nonfiction

Alaina Symanovich studies creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Florida State University. Her work has recently appeared in Sonora Review, Santa Ana River Review, Entropy, and other journals, and she is the winner of a 2016 Best of the Net for her nonfiction essay The M Word.

Anthony J. Mohr's work has appeared in the 2013 California Prose Directory, DIAGRAM, Compose, Eclectica, Front Porch Journal, Hippocampus Magazine, The MacGuffin, Word Riot,  War, Literature, and the Arts, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize and received honorable mention from Sequestrum's Editor's Reprint Award. He is a reader for Hippocampus and an assistant editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal. Once upon a time, he was a member of the L.A. Connection, an improv theater group. By day he is a judge on the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles.

Charlotte Holmes’s second collection of short stories, The Grass Labyrinth, was published by BkMk Press in 2016. Her stories and essays have appeared in many journals, including The Sun, The New Yorker, Epoch, New Letters, The Woven Tale Press, and Narrative, and her poems in American Poetry Review, Radar, Tar River Poetry, and other venues. She is at work on a collection of lyric essays that includes Open House. She teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Penn State, where she also directs the creative writing program.

Emily Townsend is a senior English major at Stephen F. Austin State University. Her nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The Bookends Review and Junto Magazine, and are also forthcoming in The Thoughtful Dog Magazine and Sink Hollow. Her nonfiction essay has been nominated to represent SFASU in the AWP Intro contest. She is not terribly scared of honeybees, but she feels mega uncomfy when they want to collect the sugars in her salad.

Gabrielle Montesanti is a current MFA student at Washington University in St. Louis. She has a BA in mathematics and studio art from Kalamazoo College in Michigan. 

Jacqueline Doyle’s award-winning flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press. In addition to a previous essay in Superstition Review, she has published creative nonfiction in The Gettysburg Review, Passages North, New Ohio Review, Catapult, and Fourth Genre. Her work has been featured in Creative Nonfiction’s “Sunday Short Reads” and has earned seven Notable Essay citations in Best American Essays. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Joe is an essayist and playwright based in Arizona by way of Trenton, NJ, Washington DC, and Tel Aviv. He is the author of the essay collection Outlier Heart, (IFERS Press). His essays have appeared in numerous publications including Interim, Louisville Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Rock & Sling, and Eclectica, and been anthologized in the Transhumanism Handbook (Springer). His plays have been performed both domestically and abroad. A scholarship alumni of the Valley Community of Writers, he is a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Kate Lechler teaches British literature at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS. She also writes speculative fiction and watches too much television. Her fiction has appeared in Podcastle, NonBinary Review, and Metaphorosis; her poetry has appeared in Arsenika. She is currently at work on a novel about a theme park featuring genetically-engineered mythological animals and an essay series about leaving the Seventh-day Adventist church.

Maggie Kast is the author of The Crack Between the Worlds: a dancer’s memoir of loss, faith and family and a novel, A Free, Unsullied Land, winner of first place for fiction from the Wordwrite Awards. Following a career in dance, she received an M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and published stories in The Sun, Nimrod, Carve, Rosebud and others. Her essays have appeared in America, Image, Writer’s Chronicle, Fiction Writer’s Review and elsewhere. She’s received a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council, third prize in the Hackney Literary Contests and two Pushcart nominations.

Tessa Barkan graduated from Tulane University in May of 2015 in English and Psychology. She currently lives in a small town in rural Utah where she writes, hikes, works at a restaurant, and associate produces a mental health radio show. Her works of poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in the Tulane Review and in Hot Metal Bridge.