Tamara Burross Grisanti
Founder / Editor-in-Chief
Tamara Burross Grisanti is a writer, editor, two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in New World Writing, Eunoia Review, Chicago Literati, Former Cactus, Corvus Review, Pussy Magic Heals, The New Mexico Review, and The Literary Hatchet, among others. Her hobbies include gardening, making candles, and book collecting. Her literary interests include the Gothic, poetry, mythology, and anything having to do with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. She has independently published one novel under a pen name. She holds a BA in English Literature from Buffalo State, and is an MFA candidate in Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing at Emerson College.
Ray Ball
Senior Editor
Ray Ball grew up in a house full of snakes. She has a PhD in European history and is currently working on an MFA. She lives in Alaska, where she works as a college professor. Ray is the author of a chapbook of history-themed poems entitled Tithe of Salt (Louisiana Literature Press, 2019). Her creative work has recently been published in descant, Gingerbread House, Rivet, Louisiana Literature, Psaltery & Lyre, and SWWIM Every Day. Ray has received multiple nominations for Best of the Net and Pushcart. When she’s not in the classroom, Ray can be found researching in the archives, running on Alaska’s trails, or drinking bitter beverages.
Kyle Shrader
Associate Editor / Nonfiction Editor
Kyle James Shrader is a writer of poetry and nonfiction, an educator, and a professional reader who, like so many WNYers, has boomeranged back to Buffalo after years away. He has taught writing at colleges and universities in Florida, Texas, and New York. He has edited for Florida Review, The Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, and now Coffin Bell. His own work has appeared in Crack the Spine, The Chaffey Review, The Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, Carcinogenic Poetry, and others. When not drinking coffee (or wine) and grading papers, he can be found hiking in the woods with his young daughter and his old dog.
Desmond White
Assistant Editor
Desmond White teaches rhetoric and writes when his students aren’t looking. His speculative fiction has appeared in HeartWood, Kasma, The Tishman Review, Literally Stories, Rue Scribe, Ghost Parachute, and Z Publishing’s America’s Emerging Writers. Be wary of his blog www.desmondwrite.com and steer away from mindless tweets @desmondwrite.
Jessica Drake-Thomas
Poetry Editor
Jessica Drake-Thomas is a horror poet and fiction writer. She is the author of a poetry collection, Burials. She also runs a poetry book review blog, This Week, I Read. Her work has been featured in Grimoire Magazine, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Coffin Bell, Ploughshares, and others. Her interests include Gothic Horror, Dark Romanticism, tarot, occultism and cupcakes.
Zuri McWhorter
Fiction Editor
Zuri McWhorter is a writer from Detroit, MI. She has self-published two poetry chapbooks and is the one-woman staff behind Juste Milieu Zine. Studies in literature have taken her to Michigan State University, NUI Galway, Trinity College, and the Interlochen Center for the Arts. Her fiction writings have been been featured a myriad of publications, including Abandon Journal, Coffin Bell Journal and the Blue Nib. Zuri wrote and directed the short horror film “Pretty Lady“, released in 2016. She lives in really cool apartment in Detroit with a ton of plants and posters.
Brad Baumgartner
Fiction Editor
Brad Baumgartner is a writer and theorist. He is the author of several works, including Weird Mysticism: Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text (Lehigh UP, 2021), Dead Man’s Switch (Orbis Tertius, 2022), Stylinaut (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021), The –Tempered Mid·riff: A Play in Four Parts (Schism-Neuronics, 2020), Celeste: Our Lady of Flowering Marvel (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), and Quantum Mechantics: Memoirs of a Quark (The Operating System, 2019). In his work, Brad is interested in transdisciplinary approaches to writing, exploring the intersections of horror, mysticism, speculative aesthetics, experimental poetics, and theory fiction. He teaches in the English Department at Penn State University.
A. A. de Levine
Short Story Editor
A.A. de Levine is a Los Angeles-based writer. Her short fiction has been published in New Gothic Review and her essays have appeared on BuzzFeed, Gossamer, Medium, and Good Night, Sweet Prince. She has developed several social media-based immersive stories and has ghost-written for a robot pop star, as one does.