Contributors

McKenzie Caldwell is a sometimes-poet from Ohio. You can usually find them with five or so books crammed into their backpack. They’re working on a book on bigfoot in popular culture and have a mild obsession with crappy bigfoot podcasts. Find them here.

Rico Craig is a teacher, writer, and award-winning poet whose work melds the narrative, lyrical and cinematic. Craig is published widely; his poetry collection BONE INK was winner of the 2017 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2018. Find recent writing here.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of 10 poetry collections, most recently “Lady, You Shot Me”, which was published by 8th House Publishing. He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Claire Grace is originally from Nashville, but she is currently studying Creative Writing at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN). Her poetry has previously been featured in Chanter Literary Magazine and Better Than Starbucks Poetry Magazine, and she is currently working on her first full-length collection. When not writing, Claire is probably baking or doing a puzzle.

Maddie Hampton is a writer born and raised in Austin, Texas. This is her first published piece. She is the creator of the podcast Tombstone Label, an auditory exploration into art history, and is currently shopping for a city to call home.

Grace Massey is a writer, editor, life-long ballet student, gardener, and cat trainer who lives outside of Boston.

Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Gargoyle, The Seattle Review, The Collagist, The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Quiddity, Cimarron, and other journals, and in several anthologies, including Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Smith has been the recipient of an Orlando Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine, and a 2007 Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her second chapbook, Scatter, Feed, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in the fall of 2014, and her book, Nobody’s Jackknife, was published in 2015 by the West End Press. Find her here.

Gem McHaffey studies English at Wesleyan University where she received the Cole Prize for Creative Writing. She is based out of Cambridge, MA. Follow her on Twitter @makeitaboutgem.

Haley Olds is a recent graduate of the College of Charleston where she interned for Illuminations, an international poetry journal. She currently writes obituaries, curates event calendars and interviews comedians for her local newspaper. You can find her on twitter at @aretheredonuts.

Jeni Prater is a queer sexual violence and disability activist and works at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center on the intersection of these. She has been published in “Of/With,” “Spark,” “Rising Phoenix Press” and was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize at Wellesley College, her alma mater.

Kathryn H. Ross is an LA-based writer, reader, and storyteller. Her works cover spirituality and the soul, recurring dreams and fears, and racial trauma inflicted on brown bodies in America and the wider world. To read her, visit her website. 

Marvin Shackelford is author of the collections Endless Building (poems) and Tall Tales from the Ladies’ Auxiliary (stories, forthcoming). His work recently has appeared in Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, Split Lip, Juked and elsewhere. He resides in Southern Middle Tennessee, earning a living in agriculture.

Emily Shue was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, where she cultivated a life-long love of cornfields and poetry. She is a recent graduate of Ursinus College. Previous publications include The Oswald Review, Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets, and The Oyster River Pages. She currently resides in New York City, where she works at Womankind, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending gender-based violence.

Jan Stinchcomb is the author of The Blood Trail (forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks). Her stories have appeared in Gravel, Gone Lawn, matchbook, Atticus Review and Monkeybicycle, among other places. She is featured in The Best Small Fictions 2018 and is a reader for Paper Darts. Currently living in Southern California with her husband and children, she can be found at janstinchcomb.com or on Twitter @janstinchcomb

Christine Taylor, a multiracial English teacher and librarian, resides in her hometown Plainfield, New Jersey.  She is the EIC of Kissing Dynamite: A Journal of Poetry and the haibun editor at OPEN:  Journal of Arts & Letters.  Christine has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her work appears in Modern Haiku, Glass, Room, and The Rumpus among others.  She can be found here.

Kristin Tenor is a writer living in Northeastern Wisconsin. She enjoys writing both short fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in the Midwest Review and the Peninsula Pulse. She is currently at work on a short story collection. Visit her online or follow her on Twitter @KristinTenor.

Born to a Vietnamese refugee and Filipina immigrant, Elise Thi Tran grew up in Chicago and studies English at Kenyon College.

Fred White‘s poems have appeared in Allegro Poetry Journal, Rattle, South Carolina Review, The Cape Rock, etc. He lives near Sacramento, CA.