Issue 5: Out of Control Spring/Summer 2024

Cassandra Brandt is a C3-4 complete quadriplegic writer (she writes with a mouth pen!) living in Arizona. She’s committed to self advocacy and advocacy for other vulnerable people with disabilities whose care is often compromised within the long-term care system. 

Denise Drapeau is a writer and freelance editor whose poetry has recently been published in Northern New England Review. She holds a master’s degree in English and Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University, and lives in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with her husband, their three daughters, and their rescue dog, Cash.

Kristin Idaszak is a playwright, essayist, and cultural critic. She is a two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow and a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Bending Genres, HowlRound, Rescripted, and elsewhere. She’s taught at DePaul University and Northwestern University.

Ann V. Klotz is a writer, an empty-nester, and a frequent feeder of two cats and three dogs. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Bay Path University, and her work weaves together reflections on forty-two years of teaching and lessons learned in motherhood. When she isn’t writing, she runs Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. www.annvklotz.com  

Lake Angela is a poet, translator, and dancer-choreographer who creates at the confluence of poetry and movement. Her books include Organblooms, Words for the Dead, and Scivias Choreomaniae (forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil). She is an editor with Punt Volat and Poetry Midwives. As director of the poetry-dance group Companyia Lake Angela, she presents the value of schizophrenia spectrum creativity: www.lakeangeladance.com.

Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of three nonfiction books, A Calendar is a Snakeskin (Autofocus, 2023), Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, 2022), and Teen Queen Training (forthcoming, 2026). Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council, twice named Notable in Best American Essays, and may be found at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie.

Kim MacQueen is the author of two novels, Out Out and People Who Hate America. Kim lives and works in Burlington, Vermont.

Katharine Malaga has worked as a registered nurse, a Spanish-English language interpreter at a large urban hospital, and a teacher of English as a Foreign Language in an adult learning center. Now retired, she volunteers as an international courier to pick up and deliver stem cells to patients waiting for transplant. She has been her husband’s caregiver for fourteen years.

Farzana Nasrin is a BA English graduate who has a passion for poetry and prose in all forms. Currently living in the United Kingdom, she is a second-generation immigrant who is a woman, a person of color, and a Muslim, and much of her work explores and raises awareness of these identities. In her free time, she writes about politics and her pet bird.

Michael Riordan lives in Arlington, Texas, and has taught in the U.S., Australia, Singapore, and China, where he was a professor of writing and film. He won first prize for nonfiction in 2020 Ageless Authors and third prize in 2022’s LIGHT story contest. His work can be found in Short Edition, Consequence, Whimsical Poet, Spirituality & Health, The Smart Set, and elsewhere.

Suzanne Roberts is the award-winning author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail, as well as four poetry collections. More information may be found on her website: www.suzanneroberts.net, or on Substack, where she shares themed writing prompts: https://suzanneroberts.substack.com/.

Yvette Schnoeker-Shorb is the author of the chapbook, Shapes That Stay (Kelsay Books). Her poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Rise Up Review, The Midwest Quarterly, About Place Journal, Earth’s Daughters, AJN: The American Journal of Nursing, Slipstream Magazine, Plainsongs, and elsewhere. She holds an interdisciplinary MA and has worked as an educator, a researcher, and an editor.

Kelly Steele weaves her adventures, curiosity, positive vibes, and mental health battles with vivid photographs and the written word. A writer, a photographer and a storyteller, she sees her creative work as her advocacy work for mental health, a way to inspire others to find their own anchors in a beautifully chaotic world, and to see they are not alone. findinganchorsinthestorm.com

Richard Stimac has published a poetry book, Bricolage (Spartan Press); two poetry chapbooks; and one flash fiction chapbook. In his work, he explores time and memory through the landscape and humanscape of the St. Louis region.

Christie Tate is a Chicago-based author and essayist. Her memoir, Group, was a New York Times bestseller, and has been translated into 19 languages. B.F.F., her second memoir, was an Amazon nonfiction pick of 2023. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.

Michael Toussaint is a Denver, Colorado-based creative. Concepts that are integral to his work include the transformation of the everyday or common through perception and context, the use of chance operations, and the engagement with series that are unstable and in flux. He uses each concept, theme, approach, and material to establish new forms. This search is the core of his art.

Hugh Willard is a long-toothed psychotherapist, writer, and musician living and working in Apex, North Carolina. His first nonfiction book, Finding Beauty in the Gray: Stories and Verse From the Third Age, was published by Warren Publishing, Inc. in November 2023. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Creative Nonfiction with Bay Path University.