Elmaz Abinader is a writer from Oakland who has published a memoir, Children of the Roojme, a collection of poems, In the Country of My Dreams and has written and performed several plays. She teaches at Mills College and is the co-founder of VONA (www.voicesatvona.org)

Samuel A. Adeyemi is a young writer from Nigeria. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, Leavings Lit Mag, The Shore, African Writer, The African Writers Review, Jalada, and elsewhere. When he is not writing, he enjoys watching anime and listening to a variety of music. You may reach him on Twitter and Instagram @samuelpoetry.

Hasheemah Afaneh, MPH is a Palestinian-American writer and public health professional based in New Orleans. Her work draws on her experiences born in one place and raised in two – New Orleans and Palestine. The themes her works center on are social justice, equity, identity, and day-to-day musings of the world. She has contributed to Fair Observer, Sinking City Literary Magazine, Poets Reading the News, HuffPost, Shado Mag, This Week in Palestine, and others. Her poetry is forthcoming in December in Grlsquash Magazine and Caldera Magazine. Quality time for her is family time, laughs with friends, and reading. You can find more of her work on norestrictionsonwords.wordpress.com. She tweets at its_hashie.

Maha Ahmed is an Egyptian poet. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon. Her work explores ideas of identity and belonging.

Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru and raised in the United States. He is a novelist and journalist. He lives in New York with his wife, Carolina Guerrero, and their two sons. He teaches at the Columbia University Journalism School.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, short story writer and game producer. Her first poetry collection, Breakpoint, was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist and received the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. To find out more about Breakpoint, go to betsyaoki.com/breakpoint or follow her on Twitter at @baoki.

Rae Armantrout, one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets, stands apart from other Language poets in her lyrical voice and her commitment to the interior and the domestic.

Daniel Backman is an Architect and Artist living in Petaluma, CA. His collages and paintings describe future urban landscapes that are in a constant state of transformation. He has shown his artwork at numerous galleries in Oakland and Boston.

Daniel works for TLCD Architecture in Santa Rosa, leading exciting and complex projects including mixed-use housing and visual and performing arts facilities for the Bay Area’s Community Colleges. He has dedicated his career to designing spaces that support community gathering and creative growth.

Scott Bailey grew up in Raleigh, Mississippi, in a family of carpenters and preachers. He is the author of Thus Spake Gigolo (NYQ Books), a collection of poems that chart an evolution of a fictionalized self deeply rooted in religious fanaticism then immersed into secularism. His degrees include an MFA in creative writing from NYU, and a PhD in creative writing from FSU.

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and A Symmetry (The Song Cave, 2018). He’s the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, NYFA, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and others. Ari lives & teaches in the Bay Area.

Kate Robinson Beckwith is a poet and intermedia book artist living in Oakland, CA where she co-founded both the Manifest Reading Series, a founding series of the East Bay Poetry Summit, and Material Print Machine, an artist-run printing and binding studio in Omni Commons.

Lora Berg has published poems in Colorado Review, The Carolina Quarterly, etc. as well as a collaborative book with Mr. Canute Caliste (1914-2005).  Lora worked as Poet-in-Residence at the Saint Albans School, and holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins. Berg once served as Cultural Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris.  Lora is a proud mom and grandma.

Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points, a longform lyric essay about chronic pain and trauma. She’s the host of the Amy’s Kitchen Organics reading series and the coordinator of the Alley Cat Bookstore residency program. She’s currently working on a novel. More at amyberko.com.

Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is the author of the poetry chapbooks Anywhere Avenue, Palimpsest, Heaven Below and To the Break of Dawn. He has facilitated poetry workshops in places in NYC and Oalkand including Rikers Island Penitentiary, the Oakland Public Library’s Oakland Word Program, UNC-Chapel Hill, among others.

Brittany Billmeyer Finn is a queer poet and playwright living in Northampton, MA where she is an aspiring social worker in the Smith MSW program. Her full length book, the meshes, written through the filmography of Maya Deren is out from Black Radish Books.

Lisa Birman is the author of How To Walk Away, winner of the 2016 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction. Her work has appeared in Floor Journal, Milk Poetry Magazine, Trickhouse, and not enough night. Lisa teaches for Naropa’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing.

Nova Cypress Black is the quiet one yo mama warned you about. A Black queer supremacist. Existentially tired & 100% over being realistic. They write, dance/choreograph, direct, teach & mind they business. NOVA currently resides in Atlanta, GA. This nomadic introvert is a slant rhyme. gold cutlery. a fistful of sunflower seeds.

Dmitry Borshch was born in Dnepropetrovsk, studied in Moscow, and lives in New York. His drawings and sculptures have been exhibited at the National Arts Club (New York), Brecht Forum (New York), ISE Cultural Foundation (New York), the State Russian Museum (Saint Petersburg).

Daniel Borzutzky’s latest poetry collection is Lake Michigan (Pitt Poetry Series, 2018). He is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press), recipient of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia (Co-im-press) won the American Literary Translator’s Association 2017 National Translation Award. He teaches in the English Department and Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Shannon Brazil’s therapist once told her, “Nobody’ll ever accuse you of being a simple woman.” Shannon is the recipient of a Literary Arts Special Fellowship for Women Writers. Her prose appears in Hip Mama Magazine, Nailed Magazine, and The Manifest-Station. Shannon loves cephalopods.

Claire Brock is a bodyworker and a student of the Writer’s Studios. Bodies, trauma, borders, and unruly bonds of love are all addressed in her work. Her poetry was featured in Jade Beall’s book The Bodies of Mothers: A Beautiful Body Project. She lives in Tucson with her son, Ameyalli.

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is a poet, songwriter, and country singer. It is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), Gowanus Atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), and coediter of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari Edwards. Julian maintains a blog of handwritten poems at https://julianspoems.tumblr.com

Asia Bryant-Wilkerson is a poet and installation artist from Los Angeles, California. She recently finished an MFA in Performance & Performance Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Claire Calderón is an Oakland-based writer and curator at work on her first novel. The recipient of fellowships from Hedgebrook, VONA, Tin House, and The San Francisco Writers Grotto, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Claire is the co-producer of the New American Story Project and manager of The Ruby SF.

Tara Campbell (www.taracampbell.com) is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University in 2019. Previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary. She’s the author of a novel, TreeVolution, and three collections: Circe’s Bicycle, Midnight at the Organporium, and Political AF: A Rage Collection.

Sara Campos is a lawyer with an immigration background and an MFA in creative writing from Mills College. She has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in The Wandering Song, Central American Writing in the United States, St. Ann’s Review, Literary Mama, and Platte Valley Review, among others.

Tri-an is a queer Vietnamese-American author and artist based in the Bay Area. A student in the MFA creative writing program at Mills College, they write sci-fi short stories about robots, marginalized identities, and neurodivergence.

Jill Bergantz Carley is a Pushcart-nominated poet living in Murphys, California. She’s been awarded fellowships & residencies at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Sundress Publications, Mineral School, and elsewhere. She has a redwood tree in her back yard & she’s grateful every day.

MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal. She is a recipient of the 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award and Alameda County Arts Leadership Award. Her latest publications can be found in bags of coffee from Nomadic Coffee and online at Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day.

Julia Cohen is the author of two poetry books, Triggermoon Triggermoon from Black Lawrence Press, and most recently, Collateral Light, from Brooklyn Arts Press.

Jason B. Crawford (They/He) was born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is out through Variant Lit. Their second chapbook Twerkable Moments is due from Paper Nautilus Press in 2021. Their debut Full Length How we Fed the Hunger will be out in 2022 from Sundress Publications.

Chanice Cruz is originally from Brooklyn, New York and has lived much of her life in Richmond Virginia where she became involved with Slam Richmond. She currently co-hosts a Latinx bookish podcast called The Poet and the Reader. Her poems have been published in several literary journals. She received a bachelors in English from Queens College.

Garin Cycholl’s recent work appears in Car Poems, The Examined Life, the Hypertext Review, as well as in a one-act play, “Ms. Liberty and Her Chastity Belt.”

Cassandra Dallett lives in Oakland, CA. Cassandra has published multiple books of poetry, been published in over a hundred journals, been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes, and graced many stages. She runs The Badass Bookworm Podcast, co-hosts MoonDrop Productions, and hosted the recently defunct monthly workshop ONTWOSIX. Look for links and books on cassandradallett.me.

Dyan McBride is a Bay Area based performer, director and theatre instructor.  She is a member of SAG/AFTRA, AEA and is represented by Boom Models and Talent. MFA-UC Davis.

Daniel Smith-Rowsey is a Bay Area-based independent, award-winning filmmaker, PhD, instructor at Napa Valley College, and writer of books published by Bloomsbury and Palgrave MacMillan.

Piper J. Daniels (she/ her) is a Michigan native and queer intersectional feminist currently living in the American Southwest. Her debut essay collection, Ladies Lazarus, won the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, was longlisted for the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award For the Art of the Essay, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction. She is the founder of Creative Consultation Collective, a manuscript consulting service dedicated to the support and proliferation of LGBTQ / POC voices.

Matthew Clark Davison is a writer and educator living in San Francisco. He earned a BA and MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU, where he now teaches in the BA/MA/MFA departments.

Derek Des Anges is an emerging cross-genre author living and working in London, with a strong interest in mycorrhizal networks, urban histories, antihumanism, and queering the self/other divide. His work also appears in Lemonspouting Journal, Missing Slate, and Vulture Bones Magazine, among others.

Anthony Doerr was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of the story collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall, the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, and the novels About Grace and All the Light We Cannot See, which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Linda Harris Dolan is a poet, editor, and professor. She holds an M.A. in English & American Literature, and an M.F.A in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Starworks Creative Writing Fellow. She’s taught at Rutgers University and NYU. She’s a 2016 Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee.

Danielle Dutton is the author of Margaret the First (Catapult, 2016), SPRAWL (reissue forthcoming in the fall of 2018 from Wave Books with an afterword by Renee Gladman), and Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007). Her writing has also appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Guardian, Fence, BOMB, etc. She is on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis and is co-founder and editor of the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project.

Rebekah Edwards is an associate professor in critical and digital pedagogies at California College of the Arts. Dr. Edwards has PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, in English with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality.

Joshua Effiong, Frontier VI, is a writer and digital artist from the Örö people of Nigeria. His works have appeared/forthcoming in The Kalahari Review, Rough Cut Press, Madrigal Press, Titled House, The Indianapolis Review, Chestnut Review, etc. Author of a poetry chapbook Autopsy of Things Left Unnamed (2020). 

Dalia A. Elmanzalawy was born in Cairo, Egypt and raised in Los Angeles, CA. An avid reader and writer, she is currently working on a debut fiction novel and a short story anthology simultaneously. She holds a BS in biochemistry and BA in creative writing from the University of California, San Diego. Her work can be found in English, French, and Arabic in Middle East Times, Le Progrès Egyptien, El Tahrir, and The Magazine, among others.

Aliyyah Fazil was born in Georgetown, Guyana raised in Toronto and currently resides in Nova Scotia, Canada. She previously has had her work published in Broken Pencil Magazine and is the editor of the Women’s Prison Network, a news zine by and for female identified  prisoners and is distributed across Canada.

Epiphany Ferrell lives in a berm home named Underhill across from a corner of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. Her stories appear in Best Microfiction 2020 and 2021, Best Small Fictions 2021, New Flash Fiction Review, Ghost Parachute, Pulp Literature, and other places. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and won the 2020 Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize. Find her at epiphanyferrell.com.

Kristin Fouquet is a photographer and writer from lovely New Orleans. Her photography appears in online journals and magazines, on chapbook and book covers, album artwork, and occasionally in galleries. When not behind the camera, Kristin writes literary fiction and is the author of five books. Visit her website Le Salon: https://kristin.fouquet.cc.

Bodil Volmer Fox is a fiber artist and sculptor. She holds an MFA and BA in Art with an emphasis on textiles from San Francisco State University, an AA in Visual Communication from Shoreline Community College in Seattle and has studied at Engelsholm Textile Højskole College, Vejle, Denmark.

Larnie Fox is a visual and sound artist known for paintings, monumental bamboo sculpture, sound art, sound installations and performances. His kinetic/sound sculpture and paintings have been shown in one-person shows at The Lab, The Richmond Art Center and The Randall Museum, and in numerous group shows and performances in the SF Bay Area and Salt Lake City, Utah.

Tim Gilmore writes about the haunted South. Gilmore is the author of a number of books, including the historical novel about the founder of Jacksonville, The Book of Isaiah: A Vision of the Founder of a City, illustrated by his colleague Shep Shepard.

Joel Gregory is a freelance graphic designer living in Oakland, CA. His work is deeply concerned with the psychic and material impact designed objects have on the world around them. Also a poet and visual artist, Gregory employs an astute critical lens that sidesteps trends and digs into the cultural zeitgeist.

Toya Groves’ creativity as a social Justice advocate inspires her work in education and community organizing. She has worked in public schools as a High School Teacher and at Community Based organizations as a Counselor and Program Manager. As a mother, writer, and teacher she studies, interprets, and expresses the role “Mama’s Magic” plays in surviving systemic racism, sexism, and able-ism. 

Lena Shepherd Hamilton of Boston, Massachusetts currently resides in Decatur, Georgia. She has spent the past twenty-odd years teaching literature and writing, and cultivating a collection of poetry. She is a member of the Rhode Island Writers Colony (’18) and participates annually in the community’s celebration and presentation of in-coming artists.  You can find her work on penumbraonline.org.

Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941. She is most known for her work My Life (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980).

Brenda Hillman has published ten collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press. In her five most recent collections, each book receives her ‘sustained attention’ to one the natural elements. In 2016 she was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor.

Originally from Oakland, California, Chinaka Hodge is a poet, educator, playwright and screenwriter. In 2010, Chinaka received USC’s prestigious Annenberg Fellowship to continue her studies at its School of Cinematic Arts. She received her MFA in Writing for Film and TV in 2012.

Darryl Holmes received his MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he also served as an editorial reader for the university’s international journal of contemporary writing, The Literary Review.  He has additional new work out or forthcoming in African American Review, Kind Writers Literary Magazine, New York Quarterly, Obsidian, Pensive Journal, River Heron Review, and Toho Journal.

Patricia Horvath is the recipient of the Bellevue Literary Review’s Goldenberg Prize in Fiction for a story that was accorded a Special Mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize anthology and of a Notable Essay designation in the 2016 edition of Best American Essays. She teaches at Framingham State University, Massachusetts and is an editor at The Massachusetts Review.

Jen (Schalliol) Huang received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her chapbook, Means of Access, was printed through The Kenyon Review. Her work has or will appear in The Cincinnati Review, decomP, Gone Lawn, RHINO, The Shore, and elsewhere. She is a two-time Pushcart as well as a Best New Poets nominee.

A graduate of the Bilingual MFA Program at UT El Paso, Javier O. Huerta’s debut collection Some Clarifications y otros poemas (Arte Publico 2007) received the 31st Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from UC Irvine. Huerta is currently a PhD student in the English Department at UC Berkeley, where he studies Bad Poetry of the 19th Century.

In a past century Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. They are a retired math professor, have won two poetry chapbook prizes and published two collections. Another collection is in press.

Writer, poet, educator and activist Audacious IAM was born and raised in Ruleville, Mississippi and now resides in Oakland, California. She holds her BA Degree from Rust College and MFA Degree from Mills College. Audacious IAM has shared the stage with writers such as Sonya Renee Taylor, Natasha Carrizosa, Trey Amos—as well as artists such as R&B Diva Monifah, Valerie Troutt’s MoonCandy, Blue Nertiti of Les Nubians and more!

Sabat Ismail is an artist, writer, and student based in the Greater Toronto Area. Her work has been featured in Spacing and RaceBaitr. She is passionate about storytelling and Black art. She is currently working on a thesis project and zine that will explore the experiences of Black girls, women, trans as well as gender non-binary experiences related to bicycling.

Cora is an illustrator, painter, and aspiring animator based in the Bay Area. Having lived all over California with her father and sisters who had a strong liking for drawing, comics, movies and fine art culture, there grew a strong love for creating things. On entering high school turning her passion into a career. Cora was given her first studio at the age of 14 where she painted and sculpted. This then sparked her interest in figurative drawing, comics, animation, and digital Illustration. While going to school at Huntington Beach high school they offered extensive art classes. Studying entertainment art, commercial art, life drawing, sculpting etc. To further her skill set she took on precollege courses at Laguna College of Art and Design her senior year. After graduating she decided to take on the reins of the bay area scene. Currently she is residing in Berkeley and is a full time freelancer in character design, comic book illustration, multimedia storyboards and mural installation. While continuing her studies Illustration at Academy of Art University.

Ryan James is a writer from the Greater Boston area. He enjoys stories that focus on people and their moments, which is something he tries to capture in his own work. Sometimes that means venturing into the weird. Ryan is currently studying for his MA in English at Bridgewater State University. This is his writing debut.

Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1967. After studying with the poet Robert Creeley at the University of Buffalo, she earned her MFA from Brown University. Her poetry is known for its startling yet inviting aesthetic. 

Robin Jeffrey was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming to a psychologist and a librarian, giving her a love of literature and a consuming interest in the inner workings of people’s minds. Both have served her well as she pursues a career in creative writing. She currently resides in Bremerton, Washington.

Tyehimba Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

Ivy Johnson is a poet and performance artist living in Oakland, CA. She is a founding member of The Third Thing, an Oakland based performance art duo that creates multi-media art in the service of an ecstatic feminist agenda. Her book As They Fall, a collection of poetic fragments published on 110 note cards, was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2013.

I.S. Jones is an American/Nigerian, poet, and music journalist. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, The Offing, The Shade Journal, and elsewhere. Her work was chosen by Khadijah Queen as a finalist for the 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at UW—Madison.

Esther Aminata Kamara is a Dutch-Sierra Leonean writer and researcher. In her writing, Esther tries to explore the bridges and boundaries between West-African and western culture.  In order to find the right medium for her message, she experiments with different formats; from creative short stories and academic articles, to impressions and research articles.

Heather Kamins grew up in New York and Massachusetts, and has an MFA in creative writing (fiction) from Mills College in Oakland, CA. She is the recipient of a 2016 Artist Fellowship in fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

bhanu kapil is the author of five books, most recently Ban en Banlieue from Nightboat Books. She also maintains a blog of daily/extreme life, THE VORTEX OF FORMIDABLE SPARKLES.

Sheba Karim’s first young adult novel was Skunk Girl. Her second young adult novel, That Thing We Call a Heart, is named one of the Best Contemporary Teen Reads of 2017 and Best Teen Books of 2017 with a Touch of Humor by Kirkus Reviews, as well as an Amelia Bloomer Best Feminist Books for Young Readers by the American Library Association.  

Avren Keating is a poet and artist. They’ve published in EOAGH, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Omniverse, and THEM: A Trans Literary Journal. Avren also hosts Waves Breaking, a podcast for trans and gender-variant poetry.

Vernon Keeve III is a writer from the south, and a teacher in Oakland. His full book of poetry Southern Migrant Mixtape is available with Nomadic Press.

Ingrid Keir is a poet, curator, publisher and healer. She runs Feather Press, an independent women’s literary press based in the Bay Area, and Toward the Light Healing, an energy healing practice. She is co-founder of the WordParty, a long-running San Francisco poetry and jazz series. Her latest book of poetry is The Choreography of Nests (2016). She facilitates writing workshops in the Bay Area that often integrate healing and wellness into the practice of writing.

Elise Kelly (she/her) studies creative writing at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and is published by For Women Who Roar, Pomme Journal, Coffin Bell, and others. An avid fan of feminist and experimental literature, Elise tries her best to push the boundaries of “acceptable” writing for a young lady. Her interests include clowns, womxn, and magical realism.

JD Kloosterman is a teacher and urban fantasy author from Michigan who recently published The Hospitaller Oath, the second book in The Solomon Code series. JD has also written a number of other short stories, including “Lost in Translation” in Cast of Wonders and “Final Inspection” in Daily Science Fiction online. Find him at the-solomon-code.com.

Richard Kostelanetz is the nephew of the conductor Andre Kostelanetz. He has a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. in American History from Columbia University under Woodrow Wilson, NYS Regents, and International Fellowships; he also studied at King’s College London as a Fulbright Scholar.

I am a dumpster diving bag lady in training, collecting discarded food and artifacts for art making from trash bins across the land. I wander through alleyways, over rooftops and hang from tree limbs in search of spaces to create magic. I love frozen burrito’s, dancing and silent movie mondays at the paramount.

Zuzanna is an illustrator and designer. She aims to capture the visual narrative of the subject and combine it with a distinct atmosphere. As an artist, she values time and effort put into the construction of a high-quality work of art.

Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus and four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling. He is also the creator and writer of a comic book Victor LaValle’s DESTROYER. He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in Washington Heights with his wife and kids. He teaches at Columbia University.

Rex Leonowicz is a performing artist, community organizer, and poet living in Oakland, CA. With expertise in a wide range of fields, he provides freelance services in the realms of editing + writing, arts administration + personal assistance, event coordination, and graphic design.

Sylke Lesinski is currently pursuing a Master’s in Creative Writing, her fiction focusing especially on the macabre and strange. When not writing, she’s flying in the back of a jet with the U.S. Air Force. Currently, she calls Oklahoma home, where she can be found walking the fields with her rescue dog, Hamlet.

erica lewis was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her books include the precipice of jupiter (2009, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), camera obscura (2010, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), murmur in the inventory (2013), among others.

Raina J. León, PhD, is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols (2008), Boogeyman Dawn (2014), and sombra: dis(locate) (2016), as well as the chapbook profeta without refuge (2016). She is a co-founding editor of The Acentos Review. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education.

Laura is a poet based in New York City. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Green Mountains Review, The Rumpus, and Pembroke Magazine, among others. She’s a member of Brooklyn Poets and Sweet Action Writing Collective. Say hi on Twitter or IG @Pennyscientist.

Tiffany Lindfield is a social worker by day, trade, and heart advocating for climate justice, gender equality, and animal welfare. By night, she is a prolific reader of anything decent and a writer.

Born in Manapla, Philippines, Cheena Marie Lo is a genderqueer poet based in Oakland, California. They co-founded the Manifest Reading Series, which featured mainly queer experimental artists and writers.

Lisa Ludden is the author of the chapbook Palebound (Flutter Press, 2017). A finalist for the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize 2018, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Stonecoast Review, Permafrost, Natural Bridge, MockingHeart Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her first full-length book of poetry.

Heather J. Macpherson writes from New England. Her writing has appeared in many fine places including The Worcester Review, Gravel, Blueline, Spillway, Pearl, The Broken Plate and Radius Lit. She has work forthcoming in the Bennington Review. Heather is a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of Rhode Island.

Sean Madden is an analyst at the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. His story, “How the Lonesome Engine Drivers Pine,” was a finalist for Alternating Current Press’s 2018 Luminaire Award for Best Prose. He is also a co-recipient of the 4th Annual John Updike Review Emerging Writers Prize. His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Broad River Review, Ponder Review, Roanoke Review, Waccamaw, and Dappled Things. He holds an MFA from the University of Kentucky and lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada with his wife and sons. Visit him at seanmadden.org.

Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her story “Madlib” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press). Her story “Surfaces” was selected for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 2019. She is the Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel.

Robert Manaster’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Rosebud, Birmingham Poetry Review, Image, Maine Review, and Spillway. His co-translation of Ronny Someck’s The Milk Underground was awarded the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. He’s published poetry book reviews in such publications as Rattle, Colorado Review, and Massachusetts Review.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and raised in Los Angeles. She has published six novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the twentieth century.

Conor Mc Donnell is a Toronto poet who recently published two chapbooks in Canada; The Book of Retaliations, (Anstruther Press), and Safe Spaces, (Frog Hollow Press). In 2018, he was awarded honorable mention in The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and he is hard at work on forthcoming poetry manuscripts.

Nicole McCarthy earned her MFA from the University of Washington Bothell. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Redivider, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, The Shallow Ends, Crab Fat Magazine, Ghost Proposal, Moonchild Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, Civil Coping Mechanism’s A Shadow Map anthology, FIVE:2:ONE Magazine, the 2018 Best American Experimental Writing anthology and others. Her work has also been performed and encountered as projection installation pieces throughout Tacoma and Seattle and her written work can be found at nicolemccarthypoet.com. She is a 2018 Artist Trust GAP award recipient.

Amber is a Dinè poet, zinester and feminist. Originally from Northern Arizona (Dinè bikeyah) she writes in celebration of land, love and living. She is an MFA candidate in the creative writing program at Mills College.

“I’m a full time artist, primarily working in oils.”

Born in Brussels, Rae Meadows grew up in Cleveland and San Diego. She received a B.A. in Art History from Stanford University, and an M.F.A. in Fiction at the University She lives in Brooklyn, NY

Maryse Meijer is the author of Heartbreaker (FSG 2016) and Northwood (forthcoming Black Balloon, 2018). She lives in Chicago.

Joshua Merchant is a native of East Oakland exploring queerness, blackness, and the complexities of their intersection through literary arts. Merchant has had the honor to be published as a finalist for the June Jordan Poetry Prize anthology Walk These Streets in 2007, a collaboration with Alice Walker and OUSD.

Roseline Mgbodichinma is a Nigerian writer, poet and blogger who is passionate about documenting women’s stories. Her work has been published on Illino Media, Isele, Native Skin, Down River Road, Amplify, jfa Human Rights Magazine, Blue Marble Review, Indianapolis Review, The Hellebore and elsewhere. You can reach her on her blog at www.mgbodichi.com where she writes about art, issues, and lifestyle.

Margaret Miller is a Nicaraguan-American born photographer from Vallejo, California whose work focuses on the body, life struggles and systematic endurance by documenting the experiences that manifest within it.

Sandeep Kumar Mishra is a bestselling author of “One Heart- Many Breaks-2020”, an outsider artist, a poet and a lecturer. He is a guest poetry editor at Indian Poetry Review. He has received “Readers Favourite Silver Award-21”, “Indian Achievers Award-21”,IPR Annual Poetry Award-2020 and Literary Titan Book Award-2020.He was shortlisted for “2021 International Book Awards”, “Indies Today Book of the Year Award 2020” and “Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize 2021” and “Oprelle Rise up Poetry Prize 2021”.He was also “The Story Mirror Author of the Year” nominee-2019. Find him at https://www.sandeepkumarmishra.com.

Marshall J. Moore is a writer and martial artist. Born and raised on the tiny Pacific island of Kwajalein, he has once a thousand dollars’ worth of teapots to Jackie Chan and on one occasion was tracked down by a bounty hunter for owing $300 in late fees to the Los Angeles Public Library.

Laura Moriarty earned a degree in social work before returning for her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Kansas. She was the recipient of the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Poet and editor Jennifer Moxley was born and raised in San Diego. She studied at University of California, San Diego; the University of Rhode Island, where she completed her BA; and Brown University, where she earned an MFA. Moxley has won the Denver Quarterly’s Linda Hull Award, and her work has been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2002) and others.

Elizabeth Mudenyo is a poet, artist, and organizer based in Toronto, Canada. She was a fellow of the 2018 Poetry Incubator in Chicago, and a participant of the 2020 Hurston/Wright Poetry Weekend with Danez Smith. Her first poetry chapbook, With Both Hands, is available through Anstruther Press.

Matt Mueller is an Asian-American Los Angeles-based writer who wishes he could effectively layer outfits in the summer. He has a degree in Creative Writing and once sold a story to comic anthology “Strange Romance Vol. 3.” When he’s not writing fiction, he’s winning the love of his girlfriend’s dog and booking his next ticket (travel, concerts, etc. You get it).

Brendan Murdock is a Venice native who attended Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica. The 48-year-old has an MFA in fine art and has worked as a graphic artist.

Paired in art and life, Delta N.A. work simultaneously revealing deep meanings and speaking directly to the heart. In an ethereal space, shapes and figures dance in a world between dream and reality, telling timeless stories of a free and introspective existence. Present in many private and public collections, they exhibited in  Europe, USA and Asia. Find them at www.dnartists.com.

Carolina Ixta Navarro-Gutiérrez is a writer from Oakland, California. Her work is primarily focused on the intersecting veins of urban communities, the Latinx identity, and personal trauma. She is primarily a fiction writer, but experiments with the forms of memoir, flash fiction, and prose poetry. She studied literature and Spanish literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and obtained her master’s degree in education at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an elementary school teacher, and lives in Berkeley, California.

Russell Nichols is a speculative fiction writer and endangered journalist. Raised in Richmond, California, he got rid of all his stuff in 2011 to live out of a backpack with his wife, vagabonding around the world ever since. 

Krystal Nikol is a Detroiter who began performing poetry while obtaining her Bachelor of Science in Psychology. She is currently a graduate student studying Community Psychology at Florida A&M University. She uses poetry as counterstorytelling to explore intersections of identity and address social inequities. In her free time, she bakes and lectures people about the evils of gentrification.

Anointing Obuh is a writer, singer and photographer from Nigeria. A one time best of the Net nominee, her works have been featured in Rattle, Mineral Lit Mag, Honey and Lime Lit, Barren Magazine and elsewhere. She is a recipient for the NF2W scholarship. She currently studies English and Literature at the University of Benin City, Nigeria.

Tyler Odeneal, a native of Milwaukee, WI, is a student in the Creative Writing MFA program at Columbia College Chicago. His work seeks to examine the complexities of the Black experience. He’s had fiction and poetry published in Furrow Literary Magazine, Glintmoon Literary Journal, Genre: Urban Arts, and elsewhere.

Beret Olsen is a writer, editor, and artist, as well as the photo editor for 100 Word Story. Her essays, reviews, and short fictions have been published in journals including the Smokelong Quarterly, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, the Laurel Review (upcoming), the Masters Review, and First Class Lit.

A member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, Olstein currently teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs. Olstein is the author of four poetry collections and her work has appeared in, The Nation, American Letters & Commentary, and Boston Review.

Jennifer Patterson is a grief worker who uses plants, breath, words to explore survivorhood, body(ies) and healing. A queer and trans affirming, trauma-experienced herbalist and breathwork facilitator, Jennifer offers sliding scale care as a practitioner through her own practice Corpus Ritual and is a member of The Breathe Network and Breathwork for Recovery. She is also the creative nonfiction editor of Hematopoiesis Press. A graduate of Goddard College’s MA program, Jennifer is finishing a book project focused on translating embodied traumatic experience through somatic practices and critical and creative nonfiction.

Soroush Payandeh is an accomplished Los Angeles-based artist and public art restorer. Born in Isfahan, Iran, Soroush has produced internationally recognized artwork for the past 25 years. Payandeh has worked on over 30 public art projects throughout the world, including sculpture, paintings and murals. He was honored by the United Nations in 2015 as the Humanitarian Artist of the year, where he exhibited four portrait paintings of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa.

Joel Peckham has published seven books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Bone Music and Body Memory. Individual poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Sun, and many others. With Robert Vivian, he is also co-editor of  Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in American Poetry and Prose, recently released by New Rivers Press.

Kailee Pedersen is an essayist who also writes poetry and fiction. She currently lives in New York City, having just graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Classics. She was adopted from Nanning in 1996.

Cecile Pineda was born in New York City, migrating to California in 1961 where she has lived ever since in the San Francisco-Bay Area. She is the author of The Love Queen of the Amazon, Frieze, and Face which won an American Book Award nomination for first fiction.

D.A. Powell was born in Albany, Georgia. He received his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first three published collections of poetry are considered by some to be a progressing trilogy on the AIDs epidemic.

H. Pueyo (@hachepueyo on Twitter) is an Argentine-Brazilian writer of literary and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared before in venues like Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and her debut short story collection “A Study in Ugliness” will be published by Lethe Press in 2022. Find her online at hachepueyo.com.

Adriana is a Colombian writer, born in cold Bogotá but raised in Medellín, The City of Eternal Spring. “Looking for Esperanza,” winner of the 2011 Social Justice and Equality Award in Creative Nonfiction, was released in 2012 by Benu Press. Her memoir, “My Mother’s Funeral,” set in Colombia, published by CavanKerry Press, was nominated for the Latino Books into Movies Award in 2014.

Amir Rabiyah is a trans and two-spirit disabled queer femme poet and writing coach. They were born in London, England to a mixed Cherokee and white mother and a Lebanese and Syrian father. Their work explores living life on the margins and at the intersections of multiple identities.

Stephen Ratcliffe was born in Boston and grew up in the Bay Area of California. He briefly attended Reed College and went on to earn his BA and PhD from the University of California-Berkeley.

Steven Berroteran is a Nicaraguan-American born photographer from Vallejo, California whose work focuses on the body, life struggles and systematic endurance by documenting the experiences that manifest within it.

Seema Reza is a poet and essayist and the author of A Constellation of Half-Lives (Write Bloody) and When the World Breaks Open (Red Hen Press). In 2015 she was awarded the Col John Gioia Patriot Award by USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore for her work with service members. An alumnus of Goddard College and VONA, her writing has appeared on-line and in print in Bellevue Literary Review, Green Mountain Review, The LA Review, The Feminist Wire, HerKind, The Offing, and Entropy among others.

Juheon (Julie) Rhee is a 14-year-old student and is currently attending International School Manila. During her free time, she enjoys reading Agatha Christie’s mysteries and hanging out with her friends. She has previously been published by K’in Literary Journal, Indolent Books, Heritage Review and has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

Marc Anthony Richardson is author of Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award, and is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award, a PEN America grant, a Sachs Program grant, a Hurston/Wright fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center residency. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Find him at www.marcanthonyrichardson.com.

“I drew my first comics in elementary school — ripoffs of ‘Itchy and Scratchy’ to amuse friends. I grew up in San Francisco and two comic shops happened to be on my way home from school. I spent all my allowance there, buying an astonishing variety of garbage. Finally I discovered Peter Bagge’s HATE, and that was that. I took a very long break from drawing while I wrote and played music, in bands and solo. Some of that is on this site as well. I now live in Oakland and draw and work at a music school.”

Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto in 1961. Her subject matter includes political themes, such as gender and nation, as well as the problems of form and genre; she has written works that explore literary forms such as the pastoral, epic, and weather forecast.

Cassandra Rockwood Rice Ganem is a Berkeley-based writer. Her award-winning poetry and non-fiction explore trauma, PTSD, and diaspora. She holds a BA from California Institute of Integral Studies and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Cassandra is a queer-identified feminist with an interest in the Middle East being of Lebanese descent.

fabian romero (Purepécha) is a two-spirit poet, filmmaker, artist and P.h.D. student in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. fabian’s academic and artistic interests integrate settler colonialism, Performance Studies, racial capitalism with storytelling and poetry. Their work centers Purépecha people from Michoacán, Mexico to Seattle, Washington and beyond.

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after retiring from public health research. He’s since published nonfiction, poetry, and photography in over 100 journals and anthologies in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Publications include Columbia Journal, Ilanot Review, Lunch Ticket, Kestrel, The Atlantic, The Manchester Review, and Typehouse. In the past year, he wrote and acted in his first play; and, a nonfiction piece led to a role in a soon-to-be-released, high-profile documentary limited series. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five preschoolers—split their time between Maryland and West Virginia.

Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith taught English and coached soccer at Tucson High Magnet School for 28 years. Some of his works have appeared in The Laurel Review, The Broke Bohemian, the anthology America, We Call Your Name, and other publications too.

Gleeson Ryan grew up one mile from the Dairy Queen in North Branford, CT, and has lived and written in six US states and two countries. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania and works to advance sustainability and social responsibility in the energy industry.

Sally’s words have been honored in local and international competitions and regularly presented by professional actors in Adelaide, South Australia. She meanders through a Bachelor of Creative Writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia and co-habits with an antique, Finnish marathon champion and two borrowed budgerigars.

Erik Mark Sandberg currently resides in Los Angeles. In 2002, he received a BFA with distinction from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. From 2003—2007, he studied with former Gemini Gel Master Printer Anthony Alan Zepeda. In the years since, he has achieved steady success in the fields of Fine Art and Illustration, receiving numerous grants and awards. From 2006 to present, Sandberg has taught concurrently at Art Center College of Design in the printmaking department, OTIS College of Art and Design and California State University, Northridge.

Esther Samuels Davis was born and raised in Catskill, New York. In 2005 she moved to Oakland California to study art at California College of the Arts, and there received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in printmaking. After school, she worked as a letterpress printer for Carrot and Stick Press, while continuing to focus on illustration and etching. Following another urge to shake things up, in 2013 Esther moved to Berlin Germany and has been living, working and drawing there since.

Arya Samuelson is currently an MFA Prose student at Mills College, where she is writing a novel about Jewish immigration, the messiness of desire, and the inheritance of grief. Her work has been published in Hematopoiesis Press,The Millions, and Entropy, and was recently awarded an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train‘s Short Story Award for New Writers. She is one of the Prose Editors for 580 Split.

Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, The Pink Institution, and Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, which was selected for the 2015 Essay Book Prize. She is the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer & educator. He is the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series, and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & Buzzfeed. He’s the poetry editor at BOAAT Press, a 2018 Ruth Lilly Fellow from The Poetry Foundation & currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Gwendolyn Schulte writes fiction about power, sex, ghosts, and greasy food. Say hello at gwendolyn.schulte@gmail.com

Nancy Schumann is a German writer, based in London, UK. She writes in English and German. Nancy’s particular interest is female vampires. Her monograph Take A Bite traces vampiresses from Lilith to Twilight. Poems have been published in collections like Gothic II. Short stories include The Hostel published by Hic Dragones. Visit Nancy online at www.bookswithbite.in or Twitter @TweetsWithBite.

Shanthi Sekaran’s most recent novel, Lucky Boy  was named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. Her essays and stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, and the LA Review of Books. She’s an AWP mentor, and teaches writing at Mills College.

Anindita Sengupta is a writer in Los Angeles. She is author of City of Water (Sahitya Akademi) and Walk Like Monsters (Paperwall.in). Her writing has appeared in Plume, The Guardian, One, Breakwater Review and others. She has received fellowships / awards from Charles Wallace Trust, International Reporting Project, TFA India and Muse India.

Said Shaiye is a Somali writer who calls Minneapolis home. He uses writing to heal from childhood trauma. He has had work published or is forthcoming in Diagram, Dreginald,  Rigorous, Night Heron Barks and the Muslim Writers at Home Anthology. He is an MFA Candidate at the University of Minnesota.

A California native, longtime New Yorker, and world traveler, Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead and The California Poem, which was a Barnes & Noble Best of the Year. Sikelianos teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver.

Nicknamed “small but terrible” by her lola, Melissa R. Sipin was born and raised in Carson, CA. She won Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open and the Washington Square Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, and co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things (Carayan Press 2014). 

Erika is a comic artist and illustrator residing out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Erika has no memory of ever not drawing. There is a chance that this relates to her being dropped a lot as a baby, but she likes to tell herself otherwise.

Norma Smith has lived and worked in Oakland since the late 1960s. She has been a scholar-educator-activist for more than 50 years. Her writing has appeared in literary, political, and academic journals. Norma’s book of poems, HOME REMEDY, was published in 2017 by Nomadic Press.

Christine Sneed lives in Evanston, IL and is the faculty director of the MA/MFA program at Northwestern University and is also on the graduate fiction faculty of Regis University’s low-residency MFA program.

Philip Staley is an adventurer and Psychiatric Nurse who resides in Oakland. He enjoys frequently participating in NaNoWriMo and exploring the Bay Area with notepad in hand. His work has appeared in The Green Windows Anthologies.

George L. Stein is a writer and photographer in the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area. Interest in monochrome, film photography and urban decay/architectural subject matter has come to include street photography, fashion, fetish, collage, and oppositional/juxtapositional projects in digital format. His work has been published in Midwest Gothic, NUNUM, Montana Mouthful, Out/Cast, The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, and DarkSide magazine.

James Stewart III is a Black writer from Chicago. He earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from North Central College. Stewart also co-curates the text-based performance series “The Guild Complex presents Exhibit B” and is a managing editor of the magazine Critics’ Union. Stewart’s writing has appeared in Pangyrus, Another Chicago Magazine, and Cowboy Jamboree.

Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer. Her mission is to create, and help others create, poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change.

Sean Talley is an artist who lives in Berkeley, California. His drawings and sculptures have been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum, Et al. Gallery, Jancar Jones Gallery, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art.

Clare Nazarena Tascio, from Brewster, New York, received her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Caroline graduated from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2014 with her MFA in Poetry. Following graduation, was selected to participate in the Tin House Summer Workshop as a Poetry Scholar. Her work can be found in Quiet Lightning, Tin House, White Stag, Salt Hill, Sixth Finch, and Pouch. She lives and writes in Oakland.

Edwin Torres is a bilingual, New York-based poet who’s a self-proclaimed “lingualisualist” whose work is “rooted in the languages of sight and sound.” He is the author of multiple books of poetry, including Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press, 2014), One Night: Poems for the Sleepy (Red Glass Books, 2012), and Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books, 2010), among others.

Gabriella Torres’s work is largely informed by her experience of growing up Latinx in the rural Midwest. Her poems are heavily influenced by Midwestern landscapes and wildlife.

Kiva Uhuru studied Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley. Her main focus artistically is portraiture and digital media.

Erica Verrillo has written three middle reader fantasies, the Phoenix Rising trilogy (Random House.) She is the coauthor, with Lauren Gellman, of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide (St. Martin’s) and author of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide, 2nd Edition. Her short stories have appeared in Million Stories, Front Porch Review, THEMA Literary Magazine, 580 Split and Nine.

Eleanor Vincent is the author of Swimming with Maya, a New York Times e-book bestseller that explores love, loss, and resilience following the death of her daughter. Vincent’s essays appear in several collections, including Creative Nonfiction’s anthology, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die, and This I Believe: On Motherhood. She holds an MFA from Mills College and is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto and the Author’s Guild. She has been a visiting writer at Mills College, teaching both graduate and undergraduate workshops in creative nonfiction.

William Tanner Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for the novel Europe Central. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and daughter.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013). She currently serves as reviews editor for the journal Stirring: A Literary Collection.

Catherine Wagner’s collections of poems include Nervous Device (2012), My New Job (2009), Macular Hole (2004), Miss America (2001); and a dozen chapbooks, including Imitating (Leafe Press, 2004). She has performed widely in the U.S., England and Ireland; her poems and essays have appeared in Abraham Lincoln, Lana Turner, New American Writing, 1913, How2, Cambridge Literary Review, Soft Targets, Action, Yes, and other magazines. An anthology she co-edited with Rebecca Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, was published by Fence in 2007. She is associate professor of English at Miami University in Ohio.

Hannah Wagner is a resident of Salem, Massachusetts. She graduated from Salem State University. She is also an actor and can be seen in many productions across the North Shore. Her work has been featured in Rock and Sling, Mass Poetry’s Poem of the Moment, Door is a Jar, Soundings East, Twyckenham Notes, Still Point Quarterly, Incessant Pipe, Sweet A Literary Confection among others. You can find more of her work at https://hannahwagnerpoetry.wordpress.com/

Laura Walker is the author of five books of poetry: story (Apogee Press, 2016), Follow–Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004). She lives, writes, and teaches in Berkeley, California.

Sarah is a surrealist, poet-playwright, based in Scotland. She has degrees in creative subjects from Leeds, UEA and Birmingham U’s, life was more structured in academia. On the outside it’s more surreal. But what is real? Aren’t we all constructions? Enjoy the journey. Of late you can find her work at Selcouth Station, The Interpreter’s House, Ellipsis and forthcoming from Thimble and Best New British & Irish Poets 2019.

Merethe Walther is a professional editor, author, and short story writer whose work spans genres and has won awards with Readers’ Favorite and Writers of the Future. When not writing—or explaining how to pronounce her name correctly—you can find her playing video games and board games, reading, and spending time with her husband and cat in Atlanta. Find her at https://merethewalther.com/.

Poet Laureate emerita for the small seaside town of Rockport, Massachusetts, Suellen Wedmore has been published in The Ledge, Green Mountains Review, College English, Phoebe, Cimarron Review, The MacGuffin, The St. Louis Review, The Harvard Review and many other journals. After 24 years working as a speech and language therapist in the public schools, she retired to enter the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College, graduating in 2004.

Nora Wessner is a closet artist and lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Working for an International Development Firm has given her opportunities to travel the world and capture art through photography. In addition to taking pictures, she does artistic wood burning, which she sells locally.

A Kentuckiana native, Katelyn Joy Wilkinson holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. She teaches creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada and serves as the poetry editor for the Red Rock Review. Her work has been published in 45th Parallel, among others.

Megan Williams is a creative writing student at the University of Pittsburgh, most recently published in Sonder Midwest and grlhood. She loves fairytales, French rebellions, and frozen grapes.

Maw Shein Win’s full-length collection Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press (2018). Maw is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016-2018), and her forthcoming collection of poetry will be published by Omnidawn in 2020. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at UC Berkeley. See more at mawsheinwin.com.

Mark Yakich is a poet, novelist, painter, and the Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. He is editor of New Orleans Review, and is co-founder and co-editor of Airplane Reading, a media venue dedicated to collecting travelers’ stories about flight.