staff bios

Susan Kay Anderson is the author of Mezzanine (Finishing Line Press, 2019), a book of poems featuring her work as a graveyard-shift custodian at a university, which was her MFA thesis at Eastern Oregon University, directed by James Crews. She is the daughter of her immigrant mother from Germany and restless Nebraskan father. Her family lived in Nome and on Indian reservations in Nevada and Montana and other places away from mainstream America while she was growing up. Anderson is the recipient of an Oregon Young Writers Award, a Jovanovich Award, fellowships from the University of Colorado, Telluride Writers, Aspen Writers, Ragdale, and stipends from the Student Conservation Association, AFS –Finland, and Study Abroad-Tuebingen University. Her poetry has been published in Barrow Street Journal 4 X 2 Project, BlazeVox Journal, Caliban Online, Carolina Quarterly, Mudfish, Puerto del Sol, Square One, Tom Clark Beyond The Pale, and other places. Anderson has been short-listed for numerous manuscript publication prizes, attended Tin House, Colrain, Windward Community College Writing Retreats, PEN Writers-Hawaii, Volcano Arts Center, AWP, 24 Pearl Street/Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and presented Mezzanine at The Montana Book Festival. She was the poetry editor of Big Talk in Eugene, Oregon, a free publication which showcased up-and-coming NW punk bands, published by Hank Trotter. Anderson earned degrees in anthropology from the University of Oregon (BS) and English Literature/Creative Writing from the University of Colorado-Boulder (MA).  Her thesis was directed by Edward Dorn. Anderson worked in Hawaii as an educator and interviewed Virginia Brautigan Aste there. This project and its resulting memoir, Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast, is forthcoming in 2021 from Finishing Line Press.  

Meagan Arthur is a fiction writer and poet from the Seattle area. She graduated with an MFA in Prose from the University of Washington in 2018, where her fiction was awarded the Grace Milliman Pollock Award. Her work has appeared in Cream City Review, Pontoon, Figure 1, California Quarterly, Hummingbird, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where she has been awarded the Vice Presidential Fellowship.

Audrey Bauman is a Chinese-American writer from Little Rock, Arkansas. She received her MFA at Northern Michigan University, where she was managing editor of Passages North, and her writing has been published in CRAFT, HAD, Jellyfish Review, and Paper Darts. She is currently pursuing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah.

Patricia Quintana Bidar is a writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. Her work appears in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, Pithead Chapel, and Atticus Review, among other journals, and in numerous anthologies. Patricia’s work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. Her story, "Over There," appears in the Flash Fiction America anthology (W.W. Norton, 2023). She holds a Bachelor's Degree in filmmaking from San Francisco State University and a Master's Degree in English from University of California, Davis.

Ryan Black is the author of The Tenant of Fire (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2018 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Death of a Nativist, selected by Linda Gregerson for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. He has published previously in Best American Poetry, Blackbird, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly, and elsewhere, and has received fellowships from the Adirondack Center for Writing, The Millay Colony for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Queens Council on the Arts, and the T.S. Eliot House. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College of the City of New York. More at ryanblackpoet.com.

Noor Khashe Brody lives in Oakland, CA. Send noor fanmail and find their published poems and crosswords at noooo.org.

Sunny Carlstrom (she/her) is a fiction writer from the Salt Lake City area. She earned her BA in English and is currently pursuing her Masters in Prose at the University of Utah. When not writing, hiking, or playing video games, you may find her sketching strange creatures.

Jess Challis’s poetry, prose, multimedia, and artwork have been published in journals and anthologies such as Banyan Review, Open Shutter Press, Ponder Review, Slippery Elm, Body of Work, Touchstones Journal, and Beyond Queer Words. She won first place in 2019 Touchstones Journal poetry contest, second place in 2023 Slippery Elm Multimedia Contest, second place for creative writing in 2021 Utah Valley University Showcase, and third place in 2023 Touchstones Journal poetry contest. Her photography, book arts, and poetry will be featured in a solo art exhibition at the Salt Lake City Library (forthcoming early 2025). She is a Creative Writing/Book Arts MFA student at the University of Utah, and she received the Wick R. Miller Scholarship through the American West Center for her creative work preserving and honoring Indigenous cultures.

Alisha Dietzman was raised in the American South and Central Europe. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she held a Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. She is a PhD candidate in Divinity focusing on aesthetics and ethics at the University of St Andrews, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. In 2020 she was awarded a U.K. Women Poets’ Prize by the Rebecca Swift Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Denver Quarterly.

Will Durham is a poet living in Seattle. He received a BA from Texas Tech University and an MFA from the University of Washington. Will's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in THRUSH, RHINO, Hoot, San Pedro River Review and others. Will's interview with Gerald Stern is available through Birmingham Poetry Review. He received a Best New Poets nomination from THRUSH. He is a reader for Quarterly West as well as The Boiler.

Alexander Duringer is from Buffalo, NY. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, &Change, and South Dakota Review among others.

Allison Field Bell is originally from northern California but has spent most of her adult life in the desert. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. She is a Fiction Editor for Waxwing. Her prose appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Superstition Review, Palette Poetry, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.

Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is now working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in the Mississippi Review, jubilat, Rabbit Catastrophe, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Kettle Blue Review, Meridian, the Tampa Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her transition from the Midwest to the South with her partner, her two dogs, and her cat.

Anna Girgenti is a writer living in Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Cider Press Review, Lunch Ticket, Cumberland River Review, Zone 3 Press, and Mid-American Review. She was a recipient of the 2018 Iowa Chapbook Prize from the University of Iowa. She spends her days working with incarcerated writers and supporting San Diego State University's Equitable Access program. Visit annagirgenti.com to get in touch with her or read some of her published work.

Jessica Goodfellow is an American poet living in Japan. Her most recent book Whiteout (University of Alaska Press) is about the death of her uncle, along with six other climbers, during an expedition to Denali in 1967. She has served as writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Scientific American, and The Southern Review.

D.E. Hardy's work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Best Small Fictions, X-R-A-Y Magazine, Lost Balloon, New World Writing, among others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be followed on twitter @dehardywriter and online at dehardywriter.com.

Jeffrey Hecker is the author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011) & the chapbooks Hornbook (Horse Less Press, 2012), Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press, 2013), Before He Let Them Guide Sleigh (ShirtPocket Press, 2013) & Ark Aft (The Magnificent Field, 2020). Recent work has appeared in Posit, The Laurel Review, LEVELER, decomP, Entropy, BOAAT, Dream Pop Journal, & DELUGE. A graduate of Old Dominion University, he’s a fourth-generation Hawaiian American and he currently resides in Norfolk, Virginia, where he teaches at The Muse Writers Center. Reach out to him on Twitter @jeffrey_hecker.

Jannah Hinthorne is a writer and teacher hailing from Seattle, Washington. She received her BA in English from Western Washington University and is beginning her PhD in literature at the University of Utah, where she studies Victorian literature and life writing. She is a book reviewer, manuscript editor, and obsessive notetaker. You can often find her shamelessly snooping through her favorite Victorian authors’ private letters (for research purposes, she says). 

Allie Hoback is an Appalachian poet from Southwest Virginia. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, where she held various editorial positions for Salt Hill Journal. Her poetry has appeared in New Ohio Review, Hobart, THE BOILER, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches writing in Central New York.

Nahal Suzanne Jamir’s writing has been recently published in journals like Arts & Letters, Gulf Coast, and Notre Dame Review. She writes fiction and nonfiction. Her fiction collection In the Middle of Many Mountains was published by Press 53. Jamir currently teaches as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Fiction at Oklahoma State University.

Angel Leyba is a queer, Latinx writer and creative from South Bay San Diego currently located in the Bay Area. They received their BA in English from UC Berkeley where they also served as the Managing Editor of Berkeley Poetry Review. Her words have appeared or are forthcoming in Honey Literary, Perhappened Mag, and Soft Quarterly. You can find them on Twitter @xspacebar.

Marianne Manzler is a writer and educator from Ohio. She earned a BA in English literature from The Ohio State University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington, where she was awarded the Grace Milliman Pollock Fellowship, co-founded the Black Jaw Literary Series, co-edited The Seattle Review, and won UW’s Eugene Van Buren Award. Marianne’s essay “On the Making of a Mumu,” which originally appeared in Fourth Genre, received a notable in Best American Essays 2022. Her work can be found in fine publications such as The Seventh Wave and 5280, and she is the recipient of fellowships from U.S Fulbright-Malaysia, Vermont Studio Center, and Martha's Institute for Creative Writing. She works and teaches at Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, MN. Find her at mariannemanzler.com.

Christopher Mohar is the author of The Denialist's Almanac of American Plague and Pestilence, winner of the 2017 Etchings Press Novella Prize. His works appear in The Mississippi Review, North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Arts & Letters, The Journal, X-R-A-Y, Gastronomica, and elsewhere. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and teaches creative writing at Mount Mary University.

Hadley Moore’s collection Not Dead Yet and Other Stories won Autumn House Press’s 2018 fiction contest and received many other award commendations. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Witness, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Indiana Review, and numerous other literary journals, and she is an alum of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Natasha Muhametzyanova is a fiction writer from Turkmenabat, Turkmenistan. She currently lives and writes in Manhattan, KS, where she’s finishing her master’s degree in English. She’s one of the founding members of Buffalo Books—an independent press that highlights stories from the Midwest. Natasha refuses to be found on Twitter.

Erin O’Luanaigh’s poems appear or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, AGNI, The Yale Review, 32 Poems, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is a PhD student at the University of Utah and co-host of the film and literature podcast (sub)Text. You can find her online here: erinoluanaigh.com.

Anna Newman holds an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Maryland. Their work has appeared in Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, [PANK], and elsewhere. They were the recipient of the 2022 Nature and Place Prize from Frontier Poetry, judged by Amaud Johnson. They live in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Hyun Jung Park is an undergraduate student at the University of Utah. She was raised in North Carolina where she spent a majority of her life, but she moved to Utah during her early years of high school. She considers herself to be a reading and writing enthusiast, mainly focusing on works of fiction. She has always had a love for literature and the creation of stories and is currently working on short stories and a novel of her own.

Tanner Pruitt studied creative writing at the University of Virginia and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and works in corporate strategy at Everlaw, a litigation software company. He lives in San Francisco. 

Brady Richards practices landscape architecture, designing public and private spaces across the United States, except for early in the morning and late at night, when he writes prose. Find his work in the North American Review, Puerto del Sol, and BOOTH. Find him in Tucson, Arizona with his family and photogenic dog.

Kanchi Sharma is a fiction writer, poet, and content strategist currently based out of Mumbai, India. She's interested in the weaponry of language, and in demolishing architectures of oppression. Her work has appeared in [PANK], HEArt, LiveWire, and is forthcoming elsewhere. Kanchi has received support & scholarships from GrubStreet, Poets&Writers, Kundiman, & more. She is @sincerelykanchi across socials.

Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah.  His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. His chapbook, Extinction Studies, is the winner of the 2023 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets, among others.

Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Fort Collins, Colorado. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, Electric Literature, Barrelhouse, DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, CRAFT Literary, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @chrisvanjonack and read his work at chrisvanjonack.com.

Anu Vitasta is a South Asian writer. She is a PhD student at the University of Utah. 

Kieron Walquist [he/they] is a queer, neurospicy poet and visual artist from mid-Missouri. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Utah. Their work is found / forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Missouri Review, Oxford American, Third Coast, and elsewhere. 

Tian Yi lives in London. Her writing has appeared in CRAFT, The Daily Drunk, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has received support from the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference and Hedgebrook, and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London, where she was awarded a Sophie Warne Fellowship. She is currently working on a short story collection.

Xueyi Zhou was born and raised in Foshan, a city of manufacturing in Guangdong, China. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Guernica, Southeast Review, Waxwing, Passages North, Chestnut Review, Tahoma Lit Review, AAWW The Margins, Best Small Fictions 2022 and more. Her recent honors include a fiction longlist in Disquiet Prize 2024, a finalist in Black Warrior Review Flash Contest in both 2022 and 2023, a shortlist for the winter Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2023, a Best of Net nomination for poetry, and more. Her poetry has appeared in BOOTH (runner-up of 2022 Beyond the Margins Prize) and Frontier Poetry. Her writing has been supported by Lighthouse Writers Workshop and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She served as Editor at Witness magazine 2023-2024 and she is a prose reader at Chestnut Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and She is currently pursuing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah. Find her at xueyizhou.com.