Atlanta Review, Chautauqua, Rhino, Cold Mountain Review, J Journal and elsewhere; and in several anthologies. Xiaoly is a 2022 recipient of Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant in Poetry. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Masters in computer science and engineering from Tsinghua University in China.
S.D. Lishan’s writing has appeared in journals including the Kenyon Review, Arts & Letters, New England Review, and Your Impossible Voice, and his book, Body Tapestries, was awarded the Orphic Prize in Poetry by Dream Horse Press. Lishan teaches creative writing at The Ohio State University.
Hannah Loeb is a poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She graduated from Yale University in 2012 and received the Clapp Fellowship for poetry. Her work will appear in the Fall/Winter issue of Ninth Letter.
Eva Lomski’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Glimmer Train, Cleaver Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Earth’s Daughters, The Best Australian Stories, Sleepers Almanac, Island, and Australia’s national The Australian newspaper. She’s placed third in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, been shortlisted several times for the UK Fish Publishing Short Story Prize and been a finalist in several Glimmer Train competitions. She has been awarded a Publisher Introduction Program Fellowship by Varuna Australia and the Grace Marion Wilson Mentorship from Writers Victoria. She has a Bachelor of Arts in journalism and has worked as a journalist, in public relations, and in administration.
Nathan Long’s work has appeared in various journals, including Tin House, Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, and Wilde. His work also appears on NPR and in anthologies such as Strange Tales V and Surreal South. Long lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Stockton University.
George Looney’s books include a collection of stories, The Worst May Be Over, which won the Elixir Press Fiction Award and was just published, The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 which was also just published, the Red Mountain Press Poetry Award-winning What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations, the novel Report from a Place of Burning which was co-winner of The Leapfrog Press Fiction Award and was published in September 2018, Hermits in Our Own Flesh: The Epistles of an Anonymous Monk (Oloris Publishing, 2016), Meditations Before the Windows Fail (Lost Horse Press, 2015), the book-length poem Structures the Wind Sings Through (Full/Crescent Press, 2014), Monks Beginning to Waltz (Truman State University Press, 2012),A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011),Open Between Us (Turning Point, 2010), The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995 Bluestem Award), and the 2008 Hymn of Ash (the 2007 Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award). George is the founder of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.
Kate Lucas writes and teaches in Minneapolis, MN. She was selected by Patricia Smith and Matt Rasmussen for the Loft Mentor Series Award in Poetry for 2014-15 and received an Honorable Mention for the series, selected by Cathy Park Hong and Peter Campion, in 2013. Her poems and essays have appeared in Sleet Magazine, rock paper scissors, and the anthology From the Pews in the Back. She holds an MFA from Hamline University and previously served as assistant poetry editor for Water~Stone Review.
Alexander Luft’s fiction has been published in The Adirondack Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Barely South Review, The Coachella Review and elsewhere. Luft’s journalistic work has appeared in multiple venues, and he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
William Luvaas has published four novels and two story collections; Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle was The Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year. Other honors include an NEA Fellowship, first place in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, The Ledge Magazine’s International Fiction Prize, and Fiction Network’s 2nd National Fiction Competition. His stories, essays, and articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Village Voice, Glimmer Train, The American Literary Review, Antioch Review, North American Review, The Sun, and the American Fiction anthology. He is fiction editor for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts.
Kathleen Lynch’s first book, Hinge, won The Black Zinnias Poetry Book Award and her second book, Lucky Witness, was published by Blue Light Press. Her chapbooks include How to Build and Owl and Alterations of Rising, both in the Select Poets Series from Small Poetry Press; No Spring Chicken, winner of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Prize; and Kathleen Lynch Greatest Hits: 1985-2001 in the Pudding House Press Greatest Hits Series. Her poem, “Abracadabra”, won a 2018 Pushcart Prize. Kathleen’s poetry and prose has appeared many journals, including Poetry, Passager, Poetry East, and Spillway, and seven anthologies. Kathleen lives in Sacramento, California.
Victoria Mack is a disabled writer, actor, and teacher who splits her time between Savannah and Brooklyn. Publications featuring her work include Minerva Rising, Papeachu, Oyedrum, Kitchen Table Quarterly, Oddball, and Flash Fiction Magazine, and has an upcoming piece in Hippocampus. Her short play “Three Women” was produced in Philadelphia. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Award, and she is a fellowship recipient from the Catwalk Art Residency. As an actor she has performed in film and television, on and off-Broadway, and all over the country. Her MFA is from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and her BA is from Barnard College. www.victoriamackcreative.com.
Nicholas Maistros holds an MFA in fiction from Colorado State University. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Nimrod, The Literary Review, Sycamore Review, and Witness. Nicholas also writes book reviews for Colorado Review and is completing his first novel.
Dheepa R. Maturi writes to explore the surprising ways in which cultures and traditions interact over time. Her poetry has appeared in The Fourth River, New York Quarterly, Crosswinds, Every Day Poems, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Her ghazal ‘The Ancient Dance’ was featured in the textbook How to Write a Form Poem. Dheepa lives with her family in Indianapolis.
Favio Martinez (Curiot) is a visual artist currently based in Mexico. He creates vibrant mythical beasts which allude to Mexican handcrafts and folk art. The works are highly detailed, rich in color, symbolist and mystic. Inspired from Pre-Hispanic cultures, nature and urban contemporaneity, the artist explores the relationship between man and nature. Learn more about Favio at http://www.faviomartinez.com/
Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self, and her poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Adanna Literary Journal, Poet Lore, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia, where she is self-isolating and writing a poem every day. www.JoanMazza.com.
Robert Garner McBrearty is the author of five books of fiction, most recently a collection of flash fiction, WHEN I CAN’T SLEEP (Matter Press). His new collection of short stories is forthcoming in University of New Mexico Press. His stories have appeared widely including in the Pushcart Prize, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review and Narrative Magazine.
Audrey McCombs is an MFA student in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University, and the Creative Director for Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. Audrey’s work has been published in Pithead Chapel, Earthspeak Magazine, Pay Attention: a River of Stones, and Beaches and Parks from Monterey to Ventura. She holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, and before going back to graduate school, she worked in natural resources management for many years. She has lived in Asia, Europe and Africa.
Jen McConnell is a fiction writer and poet. Her work has recently appeared in DASH, Paragraph Planet, October Hill, The Disappointed Housewife, and Sledgehammer Lit. Her debut collection of short stories, “Welcome, Anybody,” was published by Press 53 and she’s polishing up her second collection. Jen’s story “Earthquake Weather” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont. By day, she works as a copywriter in the corporate world. Her website is jenmcconnell.com.
John Q McDonald has published several essays and stories and is an astronomer at the University of California, where he has also assisted in teaching a writing seminar at the university’s department of architecture. McDonald lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, working on yet another draft of a novel and where he paints in oils when he has the opportunity.
Sheila Sinead McGuinness is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, also support from Vermont Studio Center and from Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. A former editor of CutBank, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, Provincetown Arts, Main Street Rag, Natural Bridge, Art New England, and Cape Cod Poetry Review. She lives barely above sea level in Provincetown.
M.B. McLatchey is a poet and writer living, writing, and teaching in Florida. Author of five books, including the award-winning titles Beginner’s Mind (Regal House Publishing, 2021) and The Lame God (2013 May Swenson Award, Utah State University Press), she is recipient of the American Poet Prize from American Poetry Journal, the Annie Finch Prize from National Poetry Review, and was recently nominated for the 2020 Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. McLatchey is Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Poet Laureate of Florida’s Volusia County, Arts Ambassador for Atlantic Center for the Arts, and U.S. Ambassador to the HundrED global foundation for education. She received her graduate degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, Master of Arts in Teaching from Brown University, MFA in Poetry from Goddard College, and her B.A. from Williams College. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com.
Adam McOmber is the author of The White Forest: A Novel (Simon and Schuster 2012) and This New & Poisonous Air: Stories (BOA Editions 2011). His work has appeared in Conjunctions, StoryQuarterly, The Fairy Tale Review, Third Coast, Quarterly West, The Greensboro Review, and Arts and Letters, among others. McOmber lives in Chicago and teaches literature and creative writing at Columbia College where he is also the associate editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika.
Abigail Mitchell is a writer and singer living in New York. Her formal education was in music performance; her informal education consists of reading every book she can find. Mitchell sings professionally, including in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera, and writes in her apartment in Upper Manhattan, supervised by her cat, Earl Grey.
A. Molotkov is an immigrant writer. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows and Synonyms for Silence; he has received various fiction and poetry awards and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. His work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Triquarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, Massachusetts Review and most other quality journals. His prose is represented by Laura Strachan at Strachan Lit; he co-edits The Inflectionist Review. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com.
Amanda Moore holds an MFA from Cornell University, where she served as managing editor for EPOCH. Moore’s poems have appeared in journals such as Third Coast, Cream City Review, and 5AM, and in anthologies such as Best New Poets and Mamas & Papas. Moore currently lives in San Francisco with her husband, daughter, and stacks of high school English papers waiting to be graded.
Haylee Morice is an artist raised and living in rural Utah. Her illustrations include themes of growth and pain, eerie cityscapes, masked figures, and other settings that ignite the imagination. With dreamy and saturated colors, subtly-shaded emotional figures serve as the focal point of her pieces.
Ellen Birkett Morris’s collection of short stories, Lost Girls, is forthcoming in September 2020. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, South Carolina Review, and Santa Fe Literary Review, among other journals. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for short fiction. Morris is a recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council in support of her fiction.
Ray Morrison’s second collection of short stories, I Hear the Human Noise, was released in 2019, and won the Gold Medal IPPY award for best regional fiction. Ray’s short stories have appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Ecotone, Story South, Fiction Southeast, Broad River Review, Carve, and others.
Chris Mpofu is a Zimbabwean-Canadian emerging writer who lives in Saskatoon. He is working on a novel that explores the experiences of those who have left their countries of origin to settle elsewhere. One of his stories appears in Little Rose Magazine, and another is due to be published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He has had stories shortlisted in the Writers’ Union of Canada Annual Short Prose Competition and the CBC Short Story Contest.
Devin Murphy’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Shenandoah and The Chicago Tribune, as well as over fifty other literary journals and anthologies. Devin won the 2009 and 2010 Student Writing Contests at the Atlantic Monthly and holds an MFA and PhD from Colorado State University and University of Nebraska – Lincoln, respectively. Murphy currently works as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bradley University.
Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet, essayist, and short story writer from Atlanta, Georgia. Her debut poetry collection Little Houses is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets, Southern Humanities Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Salt Hill, Lake Effect, New Orleans Review, Zone 3, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, and elsewhere. Currently, she is the head poetry editor for The Emerson Review at Emerson College.
María Negroni (Rosario, Argentina) has published over 20 books, including poetry, nonfiction and novels. Islandia, Night Journey, Andanza (The Tango Lyrics), Mouth of Hell, and The Annunciation have appeared in English, and her work has also been translated into Swedish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. María Negroni received a Guggenheim fellowship for poetry in 1994, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1998, the Fundación Octavio Paz fellowship for poetry in 2001, and The New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2005. She also received a National Book Award for her collection of poems El viaje de la noche, a PEN Award for Islandia as best book of poetry in translation (New York 2001), and the Premio Internacional de Ensayo y Narrativa de Siglo XXI for her book Galería Fantástica. Translations of her books Elegía Joseph Cornell/Elegy for Joseph Cornell and Archivo Dickinson/The Dickinson Archive (both translated by Allison A. deFreese) are forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in 2020-2021. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1999 to 2014, and is now director of Argentina’s first creative writing program, at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero.
Kelly Nelson is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Rivers I Don’t Live By, winner of the 2013 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. She also has work forthcoming in I-70 Review, Bluestem, Boktor and Another Chicago Magazine. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Arizona State University.
Chloe Noland is a fiction writer and information professional. She received her BA in Literature & Creative Writing from California College of the Arts, and her MLIS from San Jose State University. Her work has been previously published in Acid Free Magazine and Medium. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Daniel O’Brien’s work has previously appeared in, or is waiting in the wings of, BLOOM, The Boiler, Gandy Dancer, andthe Susquehanna Review. His work was also named honorable mention for the 2013 Red Hen Press Poetry Award. O’Brien is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at The Ohio State University.
Maureen O’Leary lives in California. Her short stories, poems, and essays can be found recently in Bourbon Penn, The Esopus Reader, Reckon Review, Occulum Journal, Flame Tree Press’ Alternate History, Penumbric Speculative Fiction, Sundog Literary, Sycamore Review, and Nightmare Magazine, among other places. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she serves as the managing editor of The Black Fork Review. Maureen is a graduate of Ashland MFA.
Timothy O’Leary is the author of Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face, and Other Tales of Men in Pain (Unsolicited Press), and Warriors, Workers, Whiners, & Weasels (Zephor Press). His stories and essays have been published in dozens of publications, and he’s been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, won the Aestas Short Story Award, was a finalist for the Mississippi Review Prize, The Mark Twain Award, and The Lascaux Prize. He graduated from the University of Montana, and received his MFA from Pacific University. More information can be found at timothyolearylit.com
Joseph O’Malley’s fiction has appeared in a score of journals, most recently in Colorado Review, A Public Space, Glimmer Train, and Crazyhorse. O’Malley was a Michener/Copernicus Fellow, and three of his stories have received Pushcart nominations. O’Malley was educated at Wayne State University, Boston College, and The University of Iowa, taught writing for four years at Boston College, and completed an M.F.A. in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was the recipient of a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship, a Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and an Alice Sheets grant. O’Malley works as a hospital pharmacist.
Dion O’Reilly has spent most of her life on a small farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her debut book, Ghost Dogs, (Terrapin Books 2020) has been short listed for a number of prizes including the Catamaran Poetry Prize and The Eric Hoffer Award. Her work appears in American Journal of Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies.
Eric Pankey is an award-winning author of ten collections of poetry, most recently Dismantling the Angel. Pankey’s writing has appeared in journals including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, Sequestrum, The Yale Review, and others. His new book, Crow-Work is forthcoming in 2015. Pankey is Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University.
Daniel Miller’s work has appeared in Conjunctions, Puerto del Sol, and Zone 3, among other publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Born in Russia, A. Molotkov moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. His poetry collection, The Catalog of Broken Things, is just out from Airlie Press. Published by Kenyon, Iowa, Cincinnati, Massachusetts, Atlanta, Tampa, Raleigh, New Orleans and Cider Press Reviews, Pif, Volt, Ruminate, 2 River and many more, Molotkov is winner of various fiction and poetry contests and a 2015 Oregon Literary Fellowship. His translation of a Chekhov story was included by Knopf in their Everyman Series. He co-edits The Inflectionist Review. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com.
Pamela Painter is the author of five story collections, and co-author, with Anne Bernays, of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Five Points, Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, New Flash Fiction Review, among others, and in numerous Flash Anthologies. Painter’s flash stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on the YouTube channel, CRONOGEO, and her work has been staged by WordTheatre in Los Angeles, London and New York. Painter’s newest collection of stories is Fabrications: New and Selected Stories from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gwendolyn Paradice is queer, hard of hearing, and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. They are the author of More Enduring for Having Been Broken (Black Lawrence Press) and co-author of Carnival Bound (or, please unwrap me) (The Cupboard Pamphlet). Their short stories and essays can be found in Tin House, Crab Orchard Review, Booth, Zone 3, and other journals. They currently reside and teach in Kentucky.
Ronit Feinglass Plank’s work has appeared in The American Literary Review, Salon, Best New Writing 2015, Proximity, and The Iowa Review (runner up, The 2013 Iowa Review Award for Fiction), among others. Her story “Gibbous” was a Narrative 2014 Winter Short Story Contest finalist and won the Eric Hoffer Award for Short Prose. She earned her MFA in nonfiction at Pacific University and is currently working on a memoir.
Melanie Perish’s poems have appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Calyx, Willawaw Journal, Brushfire, Desertwood (University of Nevada Press, 1991), Emerging Poets (Z-Publishing, 2018,2019), di-vêrsé-city (AIPF, 2017-2019), in addition to Passions & Gratitudes (Black Rock Press,2011), a collection of her poetry. Sometimes crabby/always grateful, she is a member of Poets & Writers, Inc. Poetry, friendship, and social justice are the organizing principles of her life. She cannot imagine living anywhere except in the grace of the high desert.
Bruno Pontiroli is a french pop surrealist artist based in Paris. His work aims at turning the narrow vision that we have of the world upside down; Bruno questions the identity of things and tries to reinvent it using representations or crafted settings based on a different logic. He thereby creates in his paintings a universe comprised of the absurd and paradoxes and often described as poetic or dreamlike and that definitely disturbs imagination.
Lowry Pressly is a writer of fiction, essays, and cultural criticism, whose work appears widely. He lives on Rhode Island and teaches at Harvard College.
Matthew Purdy’s work has appeared in journals such as One Story, the Mississippi Review, Quick Fiction, the Iron Horse Literary Review, the Mid-American Review, and Best New American Voices 2005, guest edited by Francine Prose. Purdy is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and received a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Texas Tech University. Currently, Purdy lives, writes, and teaches in Boston.
Charles Rafferty has published poems in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. In 2009, he received a creative writing fellowship from the NEA. Rafferty’s tenth collection of poems, The Unleashable Dog, has just been published by Steel Toe Books. His collection of flash fictions, Saturday Night at Magellan’s, was published by Fomite Press. Charles currently directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College.
Cynthia Reeves’s publishing credits include Badlands (MU Press 2008), which was awarded Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared widely. She’s won numerous awards and honors, including prizes in Columbia’s Fiction Contest, the DeMott Short Prose Contest (Quarter After Eight), New Millennium’s Short Short Fiction Contest, and Potomac Review’s Fiction Contest; several nominations for the Pushcart Prize; and residencies at Hawthornden Castle, the Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, Galleri Svalbard, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s M.F.A. program, she’s taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College’s M.F.A. program.
Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in Boston. He is the author of three collections of poetry and flash fiction, Pink X-Ray (Big Table Publishing, 2015), de/tonations (Nixes Mate Press, 2020), and Momentary Turbulence (Cervena Barva Press, 2020). His fourth collection, WordinEdgeWise, is forthcoming in 2021 from Cervena Barva Press. Five times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and twice nominated for Best of the Net Anthology, his poetry and micro fiction have appeared in, The Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, Clockhouse, Hunger Mountain, Sequestrum, Folio, decomP, Lunch Ticket, 45th Parallel, The Baltimore Review, Cultural Weekly, Into the Void, Miracle Monocle, Right Hand Pointing, and other publications. His story, “Desert Motel,” appears in the anthology Best Microfiction, 2019.
Liz Rosen is a short story writer whose work has appeared in Litro, Ascent, Pithead Chapel, The Macguffin, Sanitarium, Best Short Stories of the Saturday Evening Post, and others. Her story “Tracks” was the 2021 first prize winner of the Writer’s Digest Annual Competition in the mainstream/literary category. She is a former: writer for Nickelodeon TV, Associate Producer of primetime news, and academic. Her current obsessions are book art and ghost hunting shows. Previous obsessions include, but are not limited to, hip hop dance tutorials, Victorian fashion, and strange words like “slubberdegullion.” She has an on-going obsession with dogs.
Lisa Rosinsky has been a finalist for the Slapering Hol Chapbook Prize, the Fugue Poetry Contest, and the Morton Marr Poetry Prize, and was the recipient of the 2016 Associates of the Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Baltimore Review, Salamander, Measure, 32 Poems, and other journals and anthologies. She is a graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she was a Robert Pinsky Teaching Fellow and a teaching artist at the Boston Arts Academy. Lisa’s debut novel, Inevitable and Only, was named one of Barnes & Noble Teen’s top 12 “Most Anticipated Indie Novels of 2017.”
Helen Ruggieri is the author two books of poetry – The Kingdom Where Everybody Sings Off Key and Butterflies Under a Japanese Moon. She has an MFA from Penn State and recent creative nonfiction publications in journals including The Citron Review, Frogpond, and Haibun Today. Like much of Ruggieri’s writing, “Dead End” is a mixture of Japanese haibun and nonfiction; in this case, each section is inspired by actual events.
Sara Ryan is a third-year poetry MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University and an associate poetry editor for Passages North. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Tinderbox, Slice Magazine, New South, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review, The Blueshift Journal, Yemassee, Third Point Press and others. Her chapbook, but pink but want but blue, was a finalist in the Slapering Hol Press 2017 Chapbook Competition.
Ninn Salaün is an illustrator based in France. She likes to explore the intimate relationship between humans and nature, with a particular focus on weather phenomena and the atmospheres they create. Ninn has been working on a daily meteorological fiction project since March 2020. To see more: http://ninnsalaun.com/.
Michael Salcman poet, physician and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Café Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, a popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After (2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize), and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) was recently published by Spuyten Duyvil.
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books) and two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, Permafrost, The Pinch, and Salt Hill. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
Daniel Schifrin’s fiction and essays have appeared, among other places, in McSweeney’s, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Westwind, Jet Fuel Review, Transfer, Hinchas de Poesia, and em. He has a been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, writer-in-residence at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and a co-curator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Beyond Belief.”
Richard Schmitt has published fiction and nonfiction in Arts & Letters, The Best American Essays, Blackbird, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The North American Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah and other places. Schmitt is the author of The Aerialist, a novel (Harcourt 2001).
Adam Schuitema is the author of the short-story collection Freshwater Boys (Delphinium/HarperCollins) and the novel Haymaker (Switchgrass, 2015). “Mercy, Mercy, Me” is the closing piece from his new collection, The Things We Do That Make No Sense (Switchgrass Books). Adam’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Glimmer Train, the North American Review, The Southern Review, Indiana Review, and Triquarterly.
Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was also a semi-finalist for the Pangaea Prize and the Atlantis Award. Claire was the grand prize winner of The Maine Review’s 2015 White Pine Writing Contest. Her first book of poetry, Waiting to be Called, was published in 2015. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Jennifer Sears’ fiction and non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction International, Barrelhouse, Ninth Letter, Fence, So to Speak, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, The Boston Globe, Gilded Serpent Journal of Middle Eastern Dance and Music, and other publications. She teaches yoga, belly dance, and writing in New York City.
Indrani Sengupta is a poet from Kolkata, India, currently braving Illinois weather. She received her MFA in poetry from Boise State University and is a senior staff reader for Lantern Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming inQuarterly West, American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southeast Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.
Kerrin Piché Serna received the 3rd place prize in the 2014 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest from Carve Magazine. It was judged by her favorite writer, Aimee Bender. Kerrin’s fiction has also appeared in Rosebud Magazine, The Portland Review, and The Los Angeles Times, among others. She holds a BA in Communications from the University of California, San Diego, and has worked as a Disney performer, professional videographer, and, currently, a writer and Etsy artist. She lives in Fullerton, California with her husband and Ophelia the spoiled Shih Tzu.
Marian Kaplun Shapiro is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988), a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and two chapbooks: Your Third Wish, (Finishing Line, 2007);and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). She adores her two weeks in Paris with her true love – her husband of 55 years – every September. A resident of Lexington, she was named Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts in 2006, in 2008, in 2010, 2011, and 2014. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012.
Ross Showalter’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like Strange Horizons, F(r)iction, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Hobart, Portland Review, and elsewhere. Ross is a graduate of Portland State University’s B.F.A. program in creative writing. Showalter lives near Seattle.
Amanda Grace Shu is a biracial Asian-American poet and fiction writer, and a recent MFA graduate from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope series, and Kaleidoscope, and her fiction in Daily Science Fiction. A lover of language and all its chaotic, inventive, and endlessly changing beauty, she believes that words can build worlds both fantastical and familiar, and that creative writing is a powerful empathetic act through which we come to truly understand one another. She also obsesses over cats, writes trivia games, and names her pens after silly puns. Read more at amandagraceshu.com.
Joan Slatoff’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Exposition Review, Dime Show Review, Bangalore Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Sequestrum, and Isele.
R.T. Smith’s stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, Esquire, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and others. Smith has published four short story collections, most recently Sherburne (National Magazine Award for Fiction), and fourteen books of poems, most recently In the Night Orchard: New and Selected Poems. Three times he has won the Library of VA Poetry Book of the Year Awards. Smith is the former editor of Southern Humanities Review and current editor of Shenandoah.
Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019) with recent work in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com
Ali Solomon is a writer/illustrator from New York. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Believer. Ali is the illustrator of I Am ‘Why Do I Need Venmo’ Years Old (Running Press, 2021), and the author/illustrator of I Love(ish) New York City: Tales of City Life (Chronicle, 2022). More at: www.ali-solomon.com
Lyn Michele Stevens won the 2014 Saturday’s Child Press short story contest. Her stories have appeared in Prism Review, Greensboro Review, Eclectica Magazine, the American Literary Review, and The Saturday Evening Post, among other journals. Lyn lives in the Bronx. She is crazy in love with her growing family.
Will Stockton holds a PhD from Indiana University and teaches English at Clemson University. He writes books and essays about how people in the Renaissance had sex, and poetry about how modern people do. With D. Gilson, he is the author of Crush (Punctum Books) and Gay Boys Write Straight Porn (Sibling Rivalry Press). His poems have appeared in journals including Assaracus, Bloom, Fourth River, PANK, and Weave.
Jacob Strautmann’s debut book of poems The Land of the Dead Is Open for Businessis available from Four Way Books. Awarded a 2018 Massachusetts Poetry Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Jacob Strautmann’s poems have appeared in Agni Magazine, Forklift, Ohio, Salamander Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Appalachian Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Heritage, and Blackbird.
Marilyn L. Taylor, former Poet Laureate of the state of Wisconsin and the city of Milwaukee, is the author of six poetry collections. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Poetry, American Scholar, Measure, Able Muse, Poemeleon, Light, Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column, and the Random House anthology, Villanelles. She has been awarded First Place in contests sponsored by Winning Writers (the 2015 Margaret Reid Award) The Atlanta Review, Passager, The Ledge, Dogwood, and the GSU Review. Marilyn taught poetry and poetics for fifteen years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and served for five years as a Contributing Editor for THE WRITER.
S. P. Tenhoff’s writing has appeared in Conjunctions, The Antioch Review, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of Columbia University’s Bennett Cerf Memorial Prize for fiction, and is a recent finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize, the Calvino Prize, and the Autumn House Fiction Prize, among other awards.
J. T. Townley has published in Collier’s, Harvard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, and other magazines and journals. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MPhil in English from Oxford University. Townley teaches at the University of Virginia.
Kimi Traube’s short fiction and translations have appeared in Bomb Magazine, Electric Literature, the Best of the Net Anthology, and elsewhere. The 2020 Pamet River Prize highlighted my novel in prose poems as a semi-finalist. My translation of Juan Villoro’s The Guilty garnered praise from the New York Times and the L.A. Times. Traube completed her M.F.A. at Columbia University in 2014.
Carol Tyx lives in Iowa City, where she participates in the community sing movement and supports community-based agriculture. Her poetry has appeared in Concho River Review, Caesura, and Remaking Achilles: Slicing into Angola’s History. Currently Tyx is the artist-in-residence at Prairiewoods eco-spirituality center. She also makes a phenomenal strawberry rhubarb pie.
James Ulmer’s most recent collection of stories, The Fire Doll, was awarded the George Garrett Fiction Prize from Texas Review Press. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The North American Review, The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, New Letters and elsewhere. Ulmer is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Southern Arkansas University.
Gail Upchurch is a writer of young adult and adult fiction. She is a 2022 Kimbilio Fellow, winner of the 2022 Taint TaintTaintMagazine James Baldwin Award, a finalist for the 2022 Pen Parentis Fellowship, a 2021 Tin House YA Scholar, a 2021 Community of Writers Scholar, a finalist for the 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize, and winnerof the 2021 Tupelo Quarterly Prose Open Prize. Besides this, her short story “The Cottage” has been nominated for a 2024 O. Henry Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University’s program for writers, an MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in fiction from Chicago State University, and a BA in English from Howard University. Gail has recent short stories published or forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Obsidian: Journal & Ideas in the African Diaspora, Tupelo Quarterly, Taint TaintTaint Magazine, Torch Literary Arts, and is currently at work on a young adult novel and a linked short story collection. When she’s not making up stories, she is a professor at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Maryland, an assistant nonfiction editor at Tupelo Press, and the chapter lead for the Maryland Chapter of Women Who Submit, a nonprofit organization that empowers women and nonbinary writers to submit their work for publication.
Chris Vanjonack is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a reader at Ninth Letter, and a former language arts teacher from Fort Collins, Colorado. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Hobart, CRAFT Literary, The Rumpus, Carve Magazine, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @chrisvanjonack and read more stories at chrisvanjonack.com.
Santian Vataj was born in the former Yugoslavia to Albanian parents and raised in the Bronx, New York. Santian currently works as a history teacher at a public school in the Bronx. His work has appeared in The Cantabrigian Magazine, Prelude magazine’s website, Tin House, 100 Word Story, and Silver Needle Press.
Glen Vecchione is a poet, fiction writer, and the author of 34 nonfiction books for Sterling and Scholastic Publishing. His science, math, and history titles are published in several languages and distributed throughout the world. His poetry appears in Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA, Cincinnati Review, Comstock Review, Timberline Review, and he was named a Finalist in the 2022 Sewanee Review poetry competition as well as nominated for the 2022 and 2023 Pushcart Prizes. Glen also composes music for television with many product jingles and network themes of the late 1990s coming from his pen. Glen is a thirty-year resident of Southern California and currently divides his time between Palm Desert and San Diego. Find more at https://glenvecchione.com/.
Marcos Villatoro is the author of six novels, two collections of poetry and a memoir. His Romilia Chacón crime fiction series has been translated into Japanese, German, Portuguese and Russian. He has written and performed essays on PBS and NPR. His latest work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. A recent essay won the Dogwood Literary Award in Nonfiction. After living several years in Central America (his other home territory), Marcos moved to Los Angeles, where he holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Writing at Mount St. Mary’s University.
Emily Vizzo is a San Diego writer, editor, and educator currently serving as AME for Drunken Boat. She also volunteers with VIDA, Poetry International, and Hunger Mountain. Vizzo’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in FIELD, The Journal, The Normal School, and North American Review. She received note for an essay in Best American Essays 2013. Vizzo has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and teaches yoga at the University of San Diego.
Sara Moore Wagner lives in West Chester, OH with her husband and three small children. She is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award, and the author of the chapbook Hooked Through (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Poet Lore, Waxwing, The Cincinnati Review, and Nimrod, among others. She has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart prize, and Best of the Net.
Suzanne Warren is a Seattle-based fiction writer and essayist whose work appears or is forthcoming in Narrative, Gulf Coast, Post Road, Versal, and The Cincinnati Review. Writing awards include fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ucross Foundation. She teaches at the University of Puget Sound and is currently at work on a collection of short stories entitled Bad Gift.
Ben Weakley spent fourteen years in the U.S. Army, beginning with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and finishing at a desk inside the Pentagon. He writes poetry and essays about the enduring nature of war and the human experience. Ben’s work appears in the anthologies, We Were Not Alone: a Community Building Art Works Anthology and Our Best War Stories by Middle West Press. Other poems and articles appear or are forthcoming in Cutleaf, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Ekphrastic Review, and Vita Brevis, among other publications. His awards include first place in 2021 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards, and first prize in the 2019 Heroes’ Voices National Poetry Contest. Today, Ben lives in Northeast Tennessee with his wife, their two children, and one very mischievous hound dog. You can read more of Ben’s work at https://bit.ly/BenWeakley.
KA Webb teaches at UAB and edits for an atl-weekly in Birmingham, Ala. where she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for an investigative series on the Girl Scouts and trends in closing camps. Webb holds an MFA from UNCW, and in addition to several Southern news outlets, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Arts & Letters, Jabberwock Review, Quarter After Eight, So to Speak, and others.
Allen Weber lives in Hampton, Virginia with his poet wife and two of their three sons. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies—including Arc Poetry Magazine, The Fourth River, Iris Literary Journal, Naugatuck River Review, Splash—Haunted Waters Press, Terrain, Unlikely Stories, and Up the Staircase Quarterly.
J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry in many places including The Nation, The New Republic, The Gettysburg Review, Agni Review, Catamaran, APR, Salamander, Catamaran, North American Review, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Water-Stone, The New York Times, Willow Springs, Crazyhorse, Peripheries, and Poetry (Chicago). His sixth book of poems, A Tree Becomes a Room, was winner of the White Pine Poetry prize selected by Denusha Lemeris. His second novel, The Last Tale of Norah Bow, ill be published in 2024 by Regal House Publishing. He is the editor-at-large for Plant-Human Quarterly.
Lori White earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her story, “Gambling One Ridge Away” won first place in the 2013 Press 53 Open Award for Flash Fiction. Recent work has appeared in The Journal Online, Kenyon Review Online, and Pithead Chapel. She teaches English at Los Angeles Pierce College.
Evan Morgan Williams has published over forty short stories in such magazines as Witness, Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, and Antioch Review. A collection of Evan’s stories, Thorn, won the Chandra Book Prize at BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). The book later won the gold medal in the IPPY award series. A second collection of his stories, Canyons, won the gold medal in the Next Generation Independent Book Awards.
John Sibley Williams is the author of eight collections, most recently Controlled Hallucinations (FutureCycle Press, 2013). Four-time Pushcart nominee, he is the winner of the HEART Poetry Award and has been a finalist for the Rumi, Best of the Net, and The Pinch Poetry Prizes. John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and Board Member of the Friends of William Stafford. A few previous publishing credits include: American Literary Review, Third Coast, Nimrod International Journal, Rio Grande Review, Inkwell, Cider Press Review, Bryant Literary Review, Cream City Review, RHINO, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Richard Wollman is the author of Evidence of Things Seen (Sheep Meadow Press), Changeable Gods (Elyse Wolf Prize, Slate Roof Press), and A Cemetery Affair (Finishing Line Press). His awards include the Gulf Coast Prize and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. His poems appear in New England Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, and Notre Dame Review. He is Professor Emeritus of Literature & Creative Writing at Simmons University. His poems and sculptures may be found at richardwollman.com.
Dallas Woodburn is a 2013-14 Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she recently won second place in the American Fiction Prize and her work is forthcoming in American Fiction Volume 13: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by American Writers (New Rivers Press). Her short story collection was a finalist for the 2012 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; individual stories have appeared in Superstition Review, The Nashville Review, Louisiana Literature, Ayris, and Monkeybicycle, among others. She has been honored with the international Glass Woman Prize, the Brian Mexicott Playwriting Award, and a merit scholarship to attend the Key West Literary Seminar. A former fiction editor of Sycamore Review, she also served as editor of the anthology Dancing With The Pen: a collection of today’s best youth writing. Woodburn graduated with her MFA in Fiction from Purdue University and received her B.A. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she studied under Aimee Bender. She is also the founder of Write On!
S. Yarberry is a trans poet and writer. Their poetry has appeared in AGNI, Tin House, Indiana Review, jubilat, Notre Dame Review, The Boiler, among others. Their other writings can be found in Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, Bomb Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. They currently serve as the Poetry Editor of The Spectacle. S. has their MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and is now a PhD candidate in Poetry & Poetics at Northwestern University. Their first book, A Boy in the City, is forthcoming from Deep Vellum.
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.