Spring/Summer 2021 Issue

Andrea Hansell studied creative writing at Princeton University and earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Michigan. Her essays and memoir pieces have appeared in publications including Lilith, Intima, Easy Street, and Minerva Rising. A winter 2017 writing fellow at Pacific University, she has been a finalist for the Lascaux Prize and the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition.

Adrian Hutapea is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, performer, and creative collaborator based in Portland, Oregon. He creates ambient, technically layered and textural sonic backdrops for dance. With a background in classical piano and improvisational jazz, he relishes in working with live performers where the work unfolds with a moment to moment responsiveness held within a larger structure. As a photographer with a primary focus on landscape and nature photography, Adrian brings a contemplative, meditative outlook to his practice both in the field and in post production. Influenced by his background as a musician and his interest in the physics of energy, frequency and vibration, Adrian synthesizes the tangible physical world with the intangible subtle energies of emotion and psyche throughout his work.

Jacqueline Lowe is a retired social worker who began writing after she moved to Maine. She has participated in numerous writing workshops sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and the Maine Senior College Network. “Making it Home” is her first published piece. 

Heather M. F. Lyke is a queer writer living in southern Minnesota. By day, she works in the world of K-12 education. On evenings and weekends, she builds things out of nothing: sometimes with paint, occasionally with fabric, but most often with words. Her poems, “Turning” and “Tour Wizard”  were originally published in In Parentheses: New Modernism, June 2020. Heather’s work has also appeared in Eclectica and MockingHeart Review, and is forthcoming in the anthology, From Pandemic to Protest. Learn more on her website. 

Natalia Masewicz is a writer based in Berlin, Germany. Originally from Poland, she graduated from The Art School in Glasgow, UK with a degree in contemporary art curating. She has been a freelance writer for Blouin Art Info. She dreams and thinks in two languages, Polish and English, and often mistrusts them both. Her work is primarily concerned with attitudes towards body, language, and identity.

Will McMillan lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in literary journals including The Sun, Redivider, Hippocampus, and Pidgeonholed. Will has also been interviewed on This American Life, in an episode based on an essay he published in Nailed. Find him at https://www.willjmcmillan.com.

Lisa Novick is an environmentalist and writer based in France. Her recent work has appeared in The Hopper magazine, Plants & Poetry, Wild Roof Journal, The Write Launch, and Sky Island Journal. She was a member of the Biodiversity Expert Council and Urban Ecosystems Working Group of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and co-founded Landscape Integrity Films and Education. (www.lisanovick.com)  

Heidi Fettig Parton received an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bay Path University in 2017. Her writing can be found in many publications, including Assay Journal, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Angels Flight, literary west (AFLW), Entropy, The Manifest-Station, and The Rumpus. Find her on Instagram @heidifettigparton or at www.heidifettigparton.com.

Anne Pinkerton studied poetry at Hampshire College and received an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bay Path University. Her writing often circles around grief, loss, illness, and coping with these painful realities in our lives. She has been published in Modern Loss, Hippocampus Magazine, Entropy, Ars Medica, Lunch Ticket, The Bark, and others. Find her online at AnnePinkertonWriter.com.

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian artist, poet, and pianist who lives and works in Sydney on the land of the Ku-ring-gai people of the Eora Nation. A member of Sydney’s North Shore Poetry Project, Oormila is a chief editor for Authora Australis. Recent poems have been featured in Tistelblomma, Silver Birch Press, and Underwood Press, and Oormila’s recent artwork has appeared in The Amsterdam Quarterly, Back Patio Press, and on the covers of Pithead Chapel, Ang(st) the body zine. Find her @oormilaprahlad and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings

Merryn Rutledge got hooked on poetry when an iconoclast high school teacher taught Plath and poetry writing instead of the standard American lit survey. Writing is Merryn’s third career, after teaching literature and creative writing and then running a national leadership development firm. Merryn’s poetry has appeared in Aurorean, Borrowed Solace, Speckled Trout Review, Poetry Porch, Pudding, Oddball and other magazines.

Brad Snyder is an essayist and humor writer whose recent nonfiction work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Gay & Lesbian Review and The Dillydoun Review. Brad is currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction. For more of his work, visit bradmsnyder.com or find him on Instagram @bradmsnyderwriting and Medium @bradmsnyder.

Kelechi Ubozoh is a Nigerian-American writer who blends the reality of trauma, race, and mental health into poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. Originally from Brooklyn, Kelechi was the first undergraduate ever published in the New York Times. Kelechi co-hosts and co-curates the Bay Area reading series MoonDrop Productions with Cassandra Dallett. She has performed at the Berkeley Poetry Festival, Oakland’s Beast Crawl, San Francisco’s Litquake, and at Litcrawl with Cocoa Fly, an all-Black-women troupe. She is the editor, with L.D. Green, of the 2019 anthology We’ve Been Too Patient. Her work has also appeared in Endangered Species, Enduring Values, an anthology of works by San Francisco Bay Area writers and artists of color. She is working on a collection of poetry through memoir. Find her at https://kelechiubozoh.com/

Mydalis Vera is a writer and graduate student, studying for an MFA in creative nonfiction. Her work has been featured in Pulp City magazine and on the Multiplicity Blog, and her book, Warrior, Guerrera: Sayings and Affirmations/Para Las Guerreras, was published in April, 2021. She lives in Springfield, Mass., with her fiancée, Kenny, and their two children. Read more about Mydalis on her website, or follow her on Twitter @Daliwlf/ or on Instagram @dali.wlf. 

Bill Vernon studied English literature, then taught it. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folk dances. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in journals and anthologies including Steel House Review, Marathon Literary Review, Parhelion Literary Magazine, and Entropy. Five Star Mysteries published his novel Old Town in 2005.

Mary Zelinka lives in Albany, Oregon and has worked at the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence for more than 30 years. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Brevity, Eclectica, and Memoir Magazine.