Annie Dawid teaches creative writing at the University College, University of Denver. She was formerly professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. Her Page One Prize winning entry was taken from her novel Standing Beside Love, which was a finalist in three contests: the Retreat West competition, the Dana Awards in the Novel and the Faulkner novel-in-progress award.

“The Closer You Were, the Less You Knew,” won the 2019 Sequestrum Reprint Award and was published on that website in Spring 2020. Annie won second place in the 2018 London Independent Story Prize. In 2016, she won the International Rubery Award in fiction for her first book and the Music Prize from Knuthouse Press in Fiction. Other awards include the Dana Award in the Essay, the Orlando Flash Fiction Award, The New Rocky Mountain Voices Award (drama) and the Northern Colorado Award in Creative Non-Fiction.

Most recent publications: London Independent Story Project (2020), Pure Slush, Spelk, Arts & Letters, London Independent Story Prize, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Casket of Fictional Delights, Fictive Dream, Reflex Fiction, Windmill, and Joyland; non-fiction in Wordrunner Echapbook. and a poetry chapbook, Anatomie of the World, Finishing Line Press, 2017.

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Michael was reading by the age of four, plowing through classics like Treasure Island before the first grade. In third grade he produced a playground version of Helen of Troy so he could cast himself as Paris, and Linda Leonard as Helen. She had great freckles. A poem about discovering lint in his navel and a story about fighting monsters on Mars soon followed, but in high school he fell in love with acting, and added that to his repertoire. 

In the late-1970’s, armed with English and Drama degrees, he taught writing, drama, and technology for two decades, but continued to act and write. One of his stories, Loonie Louie, placed in the top 100 of the 1989 Writer’s Digest’s Short Story contest. The 1990’s saw his one-act play, Baum in Limbo, produced in Houston. His screenplay, An Ordinary Day, survived the first round of cuts in the 2005 season of Project Greenlight, beating out over 5,000 other scripts. 

He retired from Rice in 2009, and lives with his wife, Minay, in a suburb of Houston, where he is hard at work on a third novel, The Hawthorn’s Sting (another thriller). Ideas for a few more are also floating around somewhere in that scary place he calls his brain.

ABOUT VICTORIA BELL

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Victoria Bell is an editor and writer based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. In fiction, she’s interested in exploring the things people do to one another, whether on a nation-wide basis or within a family — she's currently working on a trilogy set in South Africa during the dying days of Apartheid, while she's also polishing up her novel The Weight of Air, about a mother-son relationship imploding within the dangerous, pressurized environment of a mountaineering expedition in Argentina.

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ABOUT JENNIFER STEIL

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Jennifer Steil is a writer, teacher, and secret ballet dancer who lives in many countries (currently Uzbekistan). She’s the author of Exile Music, which won the Grand Prize in the international Eyelands 2020 Book Awards and was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award, the Bisexual Book Award, and the Annie Award; the novel The Ambassador’s Wife, which won the Phillip McMath Post Publication book award and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Best Novel Award; The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, a memoir about running a newspaper in Yemen; and many short stories and essays. Jennifer also mentors writers through Onward Literary Mentoring.

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ABOUT SHARON GELMAN

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Sharon Gelman is a writer, editor, and human rights activist who believes in the power of art to help bring societal change. She was the longtime executive director of Artists for a New South Africa, a nonprofit working in partnership with African activist leaders to end apartheid and address endemic inequality. 

Gelman produced the award-winning audiobook Nelson Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales, penning the opening track for Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Published by Hachette in 2009, it was directed by Alfre Woodard and featured a diverse cast of notable actors. Gelman also wrote the afterword for Hachette’s unabridged audiobook of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. 

Gelman was U.S. managing editor of 200 Women: Who Will Change the Way You See the World, published in 2017 by Chronicle, affording her the opportunity to feature and/or interview Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Angela Davis, Alicia Garza, Roxane Gay, Dolores Huerta, Geena Rocero, and Jody Williams, among other remarkable women.

Gelman is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, a proud member of Macondo Writers, and grateful for fellowships, residencies, and workshops at Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, Bread Loaf, Fine Arts Work Center, Deep Creek Writers, and the Norman Mailer Center.

Gelman is at work on her first novel, which tells the interwoven stories of South African and American characters, both Black and white, whose lives have all been affected by apartheid and their efforts to end it yet in very different ways. 

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ABOUT JANICE MAMUKWA

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Janice Mamukwa is a Zimbabwean writer, lyricist and EFL teacher. She discovered her love for language and storytelling as soon as she could read, devouring every book she could find in the house (including the Encyclopedia). Janice has taught English as a foreign language in Germany and Austria. She studied Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin and Creative Writing at the University of South Africa. Since 2018, she has lived in the UK. There, she writes poetry and short stories in English, Shona, and German, the three languages that fight for dominance in her creative practice. In September 2022, she will begin her master’s studies at the University of Oxford.

ABOUT TOM HOWARD

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Tom Howard is the author of the short story collection Fierce Pretty Things (Indiana University Press), winner of the Blue Light Books Prize. He received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His short fiction has appeared, among other places, in Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Carve, Tin House, and Booth, and he's currently at work on a novel. He lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia.

ABOUT JENNIFER LAUREN

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Jennifer Lauren has worked as a journalist, fundraising director, yoga instructor, and most recently spent thirteen years as a litigation attorney in Seattle. In 2020, she moved across the country to Austin, Texas, because she could no longer abide the rain or the cutthroat word of litigation.

Jennifer now writes legal thrillers about women, as well as nonfiction essays about issues facing women in the United States. Her work is featured on Manifest-Station and has won multiple awards from Women On Writing. Jennifer loves working with and supporting other writers. 

Find her at jenniferlauren.net or email her at jlauren.writer [at] gmail [dot] com.

Play Me Backwards is a legal thriller based on the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, which shut down hundreds of daycares across the country based on little more than collective hysteria. Jennifer hopes to finish it this year.

ABOUT BETH KILLION

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Beth Killion calls Minneapolis home. Hers is a full house – two children (sometimes off at college), two dogs (never far from her feet) and a husband that is occasionally underfoot as well on Fridays. Yes, winters are cold and summers have more than their fair share of mosquitos, but the singing spring frogs, the apple-eating deer, the hosta-munching rabbits, and the occasional prehistoric snapping turtle crawling out from the wetlands make the heavy winter coats and the citronella candles worth it. Beth spends most of her free time daydreaming about retirement from the strategy consulting firm she founded 17 years ago so that she can fulfill her dream of writing full-time.

She’s currently completing a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and Literature at Harvard University’s Extension School and (fingers crossed!) will graduate in early 2024. But in an effort to have as many tasks on her to-do list as possible, she’s committing to friends and strangers alike that her novel-in-progress will be query ready by the end of 2023. Always writing. Never not working. Beth’s motto lately.

Follow along on Instagram as Beth launches her writing career or on her website where she is getting ready to launch several fun features for readers and writers alike. Subscribe now and you’ll be in the know on all her exploits in the coming year!

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ABOUT CARRIE NAUGHTON

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Carrie Naughton is a freelance bookkeeper and writer living in Tucson, Arizona. She balances her time between numbers and words, spreadsheets and poetry. Otherwise, she's out riding her bike. Her poetry has been published in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and Crab Creek Review, and she writes the eclectic Carrie This newsletter. Her novels blend genres, share characters, and weave together multiple timelines with her love of music, dialogue, and adventure. Find her at carrienaughton.com.

Raised crisscrossing America pulling a small green trailer behind the family car, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he’s hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that saw him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, represent the U.S. at the highest levels of foreign governments, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.

Tim brings the same energy to his writing that he brought to a distinguished career, and as a result, he has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, set in Poland, published in 2019 by Arcade Publishing, received tremendous reviews, and was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the Paris Literary Prize) for his novel, A Vision of Angels. Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012. 

Tim was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. His stage play, How High the Moon, won the prestigious Stanley Drama Award, and his screenplays have won competitions sponsored by the American Screenwriters Association, WriteMovies, Houston WorldFest, Rhode Island International Film Festival, Fresh Voices, StoryPros, and the Hollywood Screenwriting Institute. He is the founder of the Smith Prize for Political Theater.

Kris Ann Valdez is a proud Arizona native with a husband, three spunky children, and an overzealous family dog. They live in the heart of saguaro country in Phoenix, Arizona, where Kris Ann hoards loose-leaf tea and books. This summer, she hiked the Grand Canyon to stay at Phantom Ranch—a bucket list dream come true.

As a freelance journalist, Kris Ann writes about the environment, parenting, and travel. She’s especially interested in climate stories.

Her creative nonfiction won first prize in the annual Tempe Writes 2024 Anthology, forthcoming in the upcoming N.Y.T. bestseller sequel to “So God Made a Mother,” and published in Motherwell, Ekstasis Magazine, Calla Press Pub, and elsewhere. She was also the recipient of the 2023 Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, which allowed her to travel to Mexico City for manuscript research about Ignacio.

Her novel-length fiction is represented by Allison Remcheck of Stimola Literary Studio.

Yvonne Fein lives and writes in suburban Melbourne, from where she offers her deepest respect to the traditional custodians of the land of Australia over which sovereignty was never ceded. For all the country’s supposed taming, it is still possible to find venomous spiders and the occasional snake in one’s back yard. She holds a BA (Hons) in Literature from The University of Melbourne, an MA in History from Monash University and a Diploma of Creative Writing from Prahran College. She has had three novels and one collection of short stories published by traditional publishers; written for screen and theatre, and edited two literary journals. Her story, Weintraub’s Disorder, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by the editors of Flying South while her novel, April Fool (Hodder), was nominated in the Ned Kelly Awards for best first crime novel. Its filmscript won the New York, Gotham Screenplay Competition in the Action-Adventure category. She edited Abraham Biderman’s award-winning Holocaust memoir, The World of My Past. Her commitment to social action saw her conducting creative writing workshops for people with mental illness and, under the aegis of the Victorian College of the Arts, advocating for those with disability by writing and performing stand-up comedy to raise public awareness.

Like most writers, Peter Chordas’s bio includes a laundry list of unrelated nonsense that leaves you wondering how he ever finds time to write. He wonders that himself.

Peter Chordas is a freelance writer, photographer, and web designer in Hiroshima, Japan. His words have surfaced in The Japan Times, Setouchi Reflection Trip, Setouchi Finder, Rurubu Omotenashi Travel Guide, and Make a Living Writing. He also directs Link Hiroshima, a volunteer peace group, and much of his writing focuses on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Some have even called him an expert.

Outside of writing, Peter is the guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter for Hiroshima’s melodic crust punk band Children of the Ashes. His endless hobbies include cooking, baking, singing, sewing, reading, hiking, cycling, skateboarding, and getting stomped to putty at Candy Land by his son. Allegations that he cheats to lose are groundless.

Currently, he’s working on two novels: Terragaste: Tale of the Red Star Knight, a post-apocalyptic tale of a warrior seeking to earn his name, and The Black Desert, a father and son’s quest for survival and meaning in the void of space.

Peter believes in equality and peaceful, non-spiritual coexistence for all living things. He writes speculative fiction, poetry, feature articles, and crusty punk rock lyrics. He takes his writing far more seriously than his bio would have you believe.

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Elizabeth Moore has always been guided by two passions: stories and the sea. She wrote her first book at nine (a crayon-illustrated fantasy inspired by the Narnia series) and while practicality steered her toward science as a profession, the pull of storytelling never wavered. She earned degrees in biology (BS) and oceanography (MS) and built a distinguished career in marine conservation and communication at NOAA before leaving to pursue her writing full-time.

She was the lead author and editor, on behalf of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, of America’s Marine Sanctuaries (Smithsonian Books, 2020) and wrote Time and Tide: A History of the National Marine Sanctuary System. Her work has appeared on CNN.com, in Sea History Magazine and Dive Training, and on NOAA, US Coast Guard, and US Fish and Wildlife Service websites. She maintains the newsletters Blue Green Between, focused on nature, conservation and recreation, on LinkedIn and Tesserae, exploring the many ways humanity intersects with nature, on Substack. She is finishing a nonfiction book about the Caribbean monk seal and is at work on her novel A Haunt of Seals.

She lives in Melbourne, Florida.

Leslie T. Grover is an award-winning writer, scholar, and activist. Her novella, The Benefits of Eating White Folks, marked her entrance into historical fiction, following her work in academic and nonfiction writing. A southern Black writer, her short stories have appeared in Waxing and Waning Literary Journal, Testimony, and as the winning entry in Owl Hollow Press’ The Takeback Anthology. In 2024, she won Amazon Kindle Vella’s Grand Prize. Her second book, Rootbound, is scheduled for release later this year. Fire Shut Up In My Bones, her book of short stories, is slated for a 2026 release. She is managing editor for PushBlack, a media organization dedicated to uplifting Black identity through storytelling, and she teaches creative writing courses in historical fiction, epistolary writing, and short story writing. 

Leslie currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At the heart of Leslie’s work is the belief that storytelling shapes the world we live in. By centering Black histories and creative imagination, her writing insists on freedom as a dream and as a living, everyday practice.

D. Shay Gable is a long-time writer as well as a licensed clinical psychologist and trauma researcher with a private practice in Evansville, IN. Her psychological background informs and deepens her poetry, short stories, and creative non-fiction writing. Early in her career, she wrote freelance feature stories for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal in Lancaster, PA,

Following that stint, she put her writing career on hold to obtain a doctorate in clinical psychology, build a private practice, and develop innovative strategies for treating trauma symptoms. After twenty years as a psychologist, she has returned to her love of writing. Her short story, Like Magic, was published as a second-place winner on the Writer’s Digest website. Her short story, The Last Piece of Tommy Diggs, won first place in a Midwest Writers Guild short story contest, and her poetry and short essays have been printed in various local publications. Her short story, First Light, will appear in the 2026 Midwest Writer’s Guild anthology.

She continues to work part time in her psychology practice while she tweaks the final edit of her memoir How to Grow Wings. Lettie’s Run is her latest work in progress.

She lives in Indiana with her partner and most enthusiastic supporter, as well as three goofy dogs and an evil cat.

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Mara lives in Boise, Idaho where she works as an acupuncturist at a local nonprofit clinic and writes whenever she can. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in several publications including the 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions of the Writers in the Attic Anthology, as well as Grim & Gilded, Death Rattle Literary’s Ekphrasis: Poetry, the Boise Weekly and Paper Plane Press Volume II and III. She is the creator of the weekly Substack poetry periodical This Poem Is For You.
When Mara isn't writing or poking people with tiny needles for their own good, she can be found on a river, up a mountain, or curled up with her two beloved cats and an art project.

You can connect with Mara online at marabateman.com or by following her on Instagram @jajabird.

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Based in Bristol, UK, Michael has publications with JMWW, Indiana Review, the BBC, and Pithead Chapel, amongst others, and was longlisted for the Ploughshares’ Emerging Writers’ competition. He writes speculative and literary fiction, is a Curtis Brown Creative alum, a lifetime mental health professional, and part of the University of Bristol MA in Creative Writing cohort. He's currently looking for agent representation for a literary fiction novel and short story collection.

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Mark Purcell, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist, professor, and author whose fiction and nonfiction give voice to the mental health struggles young people face. Drawing on more than 25 years of clinical, academic, and advocacy work, Purcell writes stories and resources that challenge stigma and offer youth real tools for coping and connection.

 
His young adult novel The Specials follows a group of neurodivergent teens swept into a government program that claims to "cure" their differences — only to discover those differences are extraordinary powers, sparking a revolution against a regime built on hate. The novel has been named a finalist for the Maxy YA Fiction Award, the Amity YA Fiction Award, and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, and recently placed third for the First Page Award in the Gutsy Great Writers Award contest.

 
Purcell is also the author of the Wisdom Warrior trilogy, a magical-realism series for young readers that teaches mindfulness and healthy coping through the adventures of campers facing anxiety, judgment, and conflict at a mysterious summer camp. His nonfiction works, Teaching Kids to Pause, Cope & Connect and Mindfulness for Teen Anger, bring social-emotional learning and DBT/mindfulness-based tools to classrooms and clinicians nationwide.

 
A professor at Cal State East Bay and National University, Purcell trains the next generation of therapists while continuing to write fiction and nonfiction that gives young people a voice.

 
Learn more at drmarkpurcell.com.