Marcia Arrieta is a poet, artist, & teacher. Her work appears in Otoliths, Marsh Hawk, Angel City, Whiskey Island, DASH, Empty Mirror, Anastamos, Eratio, Barrow Street, Fourteen Hills, and Hobart, among others. She is the author of three poetry collections: perimeter homespun and archipelago counterpoint (BlazeVOX) and triskelion, tiger moth, tangram, thyme (Otoliths). Her fourth chapbook vestiges is just out from Dancing Girl Press. She edits and publishes Indefinite Space, a poetry/art journal-- www.indefinitespace.net.
Kathryn M. Barber teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she also serves as Associate Editor for Ecotone magazine. She received her MFA in Fiction from UNC Wilmington and her MA in English Literature from Mississippi State University. When she's home in Tennessee, all she can think about are Atlantic waves. When she's home in Wilmington, her head fills with fog from missing the Smokies.
Daisy Bassen is a practicing physician and poet. She graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, The Delmarva Review, The Sow’s Ear, and Tuck Magazine as well as multiple other journals. She was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, a finalist in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Prize, a recent winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest and was doubly nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.
Alana Benson is a freelance writer living in Lander, Wyoming. Her work has been previously published in BlazeVOX's 2016 edition, and the University of Vermont's literary journal Vantage Point. She has written six non-fiction titles on topics ranging from identity theft to birth control.
Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of the memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (Beacon Press), and the poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Books). Her other books include Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. Her novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns, will be published this December by Black Lawrence Press. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been widely published in places such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, O (The Oprah Magazine), The Rumpus, Salon, Longreads, and more, and have received numerous honors, including a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016, and the 2018 Multi Genre Maverick Writer Award. She lives in Incline Village, NV and teaches at Sierra Nevada College and Antioch University.
Margaret Emma Brandl’s writing has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Yalobusha Review, Pithead Chapel, Cartridge Lit, and CHEAP POP. She earned her PhD at Texas Tech University and her MFA at Notre Dame and currently works as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College. Visit her website (https://margaretemmabrandl.tumblr.com/) or say hi on twitter (@margaret_emma).
Hannah Cajandig-Taylor resides in the Upper Peninsula, where she is an MFA Candidate at Northern Michigan University and an Associate Editor for Passages North. Her prose and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gordon Square Review, Drunk Monkeys, Crack the Spine, Gravitas, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Coffin Bell, and Sidereal Magazine, among others. She has a bike named Stella and enjoys murder documentaries. You can find her on twitter @hannahcajandigt, or on her website at www.hannahcajandigtaylor.weebly.com.
A.I. Christensen was born in Las Vegas and lived there for eighteen years before volunteering to serve in Guatemala for two years as a missionary. He is now pursuing a major in English Language and minors in Latin, Spanish, and Creative Writing at Brigham Young University.
Courtney Cliften was born in a small town in Nevada, and moved to Reno to complete a bachelor's degree in writing and political science.
A.L.A. Covington has an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Spalding University, where she also studied poetry and other creative writing genres. Her short stories, poetry, and other works have appeared in various publications, including FLARE: The Flagler Review, The Delmarva Review, Crosspoint (translated into Bulgarian), Equlibrists, and the anthology Woman’s Works. In 2017, The Louisville Review nominated one of her stories, “The Lamb,” for a Pushcart Prize.
Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the recently-released lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and for Poetry City. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com
Jessica Renee Dawson, lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia and has studied poetry and English writing through North Island College. Her poetry has appeared in: Rutger Hauer's Soap Box Poets, Poetry Quarterly, INK IN THIRDS, Haiku Journal, and Wild Plum haiku journal. Presently, J.R. is studying poetry under award winning American poet, Lynne Knight, at monthly workshops. She finds the island a natural setting of inspiration for writing poetry, painting, and photography.
Claire Dockery is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and Tulane University's 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Madcap Review, Cold Creek Review, Tulane Review, Helen Lit Mag, and others. She is a poetry reader for The Cerurove and can be found on Twitter at @ClaireDockery.
Maia Dolphin-Krute is a writer and artist based in Boston, having graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2014. She is the author of Ghostbodies: Towards a new theory of invalidism (Intellect, 2017), Visceral: Essays on Illness Not as Metaphor (punctum books, 2017), Opioids: Addiction, Narrative, Freedom (punctum books, 2018) and the chapbook Aron Ralston: States of Injury (glo worm press, 2016). Her essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in American Chordata, Full-Stop, Gigantic Sequins and elsewhere, and her performances have been shown at venues including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. More information about these and other projects can be found at www.ghostbodies.com.\
Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Interrupted Geographies, published by Trio House Press, is her third collection of poetry. It was featured as the Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection for July 2017. Her other books include: Gold Passage and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air. Her work has been published in numerous publications including San Francisco Chronicle, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market 2013, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
Brandon French is the only daughter of an opera singer and a Spanish dancer, born in Chicago sometime after The Great Fire of 1871. She has been (variously) assistant editor of Modern Teen Magazine, a topless Pink Pussycat cocktail waitress, an assistant professor of English at Yale, a published film scholar, 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. Seventy-one of her stories have been accepted for publication by literary journals and anthologies, she’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart, she was an award winner in the 2015 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Short Story Contest, and her short story collection, “If One of Us Should Die, I’ll Move to Paris,” is now available on Amazon.
Janay Garrick currently resides in Tallahassee, Florida where she is completing a low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. She also holds an M.A. in Cross-Cultural Studies from Fuller Seminary and a B.A. in Creative Writing from Pepperdine University. Most days you can find her running her business (Understory Creatives), listening to birds, and standing on her head when really stressed.
Reyna Marder Gentin attended college and law school at Yale. Her fiction and personal essays have been published widely, and her debut novel, Unreasonable Doubts came out in November, 2018. Find out more at reynamardergentin.com
Gwenaëlle Gobé is an Animator, Illustrator and Documentary Filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA. My comics have been printed in Swindle Magazine, 3x3 Illustration Annual, Desert Island’s Smoke Signal and Obey the Giant Clothing.
Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection) - both by Random House. Currently, she is working on a dystopian novel about oldsters. She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University.
Maggie Herlocker is a third-year MFA student studying at the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. Her short story “The Carousel” was published by The Writing Disorder in their Spring 2018. She can be found on Twitter @itsonlymaggie.
Michelle Renee Hoppe holds a B.A. in English from Brigham Young University. She studies special education in Manhattan. Her work can be found in Leading Edge, The Write Launch, Prometheus Dreaming, and Name Calling. She is the Founder of Capable, which is a publication dedicated to stories of disability and illness.
Ann Huang is a China-born, Mexican-raised and US-based author, poet, and filmmaker who published four award-winning collections, most recently a Shaft of Light. Huang’s lyrical poetry speaks of a dreamy state of being by melting present into its past, with surrealistic gestures permeating space and time.
Eliot Hudson is a native New Yorker and has been featured as "Author of the Month" for The Missing Slate and read at their Edinburgh Reading; he’s also represented Lalitamba by reading at the Popsickle Brooklyn Literary Festival. His work has appeared in The Missing Slate, Lalitamba, Every Day Fiction, The Punxsutawney Spirit, Exploration, and his poems have been featured in the collections, Garlic and Sapphire, and Cleaves. His latest poems will be published in the print journal Gravitas (Volume 18.2), and Castabout Art & Literature, and Hudson is participating in the Adirondack PoemVillage project in Saranac Lake (2019). His forthcoming short story, “Russian Dolls” will be coming out in Mystery Weekly next month, while “Hummingbird Suite” will be coming out in Story Of later this year. He’s studied under Rick Moody and earned two Masters Degrees (Creative Writing & Modern Literature) at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). Hudson also writes music and performs as “Eliot Hudson and the Hudson Underground” throughout New York City and as far as Barcelona, London, Rome, Romania, Vietnam and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. His most recent music video was accepted in the Caribbean Sea International Film Festival and the Creation International Film Festival (Ottawa) where it won best Music Video (the Video will be available once the awards season has concluded as per their rules; his original song, “Sinners in Church,” is currently available on iTunes and Spotify).
Rose Hunter’s latest book of poetry, glass, was published by Five Islands Press (Australia, 2017), and her next book of poetry, Anchorage, is forthcoming from Haverthorn Press (UK, 2020). Born in Australia, she lived in Canada for ten years and Mexico for almost as long. She lived in Las Vegas for two memorable months. More information about her can be found at rosehunterwriting.wordpress.com.
Joseph Linscott is a writer and a teacher currently living in Denver, CO. His work has appeared in Sporklet 11, Ursa Literary Review, as well as others. His thoughts on politics and baseball can be found on Twitter @JosephALinscott.
Ellen Marcantano is a former psychotherapist who now spends her time writing. She is a native New Yorker. She currently lives in rural upstate N.Y. on a small farm. Her work has appeared in Dime Show Review and is forthcoming in the December issue of Potato Soup Journal.
Kayleigh Marinelli is an MFA candidate at The Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her fiction has appeared in The Haunted Traveler. She is currently working on her first novel involving an imaginative teenager and a dinosaur.
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with well over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).
Ann E. Michael, poet, essayist, librettist, and educator, is the author of four chapbooks and the full-length collection Water-Rites (Brick Road Poetry Press). She has been blogging about poetry, nature, books, and speculative philosophical thinking since 2011. Her next collection, The Red Queen Hypothesis, will be published in 2021.
Andrew Miller is an essayist, poet, and photographer whose work includes the chapbook You Must Know This and personal essay collection If Only the Names Were Changed (CCM 2016). He co-authored Turn the Lights On with Dr. Chrisanne Gordon, M.D. (Resurrecting Lives Foundation) about the effects of mTBI and recovery from it. He holds an MFA from Miami University. Find out more via Andrew-Miller.com.
Elizabeth Quiñones-Zaldaña earned a B.A. in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her poetry has been published in From Snowcaps to Desert Flats: An Anthology of Latino Writers in Nevada; Legs of Tumbleweeds, Wings of Lace: An Anthology of Literature by Nevada Women; Clark: Poetry from Clark County, Nevada; and 300 Days of Sun. Her chapbook, Bougainvillea, was released in August of 2019 by Tolsun Books. She lives in southern Nevada with her husband and three children.
Mick Ó Seasnáin has continually attempted to farm his quarter acre lot in the small town of Wooster, Ohio while catering to the diverse and often unanticipated needs of his tripod-ish dog and three rowdy children. His wife tolerates his creative habits and occasionally enables his binges of writing and photography. Find more of his work at https://tinyurl.com/OSeasnain.tinyurl.com/OSeasnain
Ola Ovito is a Toronto-based conceptual artist whose work spans poetry, writing, dance and film. Ola studied under Andrea Thompson at the University of Toronto, and has performed in Canada and Tanzania, where she previously worked for the Canadian Foreign Service. Ola is also a classically trained dancer and enjoys urban styles including Afrobeats and Jamaican Dancehall. She has written for publications including Dance Current and Verge Magazine, and is developing her first Spoken Word EP through the LOUD Artist Development Program through the Ryerson University Music Den, for release in 2020.
J Pascutazz is a graduate of Bennington College's writing program. Current resident of Brooklyn, NY. Published by Right Hand Pointing, Dime Show Review, Poets Reading the News, and forthcoming in The Paragon Journal. The Photograph is an excerpt from a novel-in-the works entitled The Trash Fire Orgy.
Christina M. Rau is the author of the sci-fi fem poetry collection, Liberating The Astronauts (Aqueduct Press, 2017), which won the SFPA 2018 Elgin Award, and the chapbooks WakeBreatheMove (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and For The Girls, I (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She also writes for Book Riot about all things book-related. In her non-writing life, when she’s not teaching yoga, she’s watching the Game Show Network. http://www.christinamrau.com
Jack Reilly is a 35 year old Chicago based artist and writer. You can see more of his work at www.dashhappenstance.com, or follow him on instagram @dashhappenstance.
Cameron Schneberger is a poet and comedian who lives in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Minetta Review and Yellow Chair Review. He is a member of The Poetry Brothel. twitter: @armyofmoths
Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Mary Sesso is a retired nurse who volunteers at the National Children's Center where she sits on the Human Rights Committee. She holds a MFA from Vermont College, is active in three poetry workshops and her work has appeared in a number of journals. The Open Window, her chapbook, was published last January.
In addition to poetry, Rochelle Shaposhnick is writing a children's Biography, and is developing a ½ hour series for television. She is a perpetual cheerleader for her daughter, a Freshman at Carnegie Mellon, and for her husband, an Entertainment Attorney. In her previous life, Rochelle worked in the entertainment industry. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and their Mini Goldendoodle.
Hailing from The City of Los Angeles, California, Melody Sokolow, is an Autistic writer of poems and prose. She’s a child at heart and a mother or two grown sons on the spectrum, successfully pursuing their life's passions.. In her youth, she danced professional ballet, married a highly successful musician, then spent her time creating in the kitchen and tending her six herbaceous gardens. Currently living in Portland, Oregon, she draws upon her rich memory and imagination, and the glory of the internal landscape that she adventures in and you will feel this in her writing.
Betty Stanton is a writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in various journals including Reservoir and Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and is forthcoming in several other publications and anthologies. She received her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso.
Timothy D. Starnes is originally from the small town of Waxhaw, North Carolina, a place consisting of aging train tracks and a few overpriced antique stores -his personal knack for the odd, outrageous and macabre shines through his work, spicing his works with odd occurrences, invasive visitors from outer space, drag queens, the mishaps of suburbia, small town politics, underground societies, hand puppets with PTSD, hauntings and more.
John Taylor Jr. is an artist from Hebron, Maryland. Mr. Taylor graduated from Salisbury University with a bachelor’s degree in art. Mr. Taylor’s work has been published in various literary magazines and online magazines such as: Echoes and Visions, Weirderary, Saturday Morning Comics, Chicago Literati, Chaleur Magazine, and recently in Inlandia: A Literary Journey. Mr. Taylor can usually be found at home with his wife, Caitlin, and their beagle Belle.
Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, the Same, The Mystic Blue Review, Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemian, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Deep Overstock, Lavender Review, Voice of Eve, Dash, The Courtship of Winds, Mizmor Anthology, Mojave Heart Review, NōD Magazine, Toyon Literary Magazine, Sincerely, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Rabid Oak. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, The Showbear Family Circus, and Headway Quarterly.
Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro, and as co-editor for Cobalt Review. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he also turns a lathe, crafting pens under the name Scorched Ink Penturning. His first collection “How We Bury Our Dead” (Cobalt Press) was released in March, 2015, and "Conflict Tours" (Cobalt Press) was released in 2017.
Jordan Upshaw never got over her childhood obsession with stories. If you tell her a good story, she won’t forget it, and odds are she’ll write about it someday. Her fiction, memoirs, and poetry can be found in Sea Foam Mag, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Chivomengro, and more.
April Vázquez is the winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and Carve Magazine's Prose & Poetry Contest and a Best of the Net, Orison Anthology award, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her favorite line from a novel is, "Jane had occasionally tried to develop her own hidden depths, but she never could decide what to hide and how far down." Some of April's writing can be found at https://aprilvazquez.wordpress.com.
Sherre Vernon is an educator, a poet and a believer in the mystical power of words. Sherre has written two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings, her postmodern novella and The Name is Perilous, a 2008 poetry chapbook. Sherre's work is heartbreaking, richly layered, lyrical and intelligent. She strives for linguistic efficiency by stepping outside of familiar phrases into a dynamic, shimmering grammar.
Sydney Virginia is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in English Writing. She is inspired by contemporary poets such as Zachary Schomburg, CA Conrad, Tiana Clark and Ada Limón. Two of her poems are published in Gravitas: Volume 18 Issue 2 by Pub House Books. She lives in Philadelphia.
Elizabeth Wadsworth Ellis was an outside child, conceived outside marriage, wed outside her culture, served outside her country (in Serbia, Sofia and St. Petersburg, Russia) and holds beliefs outside her upbringing. She also jumped out of an airplane.
Victoria Walters is a 2017 graduate of Hendrix College, with a double major in English—Creative Writing and Spanish. She currently lives in Murcia, Spain teaching English as a second language and she is eager to get out into the literary world and see where her writing can take her.
Scott Wilson lives in Chicago where he teaches and helps edit the Hotel Amerika lit journal. He has a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia College. His work can be found in the Chicago Anthology by Belt Publishing, Stoneboat, Bicycle Times, Quip Music Magazine, Saltfronts, Route 7, Miracle Monocle, Thin Air, Paperbark, The Write Launch, and others. He's currently working on an essay collection.
Kathryn M. Barber teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she also serves as Associate Editor for Ecotone magazine. She received her MFA in Fiction from UNC Wilmington and her MA in English Literature from Mississippi State University. When she's home in Tennessee, all she can think about are Atlantic waves. When she's home in Wilmington, her head fills with fog from missing the Smokies.
Daisy Bassen is a practicing physician and poet. She graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Oberon, The Delmarva Review, The Sow’s Ear, and Tuck Magazine as well as multiple other journals. She was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, a finalist in the 2018 Adelaide Literary Prize, a recent winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest and was doubly nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.
Alana Benson is a freelance writer living in Lander, Wyoming. Her work has been previously published in BlazeVOX's 2016 edition, and the University of Vermont's literary journal Vantage Point. She has written six non-fiction titles on topics ranging from identity theft to birth control.
Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of the memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (Beacon Press), and the poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Books). Her other books include Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. Her novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns, will be published this December by Black Lawrence Press. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been widely published in places such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, O (The Oprah Magazine), The Rumpus, Salon, Longreads, and more, and have received numerous honors, including a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016, and the 2018 Multi Genre Maverick Writer Award. She lives in Incline Village, NV and teaches at Sierra Nevada College and Antioch University.
Margaret Emma Brandl’s writing has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Yalobusha Review, Pithead Chapel, Cartridge Lit, and CHEAP POP. She earned her PhD at Texas Tech University and her MFA at Notre Dame and currently works as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College. Visit her website (https://margaretemmabrandl.tumblr.com/) or say hi on twitter (@margaret_emma).
Hannah Cajandig-Taylor resides in the Upper Peninsula, where she is an MFA Candidate at Northern Michigan University and an Associate Editor for Passages North. Her prose and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gordon Square Review, Drunk Monkeys, Crack the Spine, Gravitas, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Coffin Bell, and Sidereal Magazine, among others. She has a bike named Stella and enjoys murder documentaries. You can find her on twitter @hannahcajandigt, or on her website at www.hannahcajandigtaylor.weebly.com.
A.I. Christensen was born in Las Vegas and lived there for eighteen years before volunteering to serve in Guatemala for two years as a missionary. He is now pursuing a major in English Language and minors in Latin, Spanish, and Creative Writing at Brigham Young University.
Courtney Cliften was born in a small town in Nevada, and moved to Reno to complete a bachelor's degree in writing and political science.
A.L.A. Covington has an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Spalding University, where she also studied poetry and other creative writing genres. Her short stories, poetry, and other works have appeared in various publications, including FLARE: The Flagler Review, The Delmarva Review, Crosspoint (translated into Bulgarian), Equlibrists, and the anthology Woman’s Works. In 2017, The Louisville Review nominated one of her stories, “The Lamb,” for a Pushcart Prize.
Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the recently-released lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and for Poetry City. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com
Jessica Renee Dawson, lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia and has studied poetry and English writing through North Island College. Her poetry has appeared in: Rutger Hauer's Soap Box Poets, Poetry Quarterly, INK IN THIRDS, Haiku Journal, and Wild Plum haiku journal. Presently, J.R. is studying poetry under award winning American poet, Lynne Knight, at monthly workshops. She finds the island a natural setting of inspiration for writing poetry, painting, and photography.
Claire Dockery is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and Tulane University's 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Madcap Review, Cold Creek Review, Tulane Review, Helen Lit Mag, and others. She is a poetry reader for The Cerurove and can be found on Twitter at @ClaireDockery.
Maia Dolphin-Krute is a writer and artist based in Boston, having graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2014. She is the author of Ghostbodies: Towards a new theory of invalidism (Intellect, 2017), Visceral: Essays on Illness Not as Metaphor (punctum books, 2017), Opioids: Addiction, Narrative, Freedom (punctum books, 2018) and the chapbook Aron Ralston: States of Injury (glo worm press, 2016). Her essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in American Chordata, Full-Stop, Gigantic Sequins and elsewhere, and her performances have been shown at venues including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. More information about these and other projects can be found at www.ghostbodies.com.\
Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Interrupted Geographies, published by Trio House Press, is her third collection of poetry. It was featured as the Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection for July 2017. Her other books include: Gold Passage and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air. Her work has been published in numerous publications including San Francisco Chronicle, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market 2013, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
Brandon French is the only daughter of an opera singer and a Spanish dancer, born in Chicago sometime after The Great Fire of 1871. She has been (variously) assistant editor of Modern Teen Magazine, a topless Pink Pussycat cocktail waitress, an assistant professor of English at Yale, a published film scholar, 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. Seventy-one of her stories have been accepted for publication by literary journals and anthologies, she’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart, she was an award winner in the 2015 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Short Story Contest, and her short story collection, “If One of Us Should Die, I’ll Move to Paris,” is now available on Amazon.
Janay Garrick currently resides in Tallahassee, Florida where she is completing a low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University. She also holds an M.A. in Cross-Cultural Studies from Fuller Seminary and a B.A. in Creative Writing from Pepperdine University. Most days you can find her running her business (Understory Creatives), listening to birds, and standing on her head when really stressed.
Reyna Marder Gentin attended college and law school at Yale. Her fiction and personal essays have been published widely, and her debut novel, Unreasonable Doubts came out in November, 2018. Find out more at reynamardergentin.com
Gwenaëlle Gobé is an Animator, Illustrator and Documentary Filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA. My comics have been printed in Swindle Magazine, 3x3 Illustration Annual, Desert Island’s Smoke Signal and Obey the Giant Clothing.
Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection) - both by Random House. Currently, she is working on a dystopian novel about oldsters. She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University.
Maggie Herlocker is a third-year MFA student studying at the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. Her short story “The Carousel” was published by The Writing Disorder in their Spring 2018. She can be found on Twitter @itsonlymaggie.
Michelle Renee Hoppe holds a B.A. in English from Brigham Young University. She studies special education in Manhattan. Her work can be found in Leading Edge, The Write Launch, Prometheus Dreaming, and Name Calling. She is the Founder of Capable, which is a publication dedicated to stories of disability and illness.
Ann Huang is a China-born, Mexican-raised and US-based author, poet, and filmmaker who published four award-winning collections, most recently a Shaft of Light. Huang’s lyrical poetry speaks of a dreamy state of being by melting present into its past, with surrealistic gestures permeating space and time.
Eliot Hudson is a native New Yorker and has been featured as "Author of the Month" for The Missing Slate and read at their Edinburgh Reading; he’s also represented Lalitamba by reading at the Popsickle Brooklyn Literary Festival. His work has appeared in The Missing Slate, Lalitamba, Every Day Fiction, The Punxsutawney Spirit, Exploration, and his poems have been featured in the collections, Garlic and Sapphire, and Cleaves. His latest poems will be published in the print journal Gravitas (Volume 18.2), and Castabout Art & Literature, and Hudson is participating in the Adirondack PoemVillage project in Saranac Lake (2019). His forthcoming short story, “Russian Dolls” will be coming out in Mystery Weekly next month, while “Hummingbird Suite” will be coming out in Story Of later this year. He’s studied under Rick Moody and earned two Masters Degrees (Creative Writing & Modern Literature) at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). Hudson also writes music and performs as “Eliot Hudson and the Hudson Underground” throughout New York City and as far as Barcelona, London, Rome, Romania, Vietnam and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. His most recent music video was accepted in the Caribbean Sea International Film Festival and the Creation International Film Festival (Ottawa) where it won best Music Video (the Video will be available once the awards season has concluded as per their rules; his original song, “Sinners in Church,” is currently available on iTunes and Spotify).
Rose Hunter’s latest book of poetry, glass, was published by Five Islands Press (Australia, 2017), and her next book of poetry, Anchorage, is forthcoming from Haverthorn Press (UK, 2020). Born in Australia, she lived in Canada for ten years and Mexico for almost as long. She lived in Las Vegas for two memorable months. More information about her can be found at rosehunterwriting.wordpress.com.
Joseph Linscott is a writer and a teacher currently living in Denver, CO. His work has appeared in Sporklet 11, Ursa Literary Review, as well as others. His thoughts on politics and baseball can be found on Twitter @JosephALinscott.
Ellen Marcantano is a former psychotherapist who now spends her time writing. She is a native New Yorker. She currently lives in rural upstate N.Y. on a small farm. Her work has appeared in Dime Show Review and is forthcoming in the December issue of Potato Soup Journal.
Kayleigh Marinelli is an MFA candidate at The Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her fiction has appeared in The Haunted Traveler. She is currently working on her first novel involving an imaginative teenager and a dinosaur.
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with well over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).
Ann E. Michael, poet, essayist, librettist, and educator, is the author of four chapbooks and the full-length collection Water-Rites (Brick Road Poetry Press). She has been blogging about poetry, nature, books, and speculative philosophical thinking since 2011. Her next collection, The Red Queen Hypothesis, will be published in 2021.
Andrew Miller is an essayist, poet, and photographer whose work includes the chapbook You Must Know This and personal essay collection If Only the Names Were Changed (CCM 2016). He co-authored Turn the Lights On with Dr. Chrisanne Gordon, M.D. (Resurrecting Lives Foundation) about the effects of mTBI and recovery from it. He holds an MFA from Miami University. Find out more via Andrew-Miller.com.
Elizabeth Quiñones-Zaldaña earned a B.A. in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her poetry has been published in From Snowcaps to Desert Flats: An Anthology of Latino Writers in Nevada; Legs of Tumbleweeds, Wings of Lace: An Anthology of Literature by Nevada Women; Clark: Poetry from Clark County, Nevada; and 300 Days of Sun. Her chapbook, Bougainvillea, was released in August of 2019 by Tolsun Books. She lives in southern Nevada with her husband and three children.
Mick Ó Seasnáin has continually attempted to farm his quarter acre lot in the small town of Wooster, Ohio while catering to the diverse and often unanticipated needs of his tripod-ish dog and three rowdy children. His wife tolerates his creative habits and occasionally enables his binges of writing and photography. Find more of his work at https://tinyurl.com/OSeasnain.tinyurl.com/OSeasnain
Ola Ovito is a Toronto-based conceptual artist whose work spans poetry, writing, dance and film. Ola studied under Andrea Thompson at the University of Toronto, and has performed in Canada and Tanzania, where she previously worked for the Canadian Foreign Service. Ola is also a classically trained dancer and enjoys urban styles including Afrobeats and Jamaican Dancehall. She has written for publications including Dance Current and Verge Magazine, and is developing her first Spoken Word EP through the LOUD Artist Development Program through the Ryerson University Music Den, for release in 2020.
J Pascutazz is a graduate of Bennington College's writing program. Current resident of Brooklyn, NY. Published by Right Hand Pointing, Dime Show Review, Poets Reading the News, and forthcoming in The Paragon Journal. The Photograph is an excerpt from a novel-in-the works entitled The Trash Fire Orgy.
Christina M. Rau is the author of the sci-fi fem poetry collection, Liberating The Astronauts (Aqueduct Press, 2017), which won the SFPA 2018 Elgin Award, and the chapbooks WakeBreatheMove (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and For The Girls, I (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She also writes for Book Riot about all things book-related. In her non-writing life, when she’s not teaching yoga, she’s watching the Game Show Network. http://www.christinamrau.com
Jack Reilly is a 35 year old Chicago based artist and writer. You can see more of his work at www.dashhappenstance.com, or follow him on instagram @dashhappenstance.
Cameron Schneberger is a poet and comedian who lives in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Minetta Review and Yellow Chair Review. He is a member of The Poetry Brothel. twitter: @armyofmoths
Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Mary Sesso is a retired nurse who volunteers at the National Children's Center where she sits on the Human Rights Committee. She holds a MFA from Vermont College, is active in three poetry workshops and her work has appeared in a number of journals. The Open Window, her chapbook, was published last January.
In addition to poetry, Rochelle Shaposhnick is writing a children's Biography, and is developing a ½ hour series for television. She is a perpetual cheerleader for her daughter, a Freshman at Carnegie Mellon, and for her husband, an Entertainment Attorney. In her previous life, Rochelle worked in the entertainment industry. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and their Mini Goldendoodle.
Hailing from The City of Los Angeles, California, Melody Sokolow, is an Autistic writer of poems and prose. She’s a child at heart and a mother or two grown sons on the spectrum, successfully pursuing their life's passions.. In her youth, she danced professional ballet, married a highly successful musician, then spent her time creating in the kitchen and tending her six herbaceous gardens. Currently living in Portland, Oregon, she draws upon her rich memory and imagination, and the glory of the internal landscape that she adventures in and you will feel this in her writing.
Betty Stanton is a writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in various journals including Reservoir and Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and is forthcoming in several other publications and anthologies. She received her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso.
Timothy D. Starnes is originally from the small town of Waxhaw, North Carolina, a place consisting of aging train tracks and a few overpriced antique stores -his personal knack for the odd, outrageous and macabre shines through his work, spicing his works with odd occurrences, invasive visitors from outer space, drag queens, the mishaps of suburbia, small town politics, underground societies, hand puppets with PTSD, hauntings and more.
John Taylor Jr. is an artist from Hebron, Maryland. Mr. Taylor graduated from Salisbury University with a bachelor’s degree in art. Mr. Taylor’s work has been published in various literary magazines and online magazines such as: Echoes and Visions, Weirderary, Saturday Morning Comics, Chicago Literati, Chaleur Magazine, and recently in Inlandia: A Literary Journey. Mr. Taylor can usually be found at home with his wife, Caitlin, and their beagle Belle.
Ayşe Tekşen lives in Ankara, Turkey where she works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University. Her work has been included in Gravel, After the Pause, The Write Launch, Uut Poetry, The Fiction Pool, What Rough Beast, Scarlet Leaf Review, Seshat, Neologism Poetry Journal, Anapest, Red Weather, Ohio Edit, SWWIM Every Day, The Paragon Journal, Arcturus, Constellations, the Same, The Mystic Blue Review, Jaffat El Aqlam, Brickplight, Willow, Fearsome Critters, Susan, The Broke Bohemian, The Remembered Arts Journal, Terror House Magazine, Shoe Music Press, Havik: Las Positas College Anthology, Deep Overstock, Lavender Review, Voice of Eve, Dash, The Courtship of Winds, Mizmor Anthology, Mojave Heart Review, NōD Magazine, Toyon Literary Magazine, Sincerely, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Rabid Oak. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Straylight, The Showbear Family Circus, and Headway Quarterly.
Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro, and as co-editor for Cobalt Review. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he also turns a lathe, crafting pens under the name Scorched Ink Penturning. His first collection “How We Bury Our Dead” (Cobalt Press) was released in March, 2015, and "Conflict Tours" (Cobalt Press) was released in 2017.
Jordan Upshaw never got over her childhood obsession with stories. If you tell her a good story, she won’t forget it, and odds are she’ll write about it someday. Her fiction, memoirs, and poetry can be found in Sea Foam Mag, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Chivomengro, and more.
April Vázquez is the winner of the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and Carve Magazine's Prose & Poetry Contest and a Best of the Net, Orison Anthology award, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her favorite line from a novel is, "Jane had occasionally tried to develop her own hidden depths, but she never could decide what to hide and how far down." Some of April's writing can be found at https://aprilvazquez.wordpress.com.
Sherre Vernon is an educator, a poet and a believer in the mystical power of words. Sherre has written two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings, her postmodern novella and The Name is Perilous, a 2008 poetry chapbook. Sherre's work is heartbreaking, richly layered, lyrical and intelligent. She strives for linguistic efficiency by stepping outside of familiar phrases into a dynamic, shimmering grammar.
Sydney Virginia is a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in English Writing. She is inspired by contemporary poets such as Zachary Schomburg, CA Conrad, Tiana Clark and Ada Limón. Two of her poems are published in Gravitas: Volume 18 Issue 2 by Pub House Books. She lives in Philadelphia.
Elizabeth Wadsworth Ellis was an outside child, conceived outside marriage, wed outside her culture, served outside her country (in Serbia, Sofia and St. Petersburg, Russia) and holds beliefs outside her upbringing. She also jumped out of an airplane.
Victoria Walters is a 2017 graduate of Hendrix College, with a double major in English—Creative Writing and Spanish. She currently lives in Murcia, Spain teaching English as a second language and she is eager to get out into the literary world and see where her writing can take her.
Scott Wilson lives in Chicago where he teaches and helps edit the Hotel Amerika lit journal. He has a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia College. His work can be found in the Chicago Anthology by Belt Publishing, Stoneboat, Bicycle Times, Quip Music Magazine, Saltfronts, Route 7, Miracle Monocle, Thin Air, Paperbark, The Write Launch, and others. He's currently working on an essay collection.