Alumni
CLASS OF 2024
Xander Gershberg is a poet, editor, and educator from Fairfield, CT, and has since made Minneapolis home. He currently serves as an editor-at-large for Spout Press. His work has appeared in Poetry Online. His creative and academic work grapple with generational trauma and reparative writing, as well as queer and disability studies. He holds a BA in English and creative writing from Macalester College. In his free time, he likes to get lost in maps.
Shannon Pratson is a writer from Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2015, she graduated from the University of Virginia with a BA in English. She has worked, in no particular order, in rural France, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and Boston, but considers the Virginia Blue Ridge home. When she is not writing, she enjoys reading, running, cooking, and spending time with her husband, John.
Mary Fischer is a writer from Northern California. She is interested in Midwestern towns with biblical names, women cowboys, and the suburbs.
Kristi Stout is a writer from North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Small Orange and is forthcoming in The Rumpus. You can find her at kristi-stout.com.
Kayla Murphy is from New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. She holds a BA in Sociology from Temple University. Her work has previously appeared in Hobart.
Dante Fuoco is a genderqueer poet, playwright, solo peformer, video artist, and educator from Pittsburgh, Pa. His writing appears in Ovenbird, Exposition Review (winner of the Flash 405 contest), KGB Bar Lit Review, and elsewhere. She performed and produced her most recent solo show off-off-Broadway. A nationally recognized special education teacher, she has spent the last few years doing restorative justice work in NYC public schools. He holds a BA in English literature from Swarthmore College. (dantefuoco.com)
Andres Macias is a fiction writer from Southern California. He is interested in humans and human behavior.
Ruth Aitken [rhymes with bacon] likes writing fiction more than she likes writing about herself. When she plays Two Truths and a Lie, it’s easier to come up with three lies. Ruth Aitken invented hammocks. Ruth Aitken faked her own death for a 2007 episode of Punk’d. Ruth Aitken is four rats in a trenchcoat.
CLASS OF 2023
Julie Armstrong graduated from Washington College in 2015 with a BA in English and creative writing. From then until 2020, she worked for her alma mater as the administrative assistant for the Rose O’Neill Literary House. In 2017, she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council. Her work has appeared in RHINO, Gulf Stream, and Nashville Review, and is forthcoming in The Maine Review and Tampa Review. Julia received her MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech in 2023.
Nathan Dragon is from Salem, MA. He has work in NOON Annual, New York Tyrant, Hotel. He co-runs a publishing project called Blue Arrangements.
Florence Gonsalves is an author, poet, and educator at Virginia Tech where she received an MFA in fiction in 2023. Her published works include two novels with Little Brown Young Readers, Love and Other Carnivorous Plants and Dear Universe, as well as creative nonfiction and experimental prose featured in Lit Hub, Shenandoah, Hobart, and Pulp Magazine. In 2020 Florence founded the Dandy Line Poetry Troop, a community arts endeavor based in the New River Valley that aims to demystify “high brow” art through the spontaneous production of free, typewritten poems. For commissions, events, and inquiries visit her online at florencegonsalves.com.
Theo Richards is your rural Connecticut boy next door: coffee stout in one hand, boxcutter in the other. Their writing? Much the same. Their work passes through the body, wandering in the juncture of what is and was alive, what could be and what might again become ghost. “Haunt” might as well be the copula here. The dead bobcat will always stand back up to dance. Half the scene is already underwater anyway. They have a “dog” named Fig and a steamed bun problem. They studied gender in undergrad.
Kennedy Coyne is a fiction writer from Albany, NY. She received her BA and MA in English from the University at Albany. For two years she served as Barzakh Magazine’s Managing Editor as well as an intern at Fence. In a craft class Zadie Smith told her she should be a comedian. Her most recent publication, a conversation with Eileen Myles, is available in Michigan Quarterly Review Online.
Shannon Sullivan is a poet from Lakeland, Florida. She has been featured in Lunch Ticket, Yuzu Press, and Eunoia Review. She has a cat named Percy who decorates the apartment with mice.
Ivan Davenny was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, but has moved so many times that he just says he’s from “all over.” He received his BA in English from Brooklyn College in 2016 and since then has been living in Austin, TX. His writing reimagines life as a series of grotesque spectacles, blending absurdism and horror and filtering it all through the language of biology textbooks, Romanticist poetry, and pulp westerns.
Amanda Hodes is a writer and new media artist. Starting fall 2023, she will be the Lecturer of Poetry in Creative Writing at Oberlin College & Conservatory. Her poetry has been published in Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, AMBIT, Denver Quarterly, PANK, West Branch, Quarterly West, Interim Poetics, and elsewhere. She has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of East Anglia and an MFA in Creative Writing from Virginia Tech. Namely, she is interested in sound installation as a route to a somatic, spatial poetics. This work has been exhibited in venues such as the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Torpedo Factory, Abington Arts Center, Hirshhorn Sound Scene Festival, Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology, AUDIRE, and Dartington International Music Festival.
Mina Victoria is mostly a fiction writer from Georgia, New Jersey, and South Carolina. She graduated from the University of Tampa with a BA in Writing in 2019. Her first and only publication can be found in The Rumpus as part of their ENOUGH Series. She is the shortest person that any of her friends know, and she enjoys climbing whatever she can to reach the top shelf by herself.
CLASS OF 2022
Bessie Flores Zaldívar is a queer writer from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She’s a Tin House 2021 alumni and her work can be found in CRAFT, PANK, F(r)iction, Palette Poetry, Foglifter and elsewhere. Bessie’s fiction has been selected for Best of the Net 2020. Her chapbook, Rain Revolutions, was published in 2021 by Long Day Press. Her debut novel, Libertad, is forthcoming from Dial Press.
Sonya Lara served as the Associate Fiction Editor for The Madison Review at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she received her BA in English-Creative Writing. Currently, she is the Co-Founder and Poetry Editor for Rare Byrd Review; an Editor-at-Large for Cleaver Magazine; and an MFA poetry candidate at Virginia Tech. In 2019, she was the Managing Editor for the minnesota review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Voices, Wisconsin’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology, Trestle Ties, Heavy Feather Review, ENTROPY, Homology Lit, AGNI, and The Los Angeles Review. For more information, visit www.sonyalara.com.
Taylor Portela is a poet and drag performer who graduated from the University of Michigan in 2014 with a B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature and Language. From 2014 to 2019, they lived in Washington, D.C., working in the tech policy nonprofit sector. Their poetry and drag explore the slippery hold of bodies, identities, and performance, with an emphasis on queer and gay desire. http://taylorportela.com/
hanta tala samsa is a poet and writer from Chicago. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College. He was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops in 2018, and his fiction and essays can be found in Aster(ix) Journal, Mangal,and The Kenyon Review.
Blessing Christopher has worked as a child actor, back-up dancer, wine taster, teach, and writer. She graduated with a degree in History and International Studies from the University of Uyo, Nigeria. For her, the best stories are ones with supernatural elements. Her writing explores Afro-feminism, mental health, religion, politics, and sexuality.
A Philadelphia native, Kira Homsher graduated from Temple University in 2018 with BAs in English and Film. The winner of Phoebe Journal’s 2020 nonfiction contest and a Pushcart nominee, her writing also appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Passages North, The Normal School, and others. You can find her at kirahomsher.com
Honora Ankong is a poet, who was born and raised in Cameroon until she moved to the United States with her family in 2011. She received her BA in English (c/o 2019) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her work explores immigration, identity, and blackness across the African diaspora. She plans on getting her PhD in Literature with an emphasis on Africana literature. She loves fashion, art, and music–she’s the person to take with you while thrift shopping.
CLASS OF 2021
CAROL LISCHAU grew up in Southeast Texas, where her relatives have lived for the past 200 years. She completed both her BA and MA in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas. She writes poetry, prose, letters, and picture books, but most of her work floats around in a hybrid universe. She enjoys thrifting, Parks and Recreation, playing board games with her husband, and mothering her new daughter, Marigold.
ANNIE RAAB writes fiction about terrible people in the Midwest. Prior to her time at Virginia Tech, she worked as an academic support specialist for art students and wrote arts and culture criticism for the local rag in Kansas City. Besides writing, Annie enjoys bike rides, cooking complicated meals, productive gardens, art, artists, and weird people. When the pandemic made attending graduate school in person a thing of the past, she moved to Chicago and collected her degree from there. She is, daily, emotionally threatened by her unrevised thesis. She writes the comic GIRL NOIR.
DASHIEL CARRERA is a writer, musician, and media artist from Newton, Massachusetts. He received his BA from Brown University in Literary Arts and is currently a PhD student in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto. His first novel, The Deer, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in August 2022. You can find more from him at www.dashielcarrera.com.
ALEXA GARVOILLE is a writer, educator, and creative writing studies scholar. She edits poetry for NCTE’s English Journal, and her poems have appeared in LavenderReview, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Homology Lit, and elsewhere. Her research interests include anti-racist education, creative writing pedagogy, and inclusive workshop practices. Find more here: alexagarvoille.com
SHAINA PHENIX is a queer, Black femme, poet, other-art-maker, educator from Harlem, New York. She received a BA in Poetry, Theater, and Africana studies at Hampshire College, and taught middle and high school humanities for four years. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech and is the 2021-2022 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is—her work is—obsessed with and possessed by many sounds of black and femme existences, the passing down of stories, ocean, the body, mothering, acts of loving, and home(s). Her debut collection of poetry, To Be Named Something Else, won the Miller Williams poetry prize and was published in 2023 by the University of Arkansas Press. You can find more from her at https://www.shainaphenix.com
SARAH BOUDREAU is a fabulist writer whose work has been published in Columbia Journal, Longleaf Review, Little Fiction, and elsewhere, and her short story “The Birdhunter” was a finalist for a Best of the Net in 2018. Her short stories explore themes of femininity, domesticity, and isolation. She will go on a road trip for just about anything, and she thinks Blacksburg would be perfect if it were only closer to the beach. She is a purveyor of useless information and the fun fact.
EVAN J. MASSEY is an African American, US Army veteran who served his country in Afghanistan. He serves as an Editorial Assistant at Seneca Review. He has served as writer-in-residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and received a scholarship to Bread Loaf’s Environmental Writers’ Conference. He was the nonfiction reader for The Pinch and Portland Review reading series. His work can be found or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Hunger Mountain, Bat City Review, The Pinch, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, Willow Springs, Southern Indiana Review, Portland Review, Quarterly West, and various others. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Kentucky University. Check him out at evanjmassey.com.
CLASS OF 2020
ADELE WILLIAMS is a writer, editor, and educator. She is a doctoral student in Literature and Creative Writing at The University of Houston where she serves as the Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. Adele is the winner of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize for Poetry and the Emily Morrison Poetry Prize as well as the recipient of fellowships from UCROSS, Inprint, and Hindman Settlement School. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Air/Light, Guernica, Cream City Review, The Florida Review, Bear Review, Split Lip Magazine, Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, Quarterly West, SAND, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Her debut collection of poems, Wager, was a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2024. Her current goings-on can be found at adeleelisewilliams.com.
ASHIEDA MCKOY was born in Washington, D.C., but thinks she can live anywhere since living in Maryland, Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Italy, and Spain. She has loved poetry since having to memorize and recite “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou for her family when she was 5. She has a BA in Political Science from Dickinson College and has won national awards for her community service, teaching, and poetry. She will only drink sweet tea with lemon and mint and, inevitably, takes at least 30 minutes to pick out a card for special occasions.
GIDEON SIMONS returns to Virginia after a stint in the sometimes frozen lands of Colorado, having acquired an English BA for his troubles. Other than graduating from the University of Colorado Denver, this eccentric orbit has seen him working as a technical writer, a journalist, an editor, and an independent game developer. “Working” might be a stretch for that last one. Under the influence of writers like Flann O’Brien and Angela Carter, as well as a childhood dream of being a cartoonist, he seeks to create strange new fiction.
YASMINE AMELI is an Iranian-American poet with a BA in English from Johns Hopkins University. Her work explores diasporic experience, hybrid identities, translation, erasure, docu-po, and the connections/discontinuities between memory and familial storytelling/mythology. Born in Worcester, MA, she holds a special place in her heart for bubblers, jimmies, and all things wicked. She hangs out too much in coffee shops and only asks for tea, and the bookmark in your last library book was probably hers.
MAKENSI CERIANI is from South Central Pennsylvania and grew up in the house her parents built. She cultivates many interests and hobbies, but has too much a Gemini mentality to ever decide on her favorite pursuits. However, she will admit writing poetry holds a high spot in the top five. She has taught at the Pennsylvania State University, where she completed her English and Creative Writing degrees.
UCHE OKONKWO has an MA in Creative Writing from University of Manchester, UK, and several years’ experience working with one of Nigeria’s leading independent publishers. She was awarded a writing residency at Writers’ Omi, Ledig House, spring 2017. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Per Contra, One Story, The Ember Journal, and Ellipsis. In 2016 her essay “What the Road Offers” ––experiences from a six-week trans-Nigerian road trip project with other writers, photographers and filmmakers––was published by Invisible Borders as a chapbook. Tin House Books will publish her debut collection of stories, A Kind of Madness, in 2024.
TOLU ADEYEYE was born and raised in London, and has skipped through 21 years of life, and is about to cross the Atlantic Ocean. She’s currently studying geology and is excited to swap rocks and fossils for writing and reading as her main priorities. She writes fantasy novels as well as literary fiction, and she focuses on the events in life that shape our psychology. She’s an ENTP who can’t get enough of cheesecake, Sidney Sheldon (OTP honestly), and the sun, and hopes she won’t get buried in snow in Blacksburg (yes, she’s from England and she hates snow).
LAUREN GARRETSON is an Affrilachian creative from the mountains of West Virginia. She received her BA in Africana Studies and Creative Writing from Hampshire College. Non-traditional in most ways, Lauren enjoys pushing boundaries and genres in her writing, working with science-fiction, magical realism and historical fiction. You can be sure to find images of aged hands, winding rivers and fingers plunged into soil within her stories. At its core, her writing explores Black love and resilience in all its forms. When Lauren writes, she envisions pieces of her heart being left between the lines of every page in hopes that whoever reads it will find them and feel love.
SARAH HANSEN is a poet from McLean, Virginia. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Mary Washington where she won the Barbara Thomas Phillips Scholarship for her work and was the poetry editor of the Rappahannock Review. Her writing often delves into the history and geography of her home state and she is looking forward to exploring the stories of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Blacksburg.
CLASS OF 2019
TALI COHEN was born in Baltimore, MD and raised in Sarasota, FL. She received her BA in Philosophy from The University of Tampa. She started writing poetry as a means to apologize to the millions of stars that died to form the cells of our bodies. Everything after is negotiable.
MIRRI GLASSON-DARLING moved to Virginia from the Arctic village of Utqiagvik, Alaska (formerly known as Barrow), the northernmost community in the United States. She received an AWP Fiction Intro Journals Award in 2019, is a Pushcart Nominee, a Glimmertrain finalist, and her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, South Dakota Review, Dr. TJ Eckleburg Review, Switchback, Bosque Literary Magazine, and Mid-American Review.
LESLIE JERNEGAN, with Wisconsin inscribed on her birth certificate and in her spirit, embodies a land of homey pubs and genuine how-are-you’s. Forever nostalgic about farm fields, hometown memories and Madison, she’s also an innate wanderer. From studying and working in Asia, Europe, South America and Alaska, to fashioning makeshift car-hotels on cross-country drives, she’s never without stories to tell. Good thing her stacks of childhood-to-present-day journals, poems, lyrics and fiction, and degrees in English and Spanish attest to her joy in telling them. Welcoming new excursions, reflections and gratifying uncertainty, she’s onto her next setting.
DAN KENNEDY holds an MFA from Virginia Tech, where he won the 2017 Emily Morrison Prize in fiction. He grew up in rural Pennsylvania and graduated from Boston University with a BA in English; he was also a member of BU’s Division 1 wrestling team. In 2018, he presented a paper, “The Byronic Hero in Blood Meridian,” at the International Student Byron Conference in Messolonghi, Greece. A two-time Pushcart nominee and a recipient of grants and fellowships from the University of Virginia and Inprint, Dan’s stories have appeared in BULL, Ghost Parachute, and Typehouse Literary Magazine. He’s currently enrolled in the Literature and Creative Writing PhD program at the University of Houston.
DEVIN KOCH is a Nebraskan poet who instead of deciding between using the Valencia or Hudson Instagram filter to find his place in the world, uses the power of language. If forced to choose, he’d pick Valencia, hands down. He graduated from University of Nebraska Lincoln, where he won the Vreeland and Marjorie Stover Award for his work. Family dynamics, religion, Greek/Roman mythology, and pop culture are what inspires him. His life goals include becoming a winner of Survivor, the Pulitzer, and the lottery.
DAN MELLING is originally from London, UK. He holds a BA in Creative Writing from Liverpool John Moores University. Since graduating (and becoming sick of zero-hour contracts and minimum wage night-shifts) he has lived a fairly nomadic life; working in China and India, and spending a lot of time in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, as well as many other places. Dan likes artists and poets who portray poverty and shine a light on forgotten people. He has many influences, from Philip Levine and Alden Nowlan to Gustav Courbet. He is currently teaching in Portugal and is looking forward to swapping the valleys and vinho of Douro for the mountains and moonshine of Virginia.
LOTTE MITCHELL REFORD is a Londoner who has spent the last seven years living in Glasgow, where she completed an MA (which is what the Scots call their BAs) in English Lit; Classical Civilisation and an MLitt (which is what they call some of their MAs) in Creative Writing. She has worked as an incompetent but endearing waitress, a passable barista, and a (hopefully) decent editor. She writes stories and sometimes poems.
KELSEY SCHURER grew up in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. She graduated from Florida State University where she received a BA in Creative Writing and won the Louis and Mart P Hill Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis award. She worked as a journalist and, most recently, for an investigative company dealing in surveillance, recorded interviews, and scene investigations. Her fiction primarily deals with the dysfunctions of families, friends, and romantic relationships. She loves ice cream and salt water, and, if she could, she would like to be Jane Goodall for a day.
CHRISTOPHER WILSON was born and raised in suburban Chicago and received his Bachelor’s in English from Southern Illinois University. Before coming to study at Virginia Tech, he worked in a shipping warehouse, a book store, and spent the last decade as a bartender. He was the runner-up in 2015 for the Illinois Emerging Writer Award. In his free time he enjoys watching and playing basketball.
CLASS OF 2018
ANURADHA BHOWMIK is a Bangladeshi-born American poet and writer from South Jersey. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UNC Chapel Hill in 2015. Her poetry and creative nonfiction relate to her childhood in Atlantic City, the experiences of her first-generation immigrant family, dual cultural identity confliact, and racism in post-9/11 America. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Word Riot, The Boiler, Pithead Chapel, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. Her debut book of poems, Brown Girl Chromatography, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. For more on Anuradha, visit www.anuradhabhowmik.com.
MATT HALL is a former teacher/plasma donor/geese police officer. Born in Memphis, he was switched at birth (but found before it was too late); he’s since bounced around and considers New Jersey home. He sings two songs really well at karaoke, needs to restring his guitar, has an amazing partner, Mariana, and believes there’s nothing wrong with his owning a Kurt Vonnegut stuffed doll. He holds an MA from Monmouth University, and his prose and poetry have been published in Crack the Spine and Pif.
CODY KOUR is a Cambodian-American poet born and raised in Rochester, Minnesota. In his writing, he aims to explore the depths of memory, loss, and the functions of violence and beauty. He always wonders if you can yearn for the return of something you have never possessed, and if he can help form become a “thing” again. Currently, he is writing poems and working on a memoir of his parent’s lives.
DANIEL LAWRENCE is a fiction writer and cheese enthusiast from North Carolina. He has an annoying love for burritos, archaic poetic epithets like “wine-dark,” obscure jangle pop, Chandleresque hardboiled prose, and Doctor Who. Alarmingly, he doesn’t remember a single minute of the second grade. He believes (incorrectly) that he would have made a decent British poet between 1590 and 1825, back when it was all iambic pentameter and rhyming things.
TRAVIS MCDONALD was born and raised in Massachusetts, but has spent the last decade living in Texas. He received his bachelor’s in English from The University of Texas at Austin and has worked a variety of unskilled jobs in the meantime: gutter installer, door-to-door environmental worker, Motocross freight handler, to name a few. His work investigates communication breakdowns, the unknowability of the other, and the standardization of the American landscape. He is interested in the unique challenges that fiction faces in the technological age. His work has appeared in various publications, including The Adirondack Review and Five [Quarterly].
MATT PRATER is a poet and writer from Saltville, VA. His work has appeared in a number of journals, both regionally (Appalachian Heritage, Now & Then, Still) and internationally (The Honest Ulsterman, The Moth, Munyori). A graduate of Radford and Appalachian State Universities, he has taught writing and literature for colleges throughout the Mountain South, including Appalachian State, Emory & Henry, and Virginia Tech. His first chapbook, Mono No Aware, was published by Finishing Line Press (Georgetown, KY) in 2016. He is currently a PhD student in the Comparative Studies program at Florida International University.
PAT SIEBEL is the current Interviews Editor at Hobart. His work has appeared in Black Heart Magazine, Cartridge Lit, Go Read Your Lunch, Hobart, the Susquehanna Review, and was featured in the Best of Black Heart 2014 Anthology. He enjoys dogs, beer, bicycles. He thinks commas are the prettiest thing in the world.
KEVIN WEST grew up in Maryland and spent his undergraduate career moving around the East Coast. He started college in Boston at SMFA, then took classes at Tufts University, then transferred to NYU, and then moved back home. Once back home, he attended community college for a year before finally earning a B.S. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Towson University. His poetry primarily focuses on his interesting family dynamics and his childhood. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Journal, Tampa Review, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD student in creative writing at the University of North Texas.
CLASS OF 2017
A dual citizen of Mexico and the U.S., ANA-CHRISTINA ACOSTA GASPAR DE ALBA was raised bilingual and has lived everywhere from Ciudad Juárez to Indianapolis. She received her B.A. from Indiana University in Latino Studies and English with a concentration in creative writing, and is particularly interested in the craftsmanship of interconnected short stories, family epics, and cultural testaments. She admires works of literature that have strong narratives, precise language, and believable dialogue. Code-switching is a bonus. She is currently a PhD student in the Comparative Studies program at Florida International University.
JASMINE FRANCIS grew up in northern California and rural Louisiana. She received an English degree in 2012 from Pomona College, where she also studied philosophy. Jasmine sometimes fantasizes about writing prose like Toni Morrison before realizing that, in order for fantasy to be reality, she would have to be Toni Morrison and, if Toni were Jasmine, Toni Morrison wouldn’t be Toni Morrison; or, if Jasmine were Toni Morrison, there would be only Toni Morrison, and Jasmine wouldn’t exist. So she is content. Jasmine writes fiction about characters with some sense of not belonging and the choices they make as a result.
MANDI MANNS received a BA in English at Liberty University. She’s worked as an editor for Doximity, and is currently living in NYC and working on starting a press there. She spends most of her free time writing.
XAN PHILLIPS is the author of Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 The Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. He hails from rural Ohio where he was raised on corn, and inherited his grandmother’s fear of open water. Xan received his BA from Oberlin College, and his MFA from Virginia Tech. Xan is a poetry editor at Winter Tangerine and the curator of Love Letters to Spooks, a literary space for Black people. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Callaloo. Xan poetry appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, West Branch, Nashville Review, Neplanta, Gigantic Sequins, Ninth Letter Online, The Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. His first book, Hull, was published by Nightboat Books in fall 2019.
SARA SHEINER grew up in a saltbox at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. She has worked as a waitress, an ice cream soda jerk, a money clerk, a retail sales associate, barista, and an office worker bee. She has also volunteered at the New York Public Library, the Housing Works Bookstore, Poets House, and has been the editorial assistant and reader of poetry submissions for the Atlas Review. She writes poetry (which has appeared in TYPO, muzzle, Bennington Review, and elsewhere), lyric essays, and some fiction, and is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Denver.
MARIANA SIERRA left Puerto Rico when she was 23. Temporarily settling in New Jersey, she obtained an MA in English, a partner-in-crime (named Matt) and the world’s cutest mutt (named Evie). She likes working with (or subverting) themes of cultural and gender roles/expectations in her poetry. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies, Cliterature Journal and Cactus Heart.
BEEJAY SILCOX is an Australian writer and critic, the Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival, and chair of the 2024 Stella Prize. Beejay’s literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appears in national arts publications and is increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and the New York Times.Beejay’s award-winning short fiction has been published at home (including in Meanjin, Westerly and ABR) and abroad, and anthologized in Best Summer Stories, Best Australian Stories and Meanjin A-Z: Fine fiction 1980 to now. She is married to a diplomat and they live a strangely nomadic kind of life – the highlight of which was two years spent living in West Africa. Before her MFA, Beejay worked as a government strategist and a criminology lecturer. She believes in the power and vital importance of storytelling – the nexus of empathy and imagination.
KAITLEN WHITT’S poetry primarily deals with Appalachian folklore, female narratives, and poverty. After spending a year teaching English in Bulgaria as a Fulbright Scholar, Kaitlen worked at Allegheny Mountain Radio where she composed stories for broadcast, some of which were featured on West Virginia Public Radio. Kaitlen has also published essays with The Matador Network. Kaitlen is a native of West Virginia, and maintains a small side business making and selling jewelry and household items made from antique and vintage Appalachian scrap.