Contributors

Rebecca Ackermann

Anonymous is anonymous.

Samuel Rafael Barber is 0.00000001216379% of the population and author of The Box in Which We Live. He holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Arizona. His fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, Passages North, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and Tampa Review, among others. According to life expectancy tables, he will live another 47.5 years.

Rebekah Bergman is the author of The Museum of Human History, which received the special citation from the Philip K. Dick Awards and was named a best debut of the year by Kirkus and Booklist. Her writing appears in McSweeney’s, Joyland, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Rhode Island. Read more on her website.

Drew Broussard (he/him) is a writer and bookseller in New York's Hudson Valley. His writing has appeared in print, online, and in friends' mailboxes. He is a contributing editor at Literary Hub and the bookstore manager of Rough Draft Bar & Books in Kingston NY.

Alex Chand is a poet and playwright who lives in Atlanta. You can find her poems in The Cincinnati Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. Read more on her website.

Gina Chung is the author of the novel Sea Change, which was a B&N Discover Pick, and the short story collection Green Frog, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year. She has received the O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two APALA Adult Fiction Honors, and a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship. She is a faculty member of the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University.

Patrick Cline is the second-place winner of the 2002 New Haven Public Schools Science Fair.

Margarita Cruz was born in the desert and survived by rain. Her words can be found in Rattle, Ploughshares, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem A Day among other spaces. In 2026, she was selected as the first-place winner of Frontier Poetry’s 2026 Hurt & Healing Prize and was a multi-finalist for Creative Flagstaff's 2026 Viola Awards. Find more of her at shortendings.com.

Jackie DesForges is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Off Assignment, Alta Journal, Air/Light, and more. She is the owner of Librairie, the smallest brick and mortar bookshop in Los Angeles.

Sean Ennis is the author of Chase Us: Stories (Little A), Cunning, Baffling Powerful (Thirty West), Hope and Wild Panic (Malarkey Books), and Rat Aesthetics (Sand and Gravel Press). He lives in Mississippi.

Mitchell Galloway is a writer in Florida. His work appears in Subtropics, Relegation Books, The Metropolitan Review, and more.

Aaron Gilbreath has written for The Atlantic, Harper's, Dublin Review, Sierra, and The New York Times. The author of the books The Heart of California: Exploring the San Joaquin Valley and This Is: Essays on Jazz, you can read his three music Substacks Alive in the Nineties, Play It Strange, and Deconstruction: Portrait of a Quiet Masterpiece.

Sasha Graybosch is the author of the forthcoming novel My Future (McSweeney's Books, 2028). Her writing has appeared in Zoetrope, Electric Literature, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She grew up in Nebraska and lives in Brooklyn.

Avery Gregurich lives and writes in eastern Iowa, and organizes The Out Of Towners Reading Series.

Simon Han is the author of the novel Nights When Nothing Happened (Riverhead). He lives in the Boston area and teaches at Tufts University.

Christopher Hermelin is a writer and podcaster living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in a bunch of cool places like this one, and his podcast So Many Damn Books has been celebrating reading since 2014.

Sunwoo Jeong is a speculative fiction writer based in Seoul/NYC. Her work has appeared in Split Lip, Fantasy, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine, among others, and has been included in the Wigleaf Top 50 Long List. A Kundiman Fellow and a Clarion alum, Sunwoo is currently working on a collection of linked stories and a novel.

Charlie Joy is a writer from London, based in Las Vegas.

Jennifer Savran Kelly's debut novel Endpapers was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and a fall/winter 2023 Indies Introduce pick. Their short work has been published in Short Story, Long; Potomac Review; Black Warrior Review; trampset; and elsewhere.

Rachel King is the author of the linked short story collection Bratwurst Haven, winner of a Colorado Book Award and a finalist for an Oregon Book Award, and the novels People along the Sand and The Red Heads (forthcoming from Forest Avenue Press in June 2027). Her fiction has appeared in One Story, North American Review, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. She lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Dustin Kurtz is a bookseller in Portland, Oregon. He has big feelings. Good odds he's crying, like, right now.

Chloe Lauter

J. Robert Lennon most recent books are Hard Girls and Buzz Kill. He lives in central New York state.

Keith Leonard is the author of the poetry collection Ramshackle Ode (Ecco/HarperCollins). His work has recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

Jake Levine lives in Daegu, South Korea. He professes creative writing skills at Keimyung University. He writes poetry and translates and edits books of translation for Black Ocean.

M Lin is the author of The Memory Museum.

Jessica Love is a writer and teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. Her writing has appeared at The Coachella Review, Your Impossible Voice, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere.

Sean Lovelace lives in Indiana, where he chairs the English Department at Ball State University. He wrote Fog Gorgeous Stag (Publishing Genius Press), How Some People Like Their Eggs (Rose Metal Press), and other flash fiction collections. He has won numerous national literary awards, including the Rose Metal Press Short Short Prize and the Crazyhorse Prize for Fiction. He has elbow pain. And eats nachos.

Rachel Lyon is author of the novels Sixes, which is forthcoming from Zando in 2028; 2025 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize finalist Fruit of the Dead; and Self-Portrait with Boy, a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including One Story, Electric Literature, and the 2027 anthology Reading At Karma. The 2024 Paris Writer in Residence through The American University of Paris, Rachel teaches for the BFA Program in Creative Writing at Bennington College. She was raised in Brooklyn, NY, and lives with her family in Western Massachusetts.

Graham Marema is a writer from East Tennessee who received her MFA at the University of Wyoming with a concurrent degree in Environment & Natural Resources. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she works for an environmental nonprofit and draws old dive bars.

Molly McGhee

Lincoln Michel’s most recent novel is Metallic Realms (Atria Books). He's also the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the novel The Body Scout (Orbit). He is the co-editor of the Shirley Jackson Award nominated anthologies Tiny Crimes (Catapult) and Tiny Nightmares (Catapult). His fiction appears in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's, The Baffler, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Lightspeed. He writes the literary newsletter Counter Craft.

Jordan Michelman is an author and journalist based in Portland, Oregon.

Richard Mirabella is the author of the novel Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, a NY Times Book Review Editor's Choice. His short stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Story, Split Lip, and have twice appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50.

Ander Monson is the author of nine books, most recently Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession. He lives in Tucson.

Dan Murphy is a writer, editor, and artist raised in a river city by a lactation consultant and former mayor. He lives in Beacon, NY with his wife and their children.

Lindsay Nelson is a writer and still life photographer. She’s participated in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop 3-week Summer Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Workshop, and is at work on a story collection and a novel. She can be found at lindsay-nelson.com.

Amanda Oliver is the author of Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library. She lives and writes in Joshua Tree, California.

Matt Phillips

Kaylyssa Quinn is a writer and stay-at-home mother of two living in Atlanta, GA. She can be found at kaylyssa.com.

Morgan Rose-Marie is a queer writer and an Assistant Professor at Utah Valley University. She serves as an assistant editor for Brevity. She has a PhD from Ohio University and an MA from Colorado State University. Her work has been featured in The Normal School, Heavy Feather Review, Tampa Review, and Pleiades, among others, which can be found on her website.

Sharon Ross is a writer, teacher, and time-traveler. She grew up in California and raised her daughter in Maine. Her poems, essays and feature stories appear in The Pacific Review, Lake Effect, DASH, Miniskirt Magazine, and Mindful magazine. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. When she’s not teaching, she ignores Google maps to see where the road will take her and fantasizes about becoming a tour guide.

Nicholas Russell is a writer and bookseller from Las Vegas. His debut novel Observer is out now from Ecco.

Pete Segall lives in Chicago. His writing appears in The Stinging Fly, New York Review of Architecture, The Drift, Defector, and elsewhere.

Emily J. Smith

Lytton Smith is named after the writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who infamously coined the novel opening “It was a dark and stormy night” - a clause that begins most poems in Smith’s Foundlings Press poetry chapbook My Radar Data Knows Its Thing. You can find Lytton's Icelandic translations at Open Letter, Peirene and elsewhere, and his poetry books at New Michigan Press, Nightboat, and Poetry Society of America. You can find him in Western Upstate New York.

Leah Smolin is an MFA candidate at Boston University. She edits the art magazine Rattlesnake and is a former member of the curatorial collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid. You can read her writing in Great River Review and X-R-A-Y.

Charlie Sterchi

Megan Tady is the author of Bluebird Day, a Washington Post Noteworthy Book, and Super Bloom, an IPPY Gold medal for Best Regional Fiction in the Northeast. She runs the freelance writing and editing company Word-Lift and offers book coaching and ghostwriting. Her writing has appeared in Oprah Daily, People, L.A. Parent, Woman's Day, Writer's Digest, and Slackjaw, among others. Megan lives in Western Massachusetts with her family.

Jae Towle Vieira is a writer and producer on Normal Gossip, a storytelling podcast laud-
ed by The New Yorker, Vogue, and TIME. Jae has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona, and their short fiction has been published in New England Review, Carve Magazine, The Normal School, and elsewhere.

Adam Vitcavage is the founder of Debutiful. He lives in Denver with his wife and daughter.

Sharon Wahl’s collection Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances (Iowa, 2024) won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was longlisted for the 2025 Carol Shields Prize. Her writing has appeared in Harper's, The Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, Wigleaf, JMWW, Five Points, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Tucson and is writing a book about Character Flaws. Online here.

Katie Yee is a writer from Brooklyn. Her first novel, Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, was a New York Times Notable Book, won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. By day, she works at the Brooklyn Museum. By night, she writes, usually under the watch of her judgmental rescue dog, Ollie.