Editors
Publisher/Senior Editor Joe Ponepinto is the author of the novels Mr. Neutron and Curtain Calls, as well as dozens of short stories published in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. His major literary influences include Zadie Smith (whose novels somehow convinced him he could become a writer), Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, James Joyce, Bernard Malamud, Ted Chiang, Yasunari Kawabata, Margaret Atwood, Tobias Wolff, and dozens of others. Best book on writing: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders.
Publisher/Senior Editor Zachary Kellian, a widely published author of flash fiction and short stories, is finishing up his first novel. He is also the co-host of the podcast Literary Guise, encouraging men to use literature as a way to discuss their thoughts and emotions. His major literary influences include Dylan Thomas, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Yukio Mishima, Anne Proulx, and John O’Brien. You can find him online at zacharykellian.com
Editor Renee Jackson is a multi-disciplinary artist currently splitting time between the US and Argentina. She has a passion for new work and a background in theatre where she has had the pleasure of assisting in the literary development and staging of several plays including (Non)Fiction (Jillian Leff), The Wildling (CJ Chapman), Minotaur (Teagan Walsh-Davis), and Gothic Arch (Jeffrey Fiske). Renee’s literary influences include Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath, Denis Johnson, Albert Camus, Dylan Thomas, John Donne, and Paula Vogel.
Readers
Ronak Patel is a first generation Indian-American writer, researcher, and educator. His research interests include racism in education and the model minority myth. He has published reports and data narratives for non-profits, school districts, and state agencies in Washington and Hawaii. Ronak’s fiction explores narratives of the South Asian American experience and his literary influences include Juhmpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, T.C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Arundhati Roy, John Cheever, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
K.A. Tate is a tech turned fiction writer living in the Northern Shenandoah Valley with two great partners who are quiet when she’s writing and the same number of parrots who are not. Her work is focused in rural Appalachia where she was raised. She has her MFA from West Virginia Wesleyan and has so far been published in BULL with other publications upcoming. Her biggest literary influences include Stephen King, Otessa Moshfegh, Alice Munro, Shirley Jackson, Larry Brown, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. She has a website where she writes about craft for people who don’t know they’re writers yet at katatewriting.com.
Jacob Laba is a young writer currently living in El Cerrito, California. His focus is chiefly that of short stories which tend to settle in the realms of fabulation and the literary allegory. His literary interests are far and wide, but some of his major influences include Italo Calvino (and other members of Oulipo), Jorge Luis Borges, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Isabel Allende (as well as a great deal of other Latin American magical realists), Ali Smith, and Julio Cortázar.
Liz Rosen is a short story writer whose work has appeared in Litro, Ascent, Pithead Chapel, Sanitarium, Best Short Stories of the Saturday Evening Post, and others. Her fiction has been nominated for Pushcart Awards twice, and her story “Tracks” was the 2021 first prize winner of the Writer’s Digest Annual Competition in the literary/mainstream category. She is a former writer for Nickelodeon TV; Associate Producer of primetime news; academic whose area of specialty was apocalyptic storytelling; and Non-Fiction Editor for Ducts.org. She is currently obsessed with ghost-hunting shows and has an excellent “Did you hear that?!?”
Noha Khalil is a writer and student from New York City. Recent work has appeared in King Ludd’s Rag. Noha’s favorite writers include Toni Morrison, Yaa Gyasi, and Stephen Jay Gould.
Nolan Thilk is a young writer living in Aurora, Illinois. His literary tastes are eclectic, and his influences include Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Dickens, Neil Gaiman, George Orwell, Dorothy Parker, and Salman Rushdie.
Rebecca L. Jensen is a writer and professor of English currently residing in South Florida. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Florida Atlantic University but focuses most of her writing time on her literary novel-in-progress. Her work has most recently appeared at Musing Publications, The Moving Force Journal, and HAD, among others. She can be found online at www.rebeccaljensen.com.
Jennifer Jenkins is a Philadelphia writer; her novel, American Bourbon, explores a succession battle in a modern-day moonshine empire. Literary influences include Cormac McCarthy, Donna Tartt, Jeff Talarigo, Ann Patchett, Colum McCann, Tommy Orange, Louise Erdrich, and Colson Whitehead. Highly recommends Stephen King’s On Writing. She is online at jenniferjenkinsauthor.com.
Brendan McLaughlin’s stories have appeared in Menda City Review, OBELUS, Crow Name, and Kairos Literary Journal, which named him runner-up for their 2020-2021 Editors’ Prize in Prose. He is the author of the forthcoming Young Adult novel GlowFish. When not writing fiction, Brendan provides editorial services to conservation and human rights organizations.
Ciara Larkin is a semiotician and cultural insight analyst living in London, with a lifelong interest in literary fiction. She holds a first-class Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, where her studies focused on literature and visual culture, contemporary Irish theatre and the role of masculinity in late capitalist American literature.
Anne McGouran’s essays and short fiction have appeared in Gargoyle, The Account, Cut Bank, The Smart Set, Mslexia, Notre Dame Magazine, Queen’s Quarterly. Her hybrid essay on the 1850s Irish Workhouse was cited in Best Canadian Essays 2019. In her work she’s explored cultural displacement, generational trauma, ageism, the rural/urban divide.
Aurora Ohr is a young writer from Gig Harbor. She is currently working on her first novel, and enjoys writing about self discovery, psychological horror, fantasy worlds, and dystopias. Her major literary influences include Simone King, James Patterson, Stephanie Garber, and Nora Sakavic.
Kilmeny MacMichael resides in small town British Columbia, Canada. Primarily a writer of speculative and historical short fictions, she sometimes makes poetry. As a reader she gravitates towards mystery, as a viewer of film she falls back to classic noir, and as a podcast and radio drama listener she’s a sucker for a good baritone. Her favourite authors include Miriam Toews, Terry Pratchett, Hilary Mantel, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Guy Gavriel Kay.
If you are interested in joining our staff, please visit the Read for Us page.