Michael Alessi is the author of the chapbook The Horribles (Greying Ghost). His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Passages North, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, The Cincinnati Review and other journals, and he has earned recognition and honors from the AWP Intro Journals Project, Best of the Net and the Academy of American Poets. A native of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, he holds an MFA from Old Dominion University. Reach him on twitter @michael_alessi.

DeMisty D. Bellinger has an MFA from Southampton College and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. She has published in many journals and anthologies, including Contrary Magazine, Okay Donkey, The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, and The Best Small Fictions: 2019. She also has a poetry chapbook, Rubbing Elbows (Finishing Line Press). A Milwaukee native, DeMisty lives and teaches in central Massachusetts. You can find her website at demistybellinger.com.

The Black Ladies Brunch Collective's Poetry Anthology, “Not Without Our Laughter,” is a collection of humorous and joyful poems, riffing on Langston Hughes’s novel “Not Without Laughter.” It explores topics of family, work, love and sexuality. The women of BLBC believe, like Hughes, that even in these currently tense racial times, laughter and the celebration of life is crucial. Historically, it is what African Americans have done and will continue to do, no matter what challenges face them.

Check it out here.

The Black Ladies Brunch Collective is (clockwise from top-left): Teri Cross Davis, Anya Creightney, Katy Richey, celeste doaks, Saida Agostini, and Tafisha Edwards. 

Hisham Bustani is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry. He is acclaimed for his bold style and unique narrative voice, and often experiments with the boundaries of short fiction and prose poetry. Much of his work revolves around issues related to social and political change, particularly the dystopian experience of post-colonial modernity in the Arab world. His work has been described as "bringing a new wave of surrealism to [Arabic] literary culture, which missed the surrealist revolution of the last century,” and it has been said that he “belongs to an angry new Arab generation. Indeed, he is at the forefront of this generation – combining an unbounded modernist literary sensibility with a vision for total change…. His anger extends to encompass everything, including literary conventions.” Hisham’s fiction and poetry have been translated into many languages, with English-language translations appearing in prestigious journals across the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, including The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly. His fiction has been collected in The Best Asian Short Stories, The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Tales from Many Muslim Worlds, The Radiance of the Short Story: Fiction From Around the Globe, Influence and Confluence – East and West: A Global Anthology on the Short Story among other anthologies. In 2009, he was chosen by the German review Inamo as one of the Arab world’s emerging and influential new writers. In 2013, the U.K.-based cultural webzine The Culture Trip listed him as one of Jordan’s top six contemporary writers. His book The Perception of Meaning (Syracuse University Press, 2015) won the University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. Hisham is the Arabic fiction editor of the Amherst College-based literary review The Common, and the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Fellowship for Artists and Writers for 2017.

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maia tabet is an Arabic-English literary translator based in Washington DC, where she is the associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She is the translator of Little Mountain and White Masks by Elias Khoury, and of the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), Throwing Sparks, by Abdo Khal. Her translation of Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Eucharist (Ya Mariam, in Arabic) appeared in Spring 2017. Her translations have been published in journals, literary reviews, and other specialized publications, including Barricade, The Common, Words Without Borders, Portal 9, and Fikrun wa Fann, among others. She is currently at work on her fifth novel-length translation.

Danny Caine is the author of the chapbook Uncle Harold's Maxwell House Haggadah (Etchings Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in Hobart, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, and New Ohio Review among other places. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Kansas in 2017. He hails from Cleveland and lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where he owns the Raven Book Store. More at dannycaine.com.

Originally from North Carolina and raised in Oklahoma, Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her poetry books include SuperLoop and Translucence, a dual-language, cross-culture collaboration with Palestinian poet Samar Abdel Jaber; and the chapbooks: A Study in Spring (co-written with Zoë Ryder White), The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, andAging. A frequent collaborator with artists, actors, and writers, Nicole's work has appeared in Tin House, Sixth Finch, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughters, and is a Senior Language Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Find her on the web at www.nicolecallihan.com.

Tyrese L. Coleman is a writer, wife, mother, attorney, and writing instructor. She is also the reviews editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, an online journal dedicated to flash fiction. An essayist and fiction writer, her prose has appeared in several publications, including Catapult, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and the Kenyon Review. Her essay "How to Mourn" is listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2018. She is an alumni of the Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University and a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. She can be reached at tyresecoleman.com or on twitter @tylachelleco.

How to Sit is available now from Mason Jar Press.

Erin’s writing has been featured in Amazon’s Day One, Passages North, Bone Bouquet, Juked, Hobart, Paper Darts, The Found Poetry Review, The Pinch, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Birdfeast, among other publications.

She is the recipient of a 2017 Artist Career Development Grant from the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council/McKnight Foundation; a 2017 Emerging Artist Residency at Tofte Lake Center; a 2016 Spruceton Inn Artist Residency; and was the first Modern Worker: Writer in Residence at Modern Art in Lancaster, PA. Her literary erasure art was featured during the summer of 2017 as part of Made Here: Future, an urban walking gallery in the West Downtown Minneapolis Cultural District.

Erin is one half of FEAR NO LIT, former poetry editor for Third Point Press, founder emeritus of The Triangle, and volunteers with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Reach her at erindorney.com or @edorney.

(Photo credit Michelle Johnsen)

Born in Wisconsin in the 1970s, Mathew Falk has lived in Baltimore since 2010. He is a musician, editor, college writing instructor, armchair phenomenologist, and cat person.

Nihilist Kitsch is available now. Check it out.

Jaime Fountaine was raised by "wolves." Her work has appeared in places like JMWW, Paper Darts, X-R-A-Y, and Barrelhouse, where she writes the “Fountaine of Advice” column. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-hosts the Tire Fire reading series with Mike Ingram at Tattooed Mom. You can find her on the internet at jaimefountaine.com, and @jaimefountaine on Twitter and Instagram.

Aubrey Hirsch is the author of a short story collection, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, and a flash fiction chapbook, This Will Be His Legacy. Her stories, essays and comics have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, Vox, American Short Fiction, Black Warrior Review, The Nib, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her work has been anthologized in Flash Fiction America, Ways of Reading, and the New York Times bestselling Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. She is the recipient of a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in literature, an individual artist award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, The Meek Award in graphic narrative from The Florida Review and the Daehler Fellowship from The Colorado College. You can learn more about her at aubreyhirsch.com and follow her on instagram: @aubreyhirsch.

Michelle Junot is the author of Notes from My Phone* (Mason Jar Press, 2016) as well as and the floor was always lava. Her writing has appeared in Deep South Magazine, Atticus Review, BmoreArt, The Avenue, and Baltimore STYLE. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from University of Baltimore and her B.A. in Communication and Dance from Centenary College of Louisiana.

Michelle grew up in Southern Louisiana and lived in Baltimore for nearly a decade. Pieces of her heart still reside in both. She now lives with her husband in Houston, Texas.

Dave K. writes for Adweek and Barnes & Noble, and his fiction/essays/poetry have appeared in Front Porch Journal, Battered Suitcase, Cobalt, Artichoke Haircut, The Avenue, Welter, TRUCK, and on the LED billboard in the Station North neighborhood of Baltimore, MD. He is also the author of stone a pig and MY NAME IS HATE, both self-published. He is also a very large outer main-belt asteroid.

His novel, The Bong-Ripping Brides of Count Drogado, follows a homeless, one-armed man haunted by both his own past and the brides of a debauched plutocrat who steal him away to a party that never, never ends.

Check it out here.

Elias Kerr (they/he) is a transmasculine poet, who has been published in Esprit and Rappahannock Review. Kerr is a recipient of the inaugural 2022 Stemmler/Dennis LGBT& Award. Their poetry focuses on how the literary arts can be used to explore and represent identity. Kerr studies occupational therapy with double minors in English and creative writing at The University of Scranton. They write using the pen name E Kerr.

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes was born in Harrisburg, PA and has a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA from George Mason University. She has appeared in Always Crashing, The Rumpus, Cartridge Lit, Crab Fat Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and cahoodaloodaling. She has a chapbook, Patterning, from Corgi Snorkel Press. She is co-host of The Smug Buds, a podcast.

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an assistant professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collection Doll Palace (Dock Street Press), long-listed for the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She was awarded an artist’s fellowship in fiction from New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Millions, Fourth Genre, Slice Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Diagram, Squalorly and elsewhere. She’s landed on Wigleaf’s Top 50, and her stories have been anthologized in Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting (San Diego City Works Press) and forthcoming in New Voices: Contemporary Voices Confronting the Holocaust (Blue Lyra Press) and Best Small Fictions 2020 (Sonder Press). Raised outside of Philadelphia, she teaches in Brooklyn where she lives with her family and co-hosts the Sunday Salon NYC. Find her on twitter @saralippmann or at https://www.saralippmann.com

Mandy May was a writer and designer born and raised in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She believed in ghosts, magic and cats (she had three of them: Luella, Faustus and Babe).

Baltimore is where Mandy made herself at home, where they earned their MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore and were finishing their DS in Information and Interaction Design. A creative powerhouse, Mandy was a poet, designer, collagist, essayist, the author of Magic: Moon Tides Sing Violet Petals (Babe Press, 2016) and co-curator of Nasty: An Anthology of Dark Spirits (Babe Press, 2017). Mandy was a plant lover, card reader, star charter and beautiful spirit wrapped in bone and blossomed flesh.

Tomas Moniz edited Rad Dad and Rad Families. His novella Bellies and Buffalos is about friendship, family and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. He’s the recipient of the SF Literary Arts Foundation’s 2016 Award, the 2016 Can Serrat Residency, the 2017 Caldera Residency and others. He’s recently been published by Barrelhouse, Spring 18, and was awarded the 2018 SPACE on Ryder Farm residency. In 2019, he’ll release a chapbook with Mason Jar Press in July and his debut novel, Big Familia, on Acre Books, the book publishing offshoot of The Cincinnati Review in the Fall. He has stuff on the internet but loves letters and penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back.

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. With the sequels Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), she completed the Centenal Cycle trilogy, a finalist for the Hugo Best Series Award of 2018. She is also the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Serial Box, and her short story collection And Other Disasters will come out in November 2019. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she is currently an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations at Sciences Po, where her doctoral work explored the dynamics of post-disaster improvisation in governments. She has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development.

Image by Allana Taranto of Ars Magna Studio

dave ring is the chair of the OutWrite LGBTQ Book Festival in Washington, DC. He has stories featured or forthcoming in a number of publications, including Speculative City, GlitterShip, and A Punk Rock Future. He is the publisher and managing editor of Neon Hemlock Press, as well as the editor of Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was from Mason Jar Press. More info at www.dave-ring.com. Follow him on Twitter at @slickhop.

Justin Sanders is a ghost from Baltimore and the author of for all the other ghosts. His words have appeared most recently in American Short Fiction and on the city’s walls.

Brooke Shaffner’s novel Country of Under was the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction runner-up and was shortlisted for Dzanc Books’ Prize for Fiction and Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize. An excerpt won the Asheville Writers’ Workshop Fiction Contest. Brooke’s work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Marie Claire, BOMB, Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, and The Lit Pub. She’s received grants from United States Artists and the Saltonstall Foundation and residencies from MacDowell, Ucross, Saltonstall, Edward Albee, Jentel, I-Park, and VCCA. Brooke is at work on a memoir that explores living and loving in the face of radical uncertainty. An excerpt won the 2023 Lit/South Award, judged by Melissa Febos. Brooke founded Between the Lines and is co-creating Freedom Tunnel Press with her partner Niteesh Elias. Read more about Country of Under at BrookeShaffner.com.

Nancy Stohlman is an award-winning author, performer, and rabble-rouser. Her books include Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (Big Table, 2018), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (Pure Slush, 2014), and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2020), which won a 2021 Reader Views Gold Award and is forthcoming as an audiobook. Her work has been anthologized widely, appearing in the Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2018) and The Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press), as well as adapted for both the stage and screen. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and around the world. www.nancystohlman.com

Pantea A. Tofangchi is an Iranian-American poet, writer and graphic designer. She is the Art Director and graphic designer for Advertising Media Plus and The Business Monthly. She writes poems (in English), essays, stories and plays (mostly in Persian.) Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Little Patuxent Review, Welter Atlanta Review--in which she won the International Merit Award--and other journals. She was selected as a finalist for The National Poetry Series' 2016 and Georgia Poetry Prize 2018.

An award-winning graphic designer and art director, Pantea has led teams to produce publications, books and motivational designs. Pantea also has taught graphic design to graduate students at the University of Baltimore. Earlier in her career, Pantea was a journalist for 18 years for newspapers and magazines.

Zach VandeZande is a lapsed Texan living in Washington, DC with a partner and a dog. He is the author of Apathy and Paying Rent (Loose Teeth Press, 2008) and Liminal Domestic: Stories (Gold Wake Press, 2019), and his work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Split Lip, Georgia Review, DIAGRAM, and other journals. He got his PhD at the University of North Texas, where he also learned the value of hammocks and baking bread. He knows all the dogs in his neighborhood.

Danielle Zaccagnino is an essayist, a poet, and an English teacher. She was the winner of Sonora Review's Essay Prize (2016) and Salem College's Rita Dove Prize in Poetry (2017). She has an MFA from Texas State University. Her writing appears in journals such as Diagram, Waxwing, Sonora Review, and Puerto del Sol. She is from Queens, New York.

Website: daniellezaccagnino.com

Stephen Zerance’s poems have appeared in journals such as West Branch, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Assaracus, Knockout, and others. He has also been featured on Lambda Literary and Split This Rock. He received his MFA from American University where he received the Myra Sklarew award. He resides in Baltimore, MD.

Caligula's Playhouse is available now. Check it out.