[ MAGIC ]
Samia Ahmed is a first year MFA Creative Writing student at Old Dominion University. She is originally from India where she has been published in nationally recognized journals. She has a masters in journalism. She believes in breaking stereotypes and continues to practice it while petting pretty black cats and sipping chai.
Craig Anderson is a writer, trainer and part-time palm reader who lives in St. Petersburg, Florida (but will always consider himself a Detroiter). His work has appeared in Glitterwolf Magazine, the Eckerd Review, Former Cactus, and other publications. You can find him on twitter at @wildcraigdom.
Jesse Barben is a writer and comedian from Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work has appeared in lit.cat. He is an accounting student and has three small children.
Brad Baumgartner is a writer and Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Penn State University. His digital chapbook, Quantum Mechantics: Memoirs of a Quark, is forthcoming from The Operating System (2019).
With degrees in Physics and Chemistry, Andy Betz has tutored and taught in excess of 30 years. His novel (The Lady in Red Quilt), short stories (“The Copy,” “Kelly,” “My Color,” “November,” “My Bucket List,” “Mrs. Zeeman”), and poems (“The First Verse of the Worst Nurse Curse,” “Soon,” “I Watched the Ocean,” “When I Was Ten,” “The Coin Spins,” “Once Was a Day Without Sunshine,” “Wrap Around Wrap,” “Polysyllabic Enunciation”) are works still defining his style. He lives in 1974, has been married for 26 years, and collects occupations (the current tally is 95). He currently teaches physics and physical science.
Wyatt Bonikowski’s stories have appeared in Atticus Review, Fairy Tale Review, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing, Occulum, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and others. He teaches literature and creative writing at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Just Buffalo teaching artist Benjamin Brindise is the author of the chapbook ROTTEN KID (Ghost City Press, 2017), the full length collection of poetry Those Who Favor Fire, Those Who Pray to Fire (EMP Books, 2018), and the short fiction micro chap The Procession (Ghost City Press, 2018). He has represented Buffalo, NY in the National Poetry Slam in 2015, 2016, and 2018, helping Buffalo to place as high as 9th in the country. His poetry and fiction has been published widely online and in print including Maudlin House, Trailer Park Quarterly, and Philosophical Idiot.
Angela Caravan lives in Vancouver, BC, and writes poetry, fiction, and essays. She is the author of the micro-chapbook Landing (post ghost press) and was 2nd runner-up for Pulp Literature’s 2018 Magpie Poetry Award. Her work has also appeared in Longleaf Review, Reel Honey Mag, and Screen Queens. You can find her on Twitter at @a_caravan.
Lara C. Cory is a UK-based music & film writer, co-author of Animal Music: Sound & song in the Natural World, contributor to The Wire, Little White Lies, CRACK and other publications. Recently she made a woven shell amulet for the Art of Magic exhibition, a collaboration between Folklore Tapes and The Museum of Magic and Witchcraft in Boscastle.
Marisa Crane is a lesbian fiction writer and poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Cotton Xenomorph, Okay Donkey, Occulum, and elsewhere.
J. E. Crum is an artist who enjoys creating intensely vivid works using the method of automatism, in which the artist doesn’t always know how an artwork is going to turn out. J. E. enjoys working intuitively to create art, and tends to draw inspiration from mythologies as personal narratives evolve from the abstractions.
María DeGuzmán is a conceptual photographer and a music composer / sound designer. Her photography has been exhibited nationally and internationally (including at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, MA). She has published a creative nonfiction essay in Callaloo, photography in the North Carolina Literary Review and Map Literary (forthcoming), poetry in Empty Mirror (forthcoming) and The Cape Rock, and short stories in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, and Sinister Wisdom. I am also a scholar and have published two books, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, 2012). She has in production a third book about writer John Rechy’s oeuvre (University of South Carolina Press, 2019). She has published many articles on Latina/o cultural production, and writes and teaches about relationships between literature and various kinds of photographic practice.
Evelyn Deshane’s creative and nonfiction work has appeared in The Atlantic’s tech channel, Plenitude Magazine, Briarpatch Magazine, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, and Bitch Magazine, among other publications. Evelyn (pron. Eve-a-lyn) received an MA from Trent University’s Public Texts Program and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Waterloo. Their most recent project, #Trans, is an anthology about transgender and nonbinary identity online. For more information, check out evedeshane.wordpress.com.
Sean William Dever is a Boston-based poet, educator, and activist currently in his last year of his MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in Poetry at Emerson College. He teaches writing at Emerson and Boston Architectural College. In addition, he also works as a Professional ESL Tutor at Northeastern University. He is the author of the chapbook, I’ve Been Cancelling Appointments with My Psychiatrist for Two Years Now, forthcoming May 2019, published by Swimming with Elephants Publications.
W. C. Dowden gets some of his best ideas by just waking up in the morning. He used to be a journalist. Now, he’s a lawyer. But he’s always been a writer.
Jess Doyle is an aspiring writer from North Wales. She writes short stories and flash fiction and is currently working on her debut novel. Jess’s stories have appeared in Idle Ink and Horror Scribe. You can find Jess on Twitter as @jcdoyley.
A. R. Dugan has an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and lives in Boston. He reads poetry for Ploughshares. His poetry can be seen or is forthcoming in a number of literary magazines and reviews, most recently Sweet, where his poem “Milk Thistle” was a contest finalist. Finishing Line Press will publish his chapbook, Call / Response, in March. He taught high school English in southeastern Massachusetts for nine years. A. R. currently teaches literature and writing at Emerson College and Wheaton College.
Gwynevere Ellis has published two professional books and her memoir is forthcoming in 2019 from the Cardinal Publishers Group. Shorter works appear in literary journals including Prime Number Magazine, Smith Magazine, Cagibi and Crack the Spine.
Catherine Fahey is a poet and librarian from Salem, Massachusetts. When she’s not reading and writing, she’s knitting or dancing. You can read more of her work at www.magpiepoems.com.
Ken Farrell’s work is forthcoming/published in journals such as Sport Literate, The Piltdown Review, The Offbeat (poetry prize winner, selected by Heid E. Erdrich), Pilgrimage, The Texas Poetry Journal, Writer’s Bloc, Connections, and anthologized with Arachne Press. Ken Holds an MFA from Texas State University and an MA from Salisbury University, has earned bread as an adjunct, server, professional cage fighter, and pizzaiolo, and for most of the past ten years, Ken has worked in a warehouse. He is currently busy with family and revising and shopping poetry and short fiction manuscripts, and in response to a challenge from his daughter who participated in NaNoWriMo, Ken recently began his first novel.
Brett Firman is an emerging fiction writer and poet from Melbourne. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Monash University majoring in Creative Writing and is currently completing a Master’s Degree in Journalism. Brett is passionate about social justice, in particular gender equality and LGBTIQ rights. She has previously been published in Verge 2016: Futures for her political poem “Flowers of Nauru”. Brett is a strong believer in the cathartic nature of writing; therefore, she draws inspiration from lived experience and incorporates everyday speech into her writing.
Alex Robert Franco is a writer and educator from Atlanta, GA. He studied literature at Bard College and La Sorbonne. His work has appeared previously in PolyChrome Ink, Callisto, and The Erotic Review, among others.
Catherine Garbinsky is a writer, a witch, and a worrier living in Northern California. She holds a degree in The Poetics of Transformation: Creative Writing, Religion, and Social Justice from the University of Redlands. Catherine’s chapbook of Ursula Le Guin erasures, All Spells Are Strong Here, is part of the Ghost City Press 2018 Summer Series. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in L’éphémére Review, Rose Quartz Journal, Venefica Magazine, Cauldron Anthology, and others.
Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection Morning Time in the Household, Looking Out, and children’s picture book titled Uma the Umbrella. His work can be found in Maudlin House, Literary Orphans, The Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, CHEAP POP, and others.
A young writer from Yorkshire, Emily Harrison has recently discovered that she actually likes creative writing, despite everything she may have previously said. She can be found on Twitter @emily__harrison, and has had work published with Storgy, Soft Cartel, Retreat West and Riggwelter Press to name a few.
Rachel Hehl (yes, that’s her real surname) is a twenty-four-year-old demonic entity from Melbourne, Australia. She likes iced coffee, Byronic heroes, and all things sparkly.
Russell Hemmell is a French-Italian transplant in Scotland, passionate about astrophysics, history and speculative fiction. Recent poetry in Argot Magazine, The Grievous Angel, Star*Line, and others. Find them online at their blog earthianhivemind.net and on Twitter @SPBianchini
Gary Holman is a writer and actor from Indianapolis, Indiana. He currently lives in Washington Heights, New York City. He is currently staging his play, “Now Go and Smite” In Chelsea.
Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s poetry has appeared in Faerie Magazine, Illumen, Liquid Imagination, Star*Line, Weaving the Terrain (Dos Gatos Press), Mandragora (Scarlett Imprint), and many other places. A member of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling.
Recently retired, Julie Allyn Johnson enjoys photography, baking bread, hiking, biking, traveling with her husband, crochet, playing with her new puppy and reading about writing and poetry. Last summer, when inspiration started to keep her awake at night, poetry ensued. She is the oldest of six girls and grew up surrounded by oak, walnut and other woods native to north central Iowa piled high around the ten-acre backyard out back behind her father’s sawmill. Julie has been writing poetry for a year and a half. She has been published in Lyrical Iowa, Persephone’s Daughters, and Typishly. Her writing process is varied. She has journals stashed throughout the house and in the car and always carries a small notebook in her purse. Sometimes she goes weeks and weeks without so much as a journal entry and other times, writes several times a day.
Edmund Jonah was born in Calcutta, India to Iraqi-Jewish parents. Educated by Belgian and Canadian Jesuits. Moved to the U.K. for ten years. Lived in Israel since then. Father of three children and grandfather of three. One book published, several short stories, essays and verses published. Retired and spends time lecturing on various subjects.
Tyler Jones is a novelist from Portland, OR. Jones been in a writing workshop with Chuck Palahniuk for the last two years. Palahniuk also selected Jones’s short story, “F For Fake,” to be included in an anthology he edited called BURNT TONGUES. The film rights to my story were sold to a Sundance award-winning producer named Danny Yourd. I co-wrote the screenplay with him and he hopes to begin filming sometime later this year.
Cecilia Kennedy earned a PhD in Spanish literature from Ohio State University. Her speculative fiction works have appeared in Theme of Absence, Gathering Storm Literary Magazine, Down in the Dirt Literary Magazine, and The Sirens Call Ezine. She lives in the Greater Seattle area with her family and details her “scary” attempts at DIY projects in her blog, “Fixin’ Leaks and Leeks.”
A. C. Koch’s work has been published in the Columbia Journal, Mississippi Review, and Exquisite Corpse, and two of Koch’s short stories have been awarded first place in the Raymond Carver Short Story Award (2003, 2007). Koch lives in Denver, teaching linguistics at the University of Colorado and playing guitar in a bossa nova trio, Firstimers.
Lisa Lo Paro is a social media manager living in New York. Her fiction has previously appeared in Visitant Lit and Here Comes Everyone. She is interested in mythology, the hero’s journey, and everyday magic.
Lisa L. Lynn, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice and writes in the interstices as a necessary existential connection to the Muse in the midst of contemporary darkness.
Sante Matteo was born and raised in Italy to the age of ten. He resides in Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami University, where he taught Italian Studies before retiring.
Ellen McCammon is a queer Chicago-based creator interested in exploring gender and sexuality through folklore and myth. Her poetry has been published in Illumen Poetry magazine (as Anne Ellen Clarke) and Bi Women Quarterly. Her fiction has been published in Exponent magazine. You can follow her on twitter @bookpriestess.
Kerry McPherson lives in Portland, Oregon with her wife and two cats. She tends to distill her words to the point. A sharp one. Flash fiction is the perfect fit for her. You can see some more of her shorts on her website kerrymcpherson.com.
Zoe Mitchell lives and works on the South Coast. She has been published in a number of national poetry magazines including The Rialto, The London Magazine and The Moth. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, focused on witches in women’s writing. She recently won the Indigo-First Collection Competition and her first poetry collection will be published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. www.twitter.com/WritingByZoe
Scott Moses is an office manager by day and a writer by night. His work has appeared in Beautiful Losers. He currently resides in Baltimore, simultaneously loving and loathing humanity.
Bekkie Jean Murphy writes in Atlanta, Ga. A Georgia Southern University graduate, she currently works for the Atlanta Ballet, and her work has appeared in The Coil.
Born in Dublin Ireland, Paul Nixon spent much of his early childhood years growing up in County Sligo, located in the North West of Ireland, set in the shadow of a two thousand foot tall mountain known as Tievebaun. Paul’s grandmother, Margaret, a mystical woman, had a great influence over him. A farmers wife, she spent a good deal of her 83 years living on the slopes of this mountain and its wild glaciated lands where she was tuned into the historical, mystical and legendary wonders that enveloped the area. Margaret endeared Paul with these qualities which allowed his imagination to evolve and develop that would serve him well in later years. Revered Irish poet William Butler Yeats was also drawn to this area. Yeats one of the foremost figures of 20 Century literature loved Sligo, and his goal was to cultivate a tradition of a hidden Ireland that existed largely in the anthropological evidence of its surviving customs, beliefs, and holy places. He was a master of the traditional verse and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. Paul and WB Yeats both share the emotions and inspirations of that ancient land and its mysteries. In fact Two of Paul’s sculptures are now on permanent display alongside the works of WB Yeats in the Sligo Museum. Today Paul lives with his wife Francesca and daughter Ana Claire in Greensboro North Carolina. In his 20 years living here he has carved out a reputation as a sculptor and artist and much of his work is influenced by those early day experiences which capture the imagination of so many who have come to know his work.
Victoria Nordlund received her MALS from Wesleyan University. She teaches creative writing at Rockville High School in Vernon, CT. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut. A 2018 Best of the Net Nominee, her work is published in Coffin Bell, Pank Magazine, Gone Lawn, Ghost Proposal, Philosophical Idiot, and other journals. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, three children, and poodle.
Richard L. T. Orth grew up in Berks County in the center of the historic Pennsylvania Dutch Country and had been involved with the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown for more than 22 years, and columnist for the Berks-Mont newspapers since 2009. He holds both a bachelor and master’s degrees from Kutztown University in education, however, his life’s work and passion remains in the folklore studies of the rich Pennsylvania Dutch culture: its folk art, architecture, and folkways. His current works include curating museum collections, field research, and academic writing.
Valin Paige is a spoken word poet living in St. Paul, MN. She has a spoken word album titled Bleed Through and is published on Button Poetry. She is currently an MFA student at Hamline University.
Laura Paul is a writer living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Entropy’s monthly horoscope column, Stars to Stories. Previously, her work has been featured by the Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Eohippus Labs, Shirley Magazine, and at the West Hollywood Book Fair and Los Angeles Zine Fair. Raised in Sacramento, she’s earned her B.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle and her Master’s degree from UCLA where she was the recipient of the 2011 Gilbert Cates Fellowship. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram as @laura_n_paul.
Frank Possemato’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications including 3AM, Underground Voices, and in Akashic Books’ “Mondays Are Murder” series.
Dean Quarrell was born in 1946, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He has so far survived public schools, community college, and university (his baccalaureate degree is in English but written in Latin), the US Air Force, various employment, and retirement. His work has been published in Dark Ink Magazine and is scheduled for publication in Chicago Literati’s Daily Flash. He lives and writes in New Hampshire.
James Raleigh is a twenty-one-year-old writer from Brooklyn, New York. He recently graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering and a minor in Pre-Law and Policy. “Joey: The Magical Axolotl” is his first published piece.
Dr. Keith Raymond is a Family and Emergency Physician that practiced in eight countries in four languages. Currently living in Austria with a wife and a polar bear our husky brought home. When not volunteering his practice skills with refugees, he is writing or lecturing. He has multiple medical citations, and also published stories and poetry in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Grief Diaries, The Examined Life Journal, The Satirist, Chicago Literati, Serendipity, and Frontier Tales Magazine.
Heather Rick is a native of Worcester, Massachusetts and a former student of the Fiction Writing Workshop at Columbia College Chicago. She received her B.A. in religion from Smith College and is pursuing a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School. Her work has appeared in over a dozen publications including Steam Ticket, Fourteen Hills, Slipstream, and The Cape Rock.
Desiree Roundtree was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY where she still lives with her husband and daughter. By day she crunches numbers, but anytime in between, she is writing words. She is a lover of hip-hop, acoustic guitar, and a well-timed curse word.
Anne Rundle’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Artful Dodge and Common Threads. She has a Master of Fine Arts from Ashland University. She taught high school English for seven years, but now works for a local community college. Her poem “Now the Teacher Becomes the Student” won the 2017 Ides of March contest. Anne resides in Westerville, Ohio.
Jackie Sherbow is a writer and editor living in New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Okay Donkey, Moonchild Magazine, Bad Pony, Luna Luna, Day One, The Opiate, and elsewhere, and have been part of the Emotive Fruition performance series. She works as an editor for two leading mystery-fiction magazines as well as Newtown Literary, the literary journal dedicated to the borough of Queens, NY.
Paul Sohar ended his higher education with a BA in philosophy and took a day job in a research lab while writing in every genre, publishing thirteen volumes of translations, including “Silver Pirouettes” (TheWriteDeal 2012) and “In Contemporary Tense” (Iniquity Press, 2013). His own poetry: “Homing Poems” (Iniquity, 2006) and “The Wayward Orchard”, a Wordrunner Prize winner (2011). Other awards: first prize in the 2012 Lincoln Poets Society Contest, second prize in RI Writers Circle 2014 Contest. Prose work: “True Tales of a Fictitious Spy” (Synergebooks, 2006) and a collection of three plays from One Act Depot (Canada, 2015). Magazine credits: Agni, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review, Rattle, Poetry Salzburg Review, Seneca Review, etc.
Mayden Steele is a biblical scholar and student at Grand Canyon University (online). As an emerging writer, her work has been published in Kean University’s Diversity Magazine and in Eber & Wein Publishing’s poetry volume. Mayden lives in New Jersey with her husband, Kevin and their Staffordshire Terrier, Frasier.
Samantha Steiner is a visual artist whose paintings and drawings have garnered international acclaim. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. In 2017, she served as a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina.
Clif Travers is a visual artist as well as a writer, recently relocated from Brooklyn, N.Y. to the mountains of Maine. In 2017, Clif received an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine, and has been working on two collections of interrelated short stories that are based on the lives and the deaths in a small town. His stories have been published in Underwood Press and Dime Show Review.
Lindsey Turner is a writer, designer, photographer, crafter, and nonprofiteer in Nashville. She lives with her husband, son, and dog in a perpetual state of disarray. Her writing has been published in The Commercial Appeal, The Great and Secret Thing, and Coffin Bell. She blogs every now and again at theogeo.com and wastes more time than is wise on Twitter: @tindseylurner.
A native New Yorker, John Waterfall is a writer living in New York and a current student at the New School’s creative writing MFA program. His interests include genre fiction and literature about animals. A proud father of two cats and one on-the-way baby girl. After receiving a BA in English from Boston University and an MFA in filmmaking from the New York Film Academy, John worked as a screenwriter and bookseller. His current passion is the procurement of rare signed books.
R.C. Weissenberg is a writer of various things, who spends most of his time in the Southwestern United States. He enjoys sketching, playing guitar, and reading obsessively.
Sjoerd van Wijk (1988) is a Dutch film reviewer and writer living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Life feels like a dream to him. Its strange. He loves to share this vision through his work. When he’s not writing you can find him behind a GM screen playing Dungeons & Dragons or other tabletop role-playing games.
Christina Wilder was born in Santiago, Chile, and grew up in New Jersey and Florida. She is an avid horror fan, and lives in Tacoma, WA with her husband and cat Bellatrix.
Jane Yolen’s 370th published book is about to come out. She sends out poems to journals on a regular basis and has quite a few in sf/fantasy magazines as well. She is a Grand Master of SFPA (Science Fiction/Fantasy Poets of America), as well as a Grandmaster of SFWA and World Fantasy Assn. She has won the Nebula two times, Mythopoeic Award three times, and been nominated (but never won) for the Hugo several times. Six colleges & universities have given her honorary doctorates for her body of work.
Angela Zimmerman is a lover of oddities and mismatched socks. She lives in the South Eastern United States with her family. She is never far away from coffee, a book and an air conditioner.