Andrea Avery is the author of Sonata: A Memoir of Pain and the Piano (Pegasus Books). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Barrelhouse, CRAFT Literary, The Oxford American, Real Simple, and the Washington Post, among other places. Her essay “Father/Figure” was included as a notable essay in the 2022 edition of Best American Essays. In July 2025, Miami University Press will publish her Visiting Composer: A Novella, which was the winner of the 2024 Miami University Press Novella Prize. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and four cats. She works as an editor for a literacy nonprofit.

Alexis Barton is a poet and student from Woodstock, GA. Her work can be found in Sheepshead Review, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, The Listening Eye, and more, and her debut poetry collection is set to be published by Dipity Press by the end of 2025. She works as a poetry reader for Chestnut Review and attends Kennesaw State University to become an editor. In her spare time, she enjoys baking macarons, drinking coffee, and watching the rain.

Jane Berg is a writer and photographer. She recently graduated with an MFA in creative writing from San José State University where she served as the managing editor of Reed Magazine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in deLuge Journal, Flint Hills Review, Months to Years, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. She lives near San Francisco, CA.

Mela Blust is a Pushcart Prize and four-time Best of the Net nominated poet residing on a small, forested paradise in eastern central Pennsylvania. She is a trauma survivor, a mother, a lover, a daughter, and blooming into so many other forms. She likes gardening, wears all black, loves tequila and adores living partially feral among the other wild things. m(e)-la—Pronounced mee-lah. From Ancient Greek μέλας (melas, “black, dark”).

Rachel Aviva Burns is a writer living and working in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including the Atlanta Review, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Sheila-Na-Gig, Vallum, and the Wallace Stevens Journal.

Georgie Contreras (she/her) is a Latine writer raised and residing in the Boston area. Her poetry has been published with The Ana, Loud Coffee Press, and Querencia Press. Her work has received support from GrubStreet’s Boston Writers of Color and the Fine Arts Work Center. Whether she’s journaling or reading a book from the library, you’ll usually find an indie wrestling match from the mid-2000s playing in the background.

Savannah Cooper (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet, bisexual mess, and self-taught photographer. Her work has been previously published in more than forty journals, including Parentheses Journal, Midwestern Gothic, and Mud Season Review. Her debut poetry collection Mother Viper is due August 12, 2025 from Unsolicited Press.

Shena Crane’s fiction has appeared in Epiphany and Please See Me, and her nonfiction in the Wall Street Journal, Glamour, and elsewhere. Her book, What Do I Do Now? Making Sense of Today’s Changing Workplace, was featured on the Today Show and translated into Braille by the National Federation of the Blind. Her career includes working as a marketing communications executive in Los Angeles and a Spanish/French-to-English legal translator in New York City.

Sourav Dutta is an Indian art historian and emerging interdisciplinary artist whose academic grounding and curatorial insights bridge the realms of history, visual culture, and contemporary practice. He holds both BFA and MFA degrees in the History of Art from Rabindra Bharati University, where he graduated with First Class honors.

Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred and fifty reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. Marco’s short story “Power Tools” was nominated for Best of the Web for 2023 and is the title of his latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a ’zine called Hotch Potch. In his other life, Marco travels the world with his lovely wife Sabine. Website: https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/.

​​Bryana Fern earned her PhD in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has been published in Sequestrum, Sou’wester, Harpur Palate, Red Mud Review, Entropy, Redactions, Whispering Prairie Press, and Washington Independent Review of Books. She has presented at national conferences on creative writing pedagogy, Tolkien studies, and narrative theory. She has also published critical articles on Star Trek and feminism, including a chapter in McFarland’s Space, the Feminist Frontier.

Melissa French is currently a fourth-year English major at the University of California, Davis. She likes the Northern California coast, writing about herself in third person, and warm cafes. She always feels late. You can usually find her in the candle aisle of various stores or reading.

Michael J. Galko is a scientist and poet who lives and works in Houston, TX. He was a 2019 Pushcart Award nominee, a finalist in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review narrative poetry contest, and a finalist in the 2022 Bellevue Literary Review poetry contest. In the past year he has had poems published or accepted at Stillwater Review, Cagibi, Eclectica, Clackamas Literary Journal, Cordite Poetry Review (Australia), and Tar River Poetry, among other journals.

Sam Greene is a writer from Athens, Greece. They are in the process of finishing their PhD in Creative Writing and Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, and they write autotheory and poetry. Their writing is influenced by the works of Richard Siken and Maggie Nelson.

Marika Guthrie is an emerging writer residing in Pueblo, Colorado. She is an nontraditional undergraduate student currently attending CSU Pueblo, pursuing a major in English with an emphasis in creative writing. Marika is an ardent horsewoman, a sometimes artist, a stumbling philosopher, and a poet. She has been published in The Baltimore Review.

Walter Holland is the author of four books of poetry: Reconstruction (Finishing Line Press, 2022), Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992), and a novel, The March (Hard Candy Editions at Masquerade Books, 1996; Chelsea Station Editions, second revised edition, 2011). Recent poetry is forthcoming in Second Coming at Indolent Books online and Impossible Archetype and appears in the March 2025 anthology In the Footsteps of a Shadow from MadHat Press. He reviews frequently for Rain Taxi. For more information visit: walterhollandwriter.com.

Paul Karnowski is an artist, a poet, and a retired art teacher. He lives on a few acres just north of Asheville, North Carolina along with his dog Bingo. He spends his days growing flowers, vegetables, paintings and poems. His poems have been featured in Kakalak 24, Wild Root, Witcraft and the North Carolina Poetry Society program, Poetry in Plain Sight. One of his paintings recently appeared on the cover of the online journal, COOP. Through the years his paintings were featured in a number of one-person and group shows in the Atlanta area.

Jayant Kashyap is an Indian poet. His third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, won The Poetry Business New Poets Prize in 2024 (Smith|Doorstop, 2025). Kashyap has also published a zine, Water, with Skear Zines in 2021, and is currently working on a manuscript about the color blue.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Gratz College, where she teaches in the graduate programs. Her short story, “The Newcomer,” won the 2024 Folio Prize for fiction and her fiction and poetry have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times. Her work has been featured in more than sixty literary journals, including Folio Literary Journal, Consequence, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She lives in New Jersey.

Elina Kumra is a writer and author of Ash and Olive and poetry book, Extant, 344 pages of poems. Available on Amazon. Net proceeds go to Gaza.

​​Lindsay Liang is a New York-based Pacific Islander artist working across painting, collage, and conceptual drawing. Her work explores memory, distortion, and identity through surreal visual narratives. A published writer and researcher in both the sciences and the arts, she blends speculative fiction with ancestral fragments to question how we come to see—and missee—ourselves.

Nuala McEvoy (she/her) is an artist of English/Irish origin. She was fifty when she taught herself to paint during lockdown, and now she paints every day. She decided to submit her artwork to literary magazines in 2024, and her art now appears or will appear in around fifty literary and art magazines as features or as cover art. She has held two exhibitions in Münster, Germany, and currently has an exhibition of forty pieces in Cavendish Venues, London. 

Cassady O’Reilly-Hahn is a poet with an MA from Claremont Graduate University. He is an editor for Foothill: A Poetry Journal that highlights graduate student voices. He works for Deluxe, a company that localizes TV and film for a global audience. In his free time, Cassady writes haiku for his personal blog, orhawrites, and his Instagram @cassady_orha. Cassady currently resides in Redlands, California, with his wife, Anabelle, and their two pugs, Wyatt and Jasper.

Jennifer Patino fell in love with poetry at the age of nine and hasn’t stopped writing since. Her work has been featured in various online and print publications. She lives in Traverse City, Michigan with her husband and is addicted to reading books and watching films. She blogs at www.thistlethoughts.com.

Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse among other journals. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

Michelle Spinei’s work has appeared in Catapult, Hinterland Magazine, Ós Pressan, Points in Case and elsewhere. She is an American currently living in Reykjavík, Iceland with her family.

Tricia Steele is a science writer, memoirist, and mountain schooling mom living in North Georgia. A physics and philosophy student from Berry College, she recently completed her master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University. In between, she built and sold two technology companies. Her nonfiction essays have been published in The Science Writer, Science Spectrum, The Memoirist, as well as various newspapers, including The Washington Post. https://www.triciasteele.com/.

Jacob Strunk’s genre-bending fiction appears most recently in Allegory, Marrow Magazine, The Writing Disorder, and his 2023 collection Screaming in Tongues. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and makes weird films and television in Los Angeles, where he lives with a few framed movie posters and the ghost of his cat, Stephen. You can find more at www.sevenmileswest.com or follow @sevenmileswest on the socials.

Meghan Joyce Tozer is a writer, music historian, and soprano originally from Massachusetts. Library Journal called her debut novel Night, Forgotten (2022) “an artfully crafted story, which leads up to one unforgettable twist that will leave readers gasping.” After graduating from Harvard in 2008, Meghan earned a MM in voice performance and a PhD in music history. Much of her public writing has appeared under the pen name Emily Lindin, including UnSlut: A Diary and a Memoir (2015), a 2016 column for Teen Vogue, and the award-winning UnSlut: A Documentary Film (2016), which she also directed. Her personal story-sharing activism inspires her poetry.

Autumn White is a pictorial artist and printmaker studying in San Jose, California. Autumn teaches screen printing at small artist markets throughout the Bay Area, and gives guest lectures on watercolor and oil glazing techniques at local universities. They work in archaeology and the arts and use symbolism from both fields to produce images grounded in both the emotional and the scientific. They are set to enter the MA Anthropology program at SJSU in the fall, where they will use published articles, painted illustrations, and public teaching demonstrations to communicate their research to a broader audience. Find more at: https://amwillustrator.my.canva.site/.

B.J. Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, Naming the Trees (The Main Street Rag, 2021) and Tuckasee (Finishing Line Press, 2020). His work has appeared in The Blue Mountain Review, The Louisville Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. He holds a writing fellowship from The Hambidge Center, an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, and a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poetry. B.J. is also a songwriter and vocalist and recordings of his readings were selected by Transom for New Public Radio. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.