Our Authors

Morgan Adair has an affinity for disasters, whether that’s mandatory evacuation due to historic flooding while getting her MFA from the University of Iowa, serving in Peace Corps Georgia during the Rose Revolution, or enjoying typhoons while living in Xiamen, China. Life, while getting a BFA in dramatic writing at Tisch NYU, was full of large and small disasters, some, like the 2001 cockroach apartment incident, were merely off-putting, while others were more formative. After transitioning to YA fiction, Morgan’s predilection for disasters became a feature in her work. When not writing about the apocalypse, or getting rescued by helicopter from the Shasta National Forest in CA, Morgan teaches English at Smith College and Western New England University. She’s also an avid, if new, practitioner of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and will happily convince anyone willing to listen why grappling with friends (or enemies!) is a spectacular idea.

Emma Baker is a writer and the host of the podcast STARGIRL. She is a graduate of NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program, and lives in New York. Find Emma: Emma's Website / STARGIRL podcast

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

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

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

Nolan Cubero is a writer and filmmaker from Louisville, Kentucky. He currently lives in Los Angeles and is a law student at UCLA School of Law.

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. 

J. Daniel Elam writes about activism: anti-colonial revolutionaries in the 1910s-1920s; anti-racist thinkers in the 1930s-1940s; Third World solidarity in the 1950s-1960s; anti-apartheid movements in the 1970s; and AIDS activism in the 1980s-1990s. His book about anti-colonialism in India, Impossible and Necessary, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press in 2020. He is currently writing a book about gay uncles, the ongoing AIDS crisis, and queer inheritance. He teaches comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong. He lives in Hong Kong, Toronto, and on airplanes. 

Find J. Daniel Elam: J. Daniel Elam's Website

Peggy Dean (the Pigeon Letters) is native to the Pacific Northwest and is a nationally recognized freelance artist, with worldwide publications as a platform artist. She is the best selling author of The Ultimate Brush Lettering Guide and Botanical Line Drawing. Peggy is an award-winning online instructor with a range of classes on Skillshare.  She is predominantly self-taught, which she proudly uses to assist others. 

Find Peggy: Peggy's Website

Robert C. DeLena lives in Sudbury, MA, where he runs a recruiting company, Legal Staffing Solutions, which he founded over twenty years ago to advise law firms, lawyers, and students. He spends time skiing all over the world with his son, Ryan, and the great friends he’s made during his journey from beginner to reluctant adventurer. 

Ryan C. DeLena is widely known in the outdoor community through his social media presence as “Extreme Ryan.” He has conquered many of the world’s signature ski runs and is an enthusiastic rock climber, ice climber, and hiker. He recently completed the “Hundred Highest” hiking peaks in New England. Ryan has earned advanced certifications from the American Mountain Guides Association and the Professional Ski Instructors of America. 

Rob and Ryan’s debut, WITHOUT RESTRAINT, a memoir in two voices, is forthcoming from Falcon Guides in spring 2023.

Kristy Dickerson, keynote speaker, author, businesswoman, mom of 3 boys, and active CEO to START brands, has devoted her life to providing hope for individuals who are looking to achieve balance, success, and happiness within their own lives. She is a health enthusiast as that is people’s most important asset in life! Her health slowly slipped away from her in 2017. 

Find Kristy: Kristy's Website

Elisa Faison is a writer of contemporary literary fiction and women's fiction from Carrboro, NC. She recently completed her PhD in Contemporary American Fiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a former editorial intern at Algonquin Books and bookseller at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC. She currently works as a freelance novel editor on Reedsy. She has published work in SmokeLong Quarterly, Orca, The Lumiere Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Women’s Review of Books. She has forthcoming stories in Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and Grist. She attended the Sewanee Writers Conference in 2012 as the Sewanee Scholar in playwriting, and in 2023 as a fiction contributor. She is currently working on her debut novel, WELL-REHEARSED, and on a novel-in-stories. 

Find Elisa: Elisa's Twitter

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

Laura Garrison is working on some middle grade horror-comedy novels. She earned a PhD from Catholic University in Washington, DC, with a dissertation on spiders and webs in American literature. Currently, she teaches creative writing and literature at Roanoke College in the Blue Ridge Valley, where she lives with her husband, son, daughter, and cat. She edits Jersey Devil Press (an online magazine of weird fiction and poetry) and tweets occasionally @pickleboots.

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

Eva Jurczyk is a writer and librarian living in Toronto. She has written for Jezebel, The Awl, The Rumpus, and Publishers Weekly. Her first novel, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, was published in 2022 by Sourcebooks/Poisoned Pen Press.

Find Eva: Eva's Website

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

Shelly Kim, the artist behind Letters By Shells discovered the act of creating art as a creative outlet from her desire to release stress from her full-time insurance job back in 2015. She has now made it a mission for her artwork to express love and positivity, and for it to inspire others to believe that anything in life is totally possible. Shelly has also collaborated with a wide range of creative companies, including Apple, at their Today at Apple event, where she shared her artwork and story; Adobe Students, for their Spark Stories Sweepstakes; Enso Rings for their limited edition inked collection; MOO for their Cotton Paper Campaign; and with such crafts manufacturers as Tombow, Ranger Ink, Blick Art Materials and Princeton Brush. Shelly and her work have been featured on CBS News, Art Insider and Voyage LA. Find Shelley: Shelley's Website

Abby Sumner is a writer and researcher of contemporary art and material culture. She works as an art librarian specializing in research and instruction supporting Parsons School of Design. As a recent graduate of the Biography and Memoir program at the CUNY Graduate Center, her upcoming memoir imparts a history of famed figurines inspired by her hometown's most sacred site. Her writing can be found in Divagations Magazine, Objective, Critical Studies in Men's Fashion, and with the Lesbian Herstory Archives. She lives in Queens. 

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

Kate Tooley is a queer writer currently living in Brooklyn, but originally from the Atlanta area. She writes about the sticky corners of gender and sexuality, complicated families, and magical animals. She holds an MFA in Fiction from The New School, and is an Assistant Editor at Uncharted Magazine focusing on Mystery and Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Their writing can be found in journals including Barren Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Witness Magazine, and Longleaf Review, and has been nominated for best Microfiction and Best American Essays.  When not writing, she can be found watching too many documentaries, falling off walls at the climbing gym, or walking her unconscionably outgoing Chiweenie, Etta, in Prospect Park.

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

Taylor got to writing late. After spending his early years performing in L.A. rock clubs, he founded a digital agency and a software company for the advertising and entertainment industries. He's created designs that have traveled to space, written songs for film, played bit roles in bad movies, and occasionally does dumb things like rocketing down the Olympic bobsled track. He lives in a 1750 farmhouse outside Boston with his wife, two daughters, and a very busy miniature Australian Shepherd. Taylor's debut middle grade novel, Clara Poole and the Long Way Round, will be published in spring 2023 by Pixel+Ink with a second book to follow in spring 2024. Find Taylor: Taylor'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

Catherine Yu writes dark speculative fiction. She was born in Nanjing and is now based in New York. She is a graduate of Odyssey Writing Workshop. Direwood  (Page Street, September 2022) is her debut novel.

Find Catherine: Catherine's Website

Mimi Zieman has treated frozen limbs on the highest mountain, delivered triplets near the deepest ocean trench, tap danced through Broadway studios, and has been a suburban mom of three – all experiences that have prepared her for new challenges. Her latest is writing a memoir about her unlikely journey from New York City girl to the doctor on an Everest expedition in the remote wilds of Tibet.

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Her early career as an academic at Emory University School of Medicine included the roles of Associate Professor, Director of Medical Students, Founder and Director of a Fellowship in Family Planning, educator, and researcher. With a national reputation, she was a founding member of the scientific Society of Family Planning, and a member of CDC committees that wrote guidelines on U.S. contraceptive care. 

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She left the structured world of academia to work as an independent consultant and entrepreneur, founding her company, SageMed LLC. Mimi has co-authored sixteen editions of Managing Contraception, with over one million books in circulation, and has provided guidance to programs on a global scale. She is a passionate advocate for women’s rights and has testified before the Georgia Legislature several times against bills that have no basis in science.

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A popular medical speaker, she has lectured nationally and internationally, and has been interviewed by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Brides, Redbook, Glamour, Fitness, Esquire, Good Day Atlanta, CNN, WSB-TV, Fox news, Georgia week in review, UPN-Atlanta, and Radio stations WSB –750 and WRAS. 

Find Mimi: Mimi's Website