Our Authors

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Amelia Ada is a trans poet, literary critic, and author of the book-length poem Hard and Glad, acquired by Michelle Tea for DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e) in May 2026. Currently a doctoral candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, she holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University, and she graduated with honors from both the undergraduate journalism and creative writing programs at Northwestern University. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including ZYZZYVA, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Southwest Review, and West Branch, and she has received fellowship support from many institutions including USC, Vanderbilt, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in Los Angeles and co-hosts the podcast You Shouldn’t Let Poets Lie To You.

Find Amelia: Amelia's website

Suzanne Albanis is a New England-born fantasy and horror author of European ancestry, primarily of Greek, Polish, and Irish descent. As a lover of the outdoors, Suzanne can usually be found in the forest or growing herbs and tending her many houseplants, cooking ethnic food, or browsing playlists to suit her eclectic music tastes. She began writing seriously at the age of thirteen and by the age of eighteen had completed over ten novels. Her favorite genre to read and write is fantasy—but uneasily contained, she loves anything gorey, whimsical, fantastical, or historical-inspired.

Find Suzanne: Suzanne's X / Suzanne's Instagram / Suzanne's Bluesky

Gemma Ashborne writes dark romance stories across all genres. With an insatiable love for the macabre, she aims to show how we all have a little darkness in us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be the heroes of our own stories. As a member of the community herself, LGBTQ+ characters hold a special place in any story she writes. Born and raised in California, she lives happily surrounded by gorgeous oak trees, two trouble making pups, and her wonderful husband. Gemma self-published her debut dark fantasy duet in 2024, The Eternal Night Duet. 

Find Gemma: Gemma's Instagram

Carmiel Banasky is the author of the novel The Suicide of Claire Bishop (Dzanc, 2015), which Publishers Weekly calls “an intellectual tour de force.” Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Glimmer Train, LA Review of Books, American Short Fiction, Slice, Guernica, PEN America, The Rumpus, and on NPR, among other places. 

Find Carmiel: Carmiel's Website

Dr. Audrey Barbakoff is an author, librarian, and entrepreneur. Her debut picture book, The Schlemiel Kids Save the Moon (The Collective Book Studio, 2024) features a hilarious and diverse modern-day twist on a Yiddish folktale. Kirkus called it "an enjoyable, rollicking read" and Foreword deemed it "a multicultural winner." She is also the author of a forthcoming board book and multiple professional development books, chapters, and articles for librarians. Audrey holds a doctorate in education and a master's degree in library and information science. As a Jewish mother, she is passionate about passing down the vibrancy of Jewish humor, language, and stories to the next generation. Audrey lives with her family and a flock of chickens on a Puget Sound island.

Susan Bauerfeld, Ph.D. is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, IFS therapist, Speaker, Parent Consultant/Coach, ADHD Coach, and the proud mother of three amazing young men who she raised together with her loving, supportive husband. Her vocational passion is promoting understanding and teaching skills for success— especially skills of self-regulation, anxiety management, effective communication, and self-advocacy. She strives to offer the knowledge, support and skills individuals need to strengthen their most powerful tool-– a safe, secure, nurturing relationship with themselves and their loved ones. She is a popular speaker and has delivered talks about managing challenges related to anxiety, child raising, learning differences, technology, and the college process in a variety of venues such as libraries and schools throughout the greater Metropolitan New York area, the international CHADD (Children and Adults with ADHD) conference, the guest speaker series on Impact Parents and Alverno College.

Koa Beck is the author of the acclaimed nonfiction book White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind (Simon & Schuster, January 2021), praised by feminist writers Gloria Steinem and Rebecca Traister. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of Jezebel, the executive editor of Vogue.com, and the senior features editor at MarieClaire.com. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the cofounder of Black Lives Matter, describes Koa’s work as “intellectually smart and emotionally intelligent” while the Boston Globe has deemed her “a perceptive cultural critic” and “a visionary.”  

Find Koa: Koa's Website

Lindsay Beck is an adult fantasy author, living with psoriatic arthritis in South Carolina. When she’s not writing at a local coffee shop, you can usually find her furiously typing into her notes app in school pickup lines, at the doctor's office, or in the middle of the freezer aisle. Her work is infused with Scandinavian culture and folklore, drawing from her family's Norwegian heritage. She lives with her husband and three semi-feral children whose antics inspire much of the monsters in her stories. The Flower Growers is her debut novel.

Find Lindsay: Lindsay's X / Lindsay's Instagram / Lindsay's Bluesky

Hannah Benson is a writer and elementary teacher living in Miami. Her work appears in Pacific Review, Great Lakes Review, and Literary Bennington, among others. She loves to eat starfruit and ooh and ahh over the manatees by her apartment. 

Find Hannah: Hannah's Website

Matthew Daddona is the author of the poetry collection House of Sound (Trail to Table Press, 2020), which was praised by Publishers Weekly as "ruminative...carefully crafted," and by the Chicago Review of Books as "a debut collection for this moment." His writings--ranging from poetry to fiction to non-fiction--have appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Grammy.com's The Recording Academy, Tin House, Slice Magazine, Outside Online, Fast Company, The Rumpus, Amtrak's The National, Literary Hub, The Nervous Breakdown, and many other places. He is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and was a runner-up in The Blue Earth Review's 2017 flash fiction contest. Originally from the North Fork of Long Island, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Allison Darcy is a disabled Jewish writer living in North Carolina. The winner of the 2020 North Carolina Prize for Fiction, Allison's stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as Catapult, ANMLY, Nat. Brut., Words and Sports Quarterly, Alma, and the Eastern Iowa Review. In addition to her own work, she enjoys coaching writers to achieve their dreams through Raleigh's Redbud Writing Project. Allison holds an MA in Religious Studies from Duke and an MFA in Fiction from NCSU. She can be found at allisondarcy.com and/or obeying the whims of her 50-pound lapdog, Freyja.

Morgan Day is a fiction and architecture writer living in Tucson, Arizona. Her short fiction has appeared in Ecotone Magazine, Gulf Coast, Worms Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a writer and editor of Formgiving. An Architectural Future History (Taschen, 2020), the third installment of BIG's trilogy.

Meg Frances is a Texas born Brooklyn based writer. Her recent works have been featured in Outlook Springs, Las Odiosas’ A Very Feminist Zine, The Chachalaca Review, Love Like Salt Anthology, RaceBaitr, We the Women Collective’s Digital Wake Series, The Heart Podcast, the Cid Pearlman Performancehome(Body) project, and a forthcoming short story in Augur Magazine. In 2020, like many, she adapted her performances to suit online audiences. 

Find Meg: Meg's Website / Twitter

Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle.com, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study other places. Her third novel is forthcoming from Flatiron. 

Find Kaitlyn: Kaitlyn's Website

Lauren Haddad is a mother, homemaker, herbalist and writer who grew up in metro-Detroit, Michigan. She lives in a small village in Switzerland with her family, among the wild roses and grapevines. 

Find Lauren: Lauren's Website

Andrea Harper is a sculptor and writer living in NYC with her partner and four cats. Her writing has appeared in The Columbia Journal, Split Lip Magazine and Joyland. 

Find Andrea: Andrea's Website

Sydney Hegele (they/them) is a fiction author, poet, and essayist from small town Southern Ontario. They are the author of The Pump (Invisible Publishing 2021), a National Indie Bestseller, winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award, and the author of the poetry chapbook The Last Thing I Will See Before I Die (845 Press 2022). Their novel Bird Suit, a lakeside gothic & queer folktale, told through myths, conjecture, witness, and belief, which explores intergenerational trauma, faith, mental health, and intimacy in all its forms, is forthcoming from Invisible Publishing in Spring 2024. Their essay collection Bad Kids, about their experience of Dissociative Identity Disorder through a pop culture lens, will be edited by award-winning memoirist Alicia Elliot and is forthcoming from Invisible Publishing in Fall 2025. 

Find Sydney: Sydney's Website

A.B. Higashi is a progressive biblical scholar and educator who writes for the Bible for Normal People and who answers people's questions about religion on TikTok @abhbible. A graduate of Chicago Theological Seminary, he lives in Scottsdale, AZ with his brilliant wife and three energetic daughters. His main hobby is getting his kids to all their hobbies, but he makes time to do Jiu Jitsu, play video games, and write science fiction and fantasy novels that highlight the experiences of mixed-race characters like him.

Jen Jackson Quintano is the founder of The Pro-Voice Project, an organization harnessing the power of storytelling to dismantle stigma and restore reproductive rights in deeply conservative Idaho. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies including High Country News, Mountain Gazette, High Desert Journal, Red Rock Stories, The Capitol Reef Reader, and more. She also runs an arborist business—and is raising a daughter—with her husband in the dense forests of her state's northern reaches.

Christine Kelly is an author who loves her HEAs and himbos, ghosts and werewolves, and most of all loves her realistic heroines who are a bit messy, but fierce, ambitious, and independent. It isn't a Christine Kelly book without love interests that are down bad (so bad), a healthy dose of spice, and a bit of wit. Born in West Michigan, Christine now lives in the northern suburbs of Chicago with her two feral children, a lab pit mix geriatric puppy, and an aspiring book boyfriend of a husband.

Elizabeth Kilcoyne is an author, playwright, and poet, born and raised in Kentucky. She currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky. She is the author of Wake the Bones, a YA Southern Gothic from Wednesday Books. Elizabeth uses she/her pronouns. 

Find Elizabeth: Elizabeth's Website

Shauna Laurel Jones writes about art and aesthetics, nature, language, and identity. Her work is driven by a desire to connect: to bring together seemingly disparate strands of knowledge and experience; to integrate reason and emotion, perception and intuition; and to communicate her fascination with the intricacies of the world around her. In 2021 she was shortlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize for underrepresented voices in nature writing, and she has a column on visual art in the environmental magazine Orion. Born American and naturalised Icelandic, Shauna lives in London with her partner and daughter.

Jessica Leibe is an asexual copywriter, lifestyle blogger, and creator of One Page a Day. Her mission is to inspire women to live their most intentional lives through means such as simple living, planning, and personal development. Her work has appeared in Craft Better Books, The Big Smoke, Writing and Wellness, the AAA (Asexual, Aromantic, Agender) Literary Magazine, Fangoria, and She Did What She Wanted. She is a Northern California Writers Retreat alumni and member of Quill & Cup, an all-female writing community. She lives in New Jersey. 

Find Jessica: Jessica's Website

Katya Lidsky writes novels and TV shows. She is working on Nonfiction, Young Adult Fiction, and Women's Fiction books. She also loves writing essays and can't stop making lists. Her work has been featured in Parents.com, Texas Monthly, VegNews, The Fix, The Dogington Post, The Bark, The Mighty, and more. Katya is a Life Coach for Dog People, co-host of The Animal That Changed You podcast, and an avid animal shelter volunteer and foster. Some of her other favorite things include Tina Turner's voice, e.e. Cummings poetry, and being a Russian-Cuban-Jew from Laredo, Texas. She's a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and received her masters from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. 

Find Katya: Katya's Website

Krista Linares is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist specializing in Latino food culture and history. Krista is passionate about demonstrating how nourishing Latino foods are and advocating for Latino culture. The mission of her company, Nutrition con Sabor, is to see Latinos better represented in the health and wellness world and promote health equity for the community. Her work includes educating healthcare professionals to communicate nutrition to be inclusive of Latino food culture and writing for publications such as Healthline and Prevention.com. Krista holds a Master of Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Find Krista: Krista's Website

Sylvia Madrigal was born and raised in a small town on the Texas-Mexican border. As a Mexican-American lesbian from a modest background, Sylvia is haunted by the lack of representation she’s faced throughout her life—in books, films, and TV series, people with her background are completely absent. As a child, all she ever wanted was to learn how books were made. Her good fortune led her to Yale on an Affirmative Action scholarship. From New Haven, she went to Boston and landed in foreign language publishing as an associate editor at Houghton Mifflin. Eventually she became an author of Spanish textbooks. Although her career was in educational publishing, her heart always belonged to literary fiction. Sylvia uses fiction to process her life in the margins: as a little Mexican girl playing tennis in posh country clubs, as a public school student in an Ivy League institution, as a person of color in blueblood publishing. After that, life led her to the UK to receive her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Tennis and writing have been the constants throughout Sylvia’s life. She is still an avid tennis player. Literature saved her and now she focuses on writing books that allow young girls to see themselves, not as victims or puppets, but as masters of their destiny.

Sara Maurer lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with her husband and two children. Place deeply informs her writing, particularly how it influences identity and choice. She earned a BA in English at Albion College, an MA in written communications at Eastern Michigan University, and a certificate in novel writing through Stanford Continuing Studies. 

Find Sara: Sara’s Website

Erica McKeen is a Canadian fiction writer. Her debut novel Tear is forthcoming with Invisible Publishing in fall, 2022. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, longlisted for the 2020 Guernica Prize, and shortlisted for The Malahat Review 2021 Open Season Awards. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including PRISM international, filling Station, and The Dalhousie Review, among others. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her hybrid novel, In the Cicada Summer, is forthcoming (W. W. Norton & Co., 2024). 

Find Erica: Erica's Website / Twitter / Instagram

Marissa Miller has over 15 years of experience as a writer and editor across numerous top-tier publications.  She first joined CNN’s product recommendation department full-time in 2022 as a production editor, and now serves as the site's contributing editor covering all things health, wellness, fitness, fashion, beauty, interior design, tech, parenting and everything in between. 

Find Marissa: Marissa's Website

Colleen Morrissey is an award-winning author, educator, and humanities scholar born in Omaha, Nebraska. A writer of prose, poetry, and criticism, her work can be found in The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Chicago Reader, BitchMedia, The Rumpus, Studies in the Novel, and other venues of note. She was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 2014 and has been a Best American Short Stories Notable. She is currently at work on her debut novel. 

Find Colleen: Colleen's Website

Ellen Mulholland is a middle-grade author, USC grad, and California native. She has a background in journalism and education, spending 34 years teaching primarily middle school ELA. Now retired, she spends her days writing spooky middle-grade stories with important environmental themes and an accessible voice for young readers. She has two published books, This Girl Climbs Trees (2012), and Birds on a Wire (2013), and she was a RevPit 2018 winner. 

Find Ellen: Ellen's Website / Bluesky

Tom Mulroy is an award-winning educator living in the greater Minneapolis area. He’s been a teacher at the same elementary school for more than twenty years, and has been writing since he was in elementary school himself. He’s earned degrees from St. Cloud State University and St. Mary’s University, both in Minnesota. Tom is a contributor to the blog “Middle Grade Minded” and maintains his own blog, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.”

Chris Parrott, CPsychol is a British Psychological Society Chartered Counseling Psychologist and a Board-Certified Coach. In her private practice she specializes in working with emerging adults and with parents who are struggling with their roles. She is co-author of “Reach Before You Teach: Ignite passion and purpose in your classroom” (Corwin, 2012) and of “Doing Therapy Briefly” (Palgrave, 2004), as well as several book chapters and journal articles. Parrott presents at various international, national, and local conferences on topics related to parenting and to building a strong sense of self (such as— but not limited to— the BPS Division of Counseling Psychology, the School Social Workers of America Association, Character Education, Florida After School Association, and NY, PA, MA, & NJ State AHPERDs.) She founded Your Self Series, an SEL teen identity program serving schools nationwide prior to Covid; its website YourSelfSeries.com is still available for free to students and teachers globally. Parrott is also a licensed pilot, proud mother of two and married to her best friend.

Maria Pinto is a mushroom enthusiast, writer, and teaching fellow at the literary nonprofit GrubStreet. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies by Vermont Studio Center, the Mass Cultural Council, The Writers' Room of Boston, The Mastheads, and The Garrett on the Green. Her fiction has appeared in Frigg, Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, The Butter, and Dostoevsky Wannabe Cities: Boston, among others. She edits fiction for Peripheries Journal and is a contributor at Roundglass: Living. She's lectured about fungi for the Boston Center for the Arts, the Wisconsin Mycological Society, and the Central Texas Mycological Society. 

Sarah Prager is the author of three books about LGBTQ+ history for young readers:  Queer, There, and Everywhere (YA, 2017, HarperCollins), Rainbow Revolutionaries (MG, 2020, HarperCollins), and Kind Like Marsha (PB, 2022, Running Press). Sarah’s writing has also appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, NBC News, Business Insider, HuffPost, The Advocate, JSTOR Daily, and elsewhere.  Sarah has spoken on LGBTQ+ history to over 150 groups across six countries and lives with her wife and their two children in Massachusetts. 

Find Sarah: Sarah's Website

Danielle Render Turmaud, PhD, NCC is a kidlit author, a published academic author, a trauma therapist, a Psychology Today Expert Blog Author, an international presenter and speaker, and an experienced university instructor. Her stories meet at the intersection of lyrical + transformative as she brings her knowledge of human development and psychology into stories that help readers feel seen, understood, and enough. Danielle is also the host of writing community resources such as the You, Me, and the Writing Journey Podcast and #YouDeservepIt.

X: @Drenderturmaud BS: @drenderturmaud

Find Danielle: Danielle's X / Danielle's Bluesky

Meg Ripley was born in Ontario and raised in Newfoundland, Canada, surrounded by whales and icebergs. After an MFA in illustration from SVA, NYC, she worked as an illustrator for a decade before realizing her love of writing fiction could no longer be ignored. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two kids, and two dogs.

Find Meg: Meg's Website / Twitter

Lindsey Steffes has an MFA in Fiction from University of California, Riverside and a background in publicity and film. She enjoys small towns, quiet moments, and stories that vibrate with tension. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is currently at work on her debut novel. Her stories and poems have been featured in Midwestern Gothic, Black Heart Review, and Atticus Review. Find Lindsey: Lindsey's Website

Rachel Strauss is the woman behind @woodburncorner. You can find her artwork on the packaging of the newest professional wood burner to hit the market: the Walnut Hollow Creative Woodburner. She is a featured teacher on Skillshare for her Introduction to Wood-Burning class. Her work has been featured on the official Instagram feeds of Etsy (1.5M followers), Joann, Pinners, Craftsposure, Walnut Hollow, Creatorslane, Handmade Revolution, and many more. Her artwork is in @doityourselfmagazine. She is the proud creator of the Burnt Month Challenges (most recent: #BurntOctober). 

Find Rachel: Rachel's Instagram

Michael Strecker is the author of The Young Comic’s Guide to Telling Jokes Books 1 and 2 (Sterling 2017) and Jokes for Crescent City Kids, (Pelican 2019). His fourth joke book for kids will be published by Scholastic in the fall of 2021. He also writes fiction for adults. His short story The Woman at the Well was selected as a finalist by the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and his story A Lake Catherine Lesson appeared in The Critic, a literary journal that has published some of the country’s most highly regarded writers, including Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene.  In addition to his writing, Strecker is a stand-up comedian, who regularly performs at some of the top comedy clubs in the country. He lives in the New Orleans area with his wife Jillian and their sons Stephen and Joseph. 

Anca L. Szilágyi is a fiction writer and essayist. She is the author of Daughters of the Air (Lanternfish Press, 2017), which Shelf Awareness called “a striking debut from a writer to watch” and Dreams Under Glass (Lanternfish Press, 2022), which Buzzfeed Books called “a novel for our modern times.” Her writing appears in Orion Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Newsweek, among other publications. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Hugo House, and Jack Straw Cultural Center; her work has been listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2023 and nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Originally from Brooklyn, she has lived in Montreal, Seattle, and now Chicago, where she teaches creative writing.

Find Anca: Anca's Website / Twitter / Instagram

Kara Helen Terzis is a Greek-Australian author, whose debut novel, Frayed, was published when she was just nineteen. She’s had a lifelong love of science fiction and fantasy, and is passionate about layering her Greek heritage into everything she writes. When she’s not writing, she enjoys video games, baking, and reading anything she can get her hands on.

Find Kara: @karahelenterzis on all platforms. 

Jason Tougaw is the author of The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism (winner of the 2017 Dzanc Nonfiction Prize), The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience (Yale University Press), and Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel (Routledge). He is editor, with Nancy K. Miller, of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (University of Illinois Press). He has published essays in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Electra Street, Modern Fiction Studies, and OUT magazine. He teaches literature and writing at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. You can hear his weekly radio show, “The Mixtape,” on 90.5 WJFF Radio Catskill. Find Jason: Jason's Website

Chelsea Wakelyn’s debut novel is What Remains of Elsie Jane, forthcoming in March ‘23 (Rare Machines). She’s a good enough mother, a committed music snob, and neurodivergent maker of doom piles great and small and everywhere. She lives with her children in what is colonially known as Nanaimo, Canada as an uninvited guest on the unceded, ancestral, and living territory of the Snuneymuxw Nation. Chelsea is of mixed white settler and Red River Métis descent. Her current work-in-progress, Melinoë, is a speculative horror novel about doppelgängers, fraught mother-daughter relationships, and ketamine-infused VR. Find Chelsea: Chelsea's Twitter

Jackie Yeager is a children’s author from Rochester, NY with a Master of Science degree in Education. Her middle grade series, THE CRIMSON FIVE includes Spin the Golden Light Bulb (2019 NSTA BEST STEM list K-12), Flip the Silver Switch, and Pop the Bronze Balloon. When she’s not writing whimsical sci-fi for kids or spending time with her family, she can usually be found daydreaming about living in an English cottage or creating content for her creative team-building website.

Find Jackie: Jackie's Website