Diana Amsterdam’s (Beggar by Day) plays have been produced in New York, London, Berlin, Montreal, Los Angeles and internationally, and been reviewed by the New York Times, LA Times and Washington Post. Full-lengths, one-acts and monologues are published by Samuel French, Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts Inc. and Smith and Kraus. Amsterdam maintains an active writing practice that includes writer-for-hire projects for film, TV and the streaming services. “Beggar by Day” represents a return to her original form: fiction.
Catherine Browder’s story in this issue of Orca, “Inside the Zone,” is one of a cycle of stories-in-progress focusing on the Great East Japan Disaster of 2011. Her stories have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including New Stories from the Midwest 2016, and a Ploughshares Solo. A National Endowment of the Arts award recipient, her most recent book is Now We Can All Go Home: Three Novellas in Homage to Chekhov. www.catherinebrowder.com
Christie B. Cochrell (Alien Corn) is an ardent lover of the play of light, the journeyings of time, things ephemeral and ancient. Her work has been published by Tin House and The Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. She has won the Dorothy Cappon Prize for the Essay and the Literal Latté Short Short Contest. Once a New Mexico Young Poet of the Year in Santa Fe, she now lives and writes by the ocean in Santa Cruz, California.
Will Cordeiro (The Broken Logic of the Universe) has work appearing or forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Sycamore Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He co-edits the small press Eggtooth Editions. He lives in Flagstaff, where he is a faculty member in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.
Stephanie Dickinson (Like the Austin Night, A Thirst) lives in New York City. Her novels Half Girl and Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her feminist noir Love Highway. Other books include Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, (New Michigan Press), and Flashlight Girls Run (New Meridian Arts). Her work has been reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading, and New Stories from the South. She is the editor of Rain Mountain Press. @rainmountpress. Her website is www.stephaniedickinson.net.
Kristyn Dunnion (Daughter of Cups) is a Canadian author, performance artist and heavy metal bassist whose work incites critical questions about identity, justice, and power. Tarry This Night (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017) was long listed for a Sunburst Award. The Dirt Chronicles (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011) was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and ALA Over the Rainbow selection. She grew up on the magical (northern) shores of Lake Erie. www.kristyndunnion.com IG @midnight_sister.
Justin Herrmann (No Cream, No Sugar) is the author of the short fiction collection Highway One, Antarctica (MadHat Press 2014). His stories have appeared in Best Small Fictions, as well as journals including River Styx, Mid-American Review, Washington Square Review, and Tahoma Literary Review. He lives in Alaska and has an MFA from University of Alaska Anchorage.
Melissa Juchniewicz (The Raspberry Man) is a member of New Hampshire Writers’ Project, and the Derry, New Hampshire-based Hyla Brook Poets. Growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, she was inspired by Emerson and Thoreau; nevertheless her first jobs were in Boston and San Francisco theater. She began writing for newspapers while studying teaching, and eventually joined the English faculty at UMass Lowell. She lives in an 1812 farmhouse in Chester, New Hampshire, and cherishes the beauty of New England.
Lidia Kosk (Summer of Signs in the Sky; Through Snowdrifts) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, and two anthologies. Her collaboration with Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka resulted in two bilingual volumes: Niedosyt/ Reshapings and Słodka woda, słona woda/Sweet Water, Salt Water and Szklana góra/Glass Mountain, featuring Lidia’s poem in 22 languages. Translations appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. As choral compositions, her poems were performed in several countries. Lidia resides in Warsaw, Poland, where she leads poetry workshops and the Poets’ Theater.
Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka (Summer of Signs in the Sky; Through Snowdrifts) is a prize-winning poet, translator, and photographer. She is the author of two collections (Oblige the Light, CityLit Press; Face Half-Illuminated, Apprentice House) and translator for three books by Lidia Kosk. Her translations of poems by Maryland Poets Laureate—Lucille Clifton, Josephine Jacobsen, and Linda Pastan—have appeared in Poland. Her work has been published in Notre Dame Review, Spillway, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Co-editor of Loch Raven Review. More at danutakk.wordpress.com.
Australian by birth and Montenegrin by origin, Pavle Radonic’s (Gaugin Again) seven years living and writing in SE Asia has provided unexpected stimulus. Previous work has appeared in a range of literary journals and magazines, most recently Entropy, Map Literary, Anti-Languorous Project, Antigonish and Citron Reviews. A mountainous blog containing mainly the Asia writing is here: https://axialmelbourne. blogspot.com/.
Stefen Styrsky’s (Laundromat) fiction has appeared in the Tahoma Literary Review, The Offing, Amazon’s Day One, Best Gay Fiction 2017, and other places. “Laundromat” is part of an unpublished collection of linked stories. He has an MA in Fiction Writing from Johns Hopkins University and lives in Washington, DC. His website is stefenstyrsky.com. Follow him on twitter @Stefen_Styrsky.
Tamika Thompson (And We Screamed) is a writer, producer, journalist, and fiction editor of the forthcoming POC United: Graffiti (Aunt Lute Books, 2019), an anthology of works by writers of color. Her writing has been published by Glass Mountain, The Matador Review, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Another Chicago Magazine, Huizache, The Huffington Post, and PBS.org among others. She lives in the Chicago metropolitan area with her family.
Joe Yoshya Vickers (No Woman, No Cry) studied English with a creative writing emphasis at the University of Wisconsin. Currently, he lives in London with his wife, and is the managing editor of Trauma Transformation on Medium. You can find him at joestickers.com, or on Twitter @JosephYoshya.
Siamak Vossoughi was born in Tehran and lives in San Francisco. He has had stories published in Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, West Branch, and Gulf Coast. His collection, Better Than War, received a 2014 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Find him through www.siamakvossoughi.com.
Conor Watson (Immovable Subject; Substratum) emigrated in 2006 from Scotland to Germany, where he works as a soil scientist at a university. In 2016 he established a creative writing group in his adopted hometown of Kleve. He has previously had work published in Pushing Out The Boat and Gutter.
Teffy Wrightson (Scientifically Mapping a Missed Attraction; Saudade) has lived in Yorkshire, UK, all her life. Older now and disabled with arthritis, she finds inspiration for her writing in the people and places she knows well. She has been published at home, in the USA and South East Asia. She can be found on Twitter @belledujour208, setting the world to rights.
Amanda Yskamp’s (Robin and the Pronoun They) work has appeared in such magazines as Threepenny Review, Hayden Review, caketrain, Redivider, and The Georgia Review. She lives on the 10-year flood plain of the Russian River, where she teaches writing from her online schoolhouse. http://wordwise-instruction. weebly.com/.