2023

Louise Watts has published short fiction and poetry in magazines and anthologies including Ambit, Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology, The Rialto, Raceme, Retreat West and Reflex Fiction. In 2020, her highly commended novella-in-flash Something Lost was published by Ad Hoc Fiction. Her poetry and fiction have been listed or highly commended in competitions including The Poetry Society, The Plough, Mslexia, the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize, Fish, Retreat West and Reflex Fiction. She lives in Oxfordshire with her family and dog, where she works in education. She is currently working on a work of longer fiction and is putting together a pamphlet of poetry.

Tamsin Cottis is a London-based child psychotherapist and writer. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck and is a former winner of the Mslexia Short Story Prize. Though currently focusing on her Memoir, Tamsin’s poems and short stories have been placed or long/shortlisted in a range of competitions including Bath, Brighton, Fish, and London. She has been published by, among others, the Mechanics Institute Review, FlashBackFiction, Tell Tales, Rattle Tales, Atrium and Verve. Tamsin’s professional and academic writing, about her work with children, and people with learning disabilities, has also been widely published in professional books and journals.

Siobhan Harvey is a UK-NZ author of eight books, including the 2022 New Zealand Book Awards long-listed poetry collection, Ghosts (Otago University Press, 2021). She was awarded the 2023 Landfall Essay Competition, 2021 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry and 2020 Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship. Recently, her memoir pieces have appeared in Feminine Divine: Voices of Power & Invisibility (Cyren US), Fourth Genre (US) and Griffith Review (Aus).

Kyung Peggy Kim returned to writing at the age of seventy after a long career in the non-profit sector. This time, it was with a sense of grounding – in the truth of her experiences and in the soundness of her perspectives – witnessed from the margins where she stood all her life. Yet, it is where she finally found her voice, a new voice, loosed from the constraints of mimicry.

Kyung’s essays have been published in Pangyrus, Atticus Review, and Bright Flash. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021. She is currently revising her first book, a memoir.

Anne Smith is an American artist and writer based in the UK. She holds two degrees in Ceramics and for several years operated a pottery studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her artwork is held in numerous public and private collections including the Smithsonian Institution and Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She has also taught extensively and has been a visiting artist at universities and residencies throughout America and Europe. Upon moving to London in 1998 her work shifted towards painting, illustration and more recently to writing.

Amanda Quaid is a writer, performer, and multi-disciplinary artist in New York. Plays include The Extinctionist, The Clam, Echo and Narcissus, and Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays. Her first opera libretto will premiere with Heartbeat Opera in 2024. As a filmmaker, Ms. Quaid received a LUNAFEST prize for her short, Toys, which she adapted, directed, and hand-animated. The film was also honored with a Best Animation prize at DC Shorts. She began writing poetry in 2023, and her work has been published in Rattle. She is a graduate of Vassar College.

Alyson Kissner is co-winner of the 2022 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award for Scottish-based poets under 30. She has also been shortlisted for the 2022 Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize and the 2023 Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Alyson is completing her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her creative and critical practices interrogate themes of identity/memory, mythmaking, grief, power, and the natural world, as well as the ways abuse functions in personal relationships. Her work can be found at alysonkissner.com.

Lance Larsen is the author of five poetry collections, most recently What the Body Knows (Tampa 2018). His poems have appeared in TLS, London Magazine, Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New England Review, and Best American Poetry 2009. His awards include a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brigham Young University and likes to fool around with aphorisms: “When climbing a new mountain, wear old shoes.” In 2017 he completed a five-year appointment as Utah’s poet laureate.

Mara Bergman’s poetry has been published widely here and abroad. Her first collection, The Tailor’s Three Sons and Other New York Poems, won a Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition and Crossing Into Tamil Nadu a Templar Quarterly Poetry Prize. She has since published two full collections with Arc: The Disappearing Room (2019) and The Night We Were Dylan Thomas (2021). Mara won the 2023 Plough Poetry Competition, judged by Imtiaz Dharker. An award-winning children’s writer and editor, she is thrilled to have a poem highly commended by Roger Robinson in this year’s Bridport Poetry Competition.

Kizziah Burton has been shortlisted for Forward Prize Best Single Poem 2023. She was Finalist for Gregory O’Donogue International Competition (2023), Third place Mslexia Poetry Prize (2022), Highly Commended Oxford Poetry Prize (2022), Judge’s Prize - Magma Poetry Competition (2022/23), & The National Poetry Competition (2021). Second Place Ledbury Poetry Competition (2020), Shortlisted for The Bridport Prize (2022) & Aesthetica Creative Writing Award (2023). Awarded grants from the American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Foundation while a graduate fellow of the University of Southern California, she holds a BA in Art History/Religion with an MA in creative writing.

Mary Mulholland’s poems are published in many journals including bath magg, 14 Magazine, Aesthetica, Under the Radar, Rialto, Finished Creatures, Stand, and in anthologies by Candlestick Press and Corrupted Poets.among others. This year she’s been longlisted in the National Poetry Prize, Rialto Nature & Place, placed in Wolves, Teignmouth, and commended/ shortlisted in Ver, Ware, Fish, Plough, Bedford and South Downs.. She has a pamphlet, What the sheep taught me (Live Canon, 2022) and two collaborations with Simon Maddrell and Vasiliki Albedo (Nine Pens). She founded the platform Red Door Poets and co-edits The Alchemy Spoon.

Erin O’Luanaigh received her MFA from the University of Florida. Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Bad Lilies, AGNI, 32 Poems, The Southern Review, Subtropics, and The Hopkins Review, among other journals. Originally from Connecticut, she currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Utah and cohost of the film and literature podcast, (sub)Text.

Jean O’Brien’s 6th collection Stars Burn Regardless was published by Salmon Publishing in 2022. She is widely published and has received prizes and awards, including winning the Arvon International, the Fish International and been placed/runner up in others such as the Forward Prize (Single Poem). She was Poet in Residence in the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris in 2021 and awarded a Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in 2017/18. She received an M. Phil in creative writing/poetry from Trinity College Dublin and has taught in places as diverse as community centres, schools, prisons, the Irish Writers Centre and at post graduate level.

Jenny Pagdin’s pamphlet Caldbeck, was published by Eyewear in 2017 and shortlisted for the Mslexia pamphlet competition. Competition wins include second prize in the Café Writers competition 2021, Café Writers Norfolk prize 2017 and longlisting in the Rebecca Swift Foundation Women’s Poetry Prize 2018. Her work is featured or forthcoming in New Welsh Review, Smoke, Magma, Ambit, The Stand, Wild Court, Finished Creatures, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Interpreter’s House and an Emma Press anthology. She was born into an English-Lebanese family and lives in Norwich with her husband and child, where she works as a fundraiser in the voluntary sector.

Margaret Ray grew up in Gainesville, Florida. She is the author of GOOD GRIEF, THE GROUND (BOA Editions, 2023, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize selected by Stephanie Burt) and the chapbook SUPERSTITIONS OF THE MID-ATLANTIC (2022, selected by Jericho Brown for the 2020 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship Prize). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Best New Poets 2021, Threepenny Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. A shortlister for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, she teaches in New Jersey. She’s on Twitter & BlueSky @mbrrray, on Instagram @m_rrray. You can find more of her work at www.margaretbray.com

Joyce Schmid’s poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, The Hudson Review, Five Points, Literary Imagination, and other journals and anthologies. She lives with her husband of over half a century in Palo Alto, California, USA.

Joelle Schumacher is a poet, painter, printmaker, and photographer. they currently reside in Denver, Colorado, where they teach weekly poetry workshops and miss quality public transportation.

William Wyld is a gender non-conforming poet and visual artist from South London. Costume and identity are central to their writing and performing, which is rooted in nature and the landscape, relating to their practice as a painter. William has performed at the Poetry Library, Wilderness festival, Wandsworth Fringe and featured at poetry nights around London. They have been published in Lighthouse, Queer Life Queer Love II, the Live Canon sonnet anthology 154, and exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show and Discerning Eye exhibitions. A carpenter by trade, William recently helped rebuild the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green.

Tom Miles lives in London and supplements his negligible writing income by selling doorknobs and tennis rackets. He is the proud father of two daughters and the rather less proud author of two novels and two collections of shorter fiction. Two of his stories for children have been adapted for television and broadcast by BBC Persian. He has two bad knees and no real interest in numerology.
Tom researches and writes on James Joyce, violence in art, and the weather. He struggles with comma usage and talking sensibly about himself in the third person. He remains optimistic.

Alex Luke is a writer from London. She has an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Camden, where she was the recipient of an Interdisciplinary Fellowship. Her short fiction has been published in The Good Journal and SAND Journal. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the STACK Awards. She is a nanny and a bookseller, and she’s currently working on her first novel. Find her on Twitter at @alexjaneluke

Andrew De Silva was raised in metro Detroit and studied fiction at the University of Southern California, where he is now an associate professor in the University’s undergraduate writing program. His fiction debuted in the Missouri Review in 2018 and has since won december magazine’s Curt Johnson Prose Award and Bayou Magazine’s James Knudsen Prize for Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and two young children. This story is drawn from his recently completed novel manuscript Journeyman, set in the world of professional tennis.

georgia campbell is from Stroud and graduated from UEA’s Creative Writing MA in 2022. She has written a novel about an obsessive actress, and her story digestible has formed the grounds for another novel, this time set behind the scenes of a theatre rather than on the stage. She used to be a tutor and now works as a transcription editor.

Mustapha Enesi is a short story writer whose works explore minority voices and complex familial relationships. In 2021, he won the K&L Prize for African Literature with a story about a young girl who develops severe mental health issues. In the same year, he won the Awele Creative Short Story Prize with a story about a woman who, after seven miscarriages in seven years of marriage, decided to remove her womb as a way to seek agency from the toxic clutches of patriarchy; it was later published in Harvard’s Transition Magazine. He is Ebira, and he writes from Lagos, Nigeria.

Asia Haut lives in Kent with her husband and son. She studied History of Art at The University of Manchester and taught the subject for a number of years, though she now works with undergraduate students with disabilities. Her first piece of published fiction appeared in Mslexia in 2022. She is currently writing more short stories and working on a novel.

Fred Lunzer is a writer coming out of the tech world, his day job is in AI research and strategy. He has British and German citizenship, grew up in London and Tokyo, and speaks Japanese. He is the third of five children, and his family is made up of writers, musicians, jewellers and filmmakers. His debut novel, SIKE, will be published by Celadon.

Eamon O’Riordan lives in Greenwood, Ontario, with his wife Melissa. His writing has appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Honest Ulsterman, and The Galway Review. He is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Mohini Singh studied Computer Science at Cambridge and worked as a software engineer for eight years before deciding it was not the career for her. She took evening classes in creative writing at City Lit and completed a diploma in Novel Writing from Birkbeck. Her short stories have been published in Long Story, Short, The Wrong Quarterly and The Good Journal. She’s recently completed her first novel and is currently working on her second. In her free time she learns Japanese and does voluntary tutoring in English and Maths.

Radhika Maira Tabrez is a writer, editor, L&D specialist, TEDx speaker, and radio show host.
Her debut novel ‘In The Light Of Darkness’ won the much-coveted Muse India – Satish Verma Young Writer Award in 2016. Radhika’s stories and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines since then. In 2018, she became the first Indian ever to speak at a TEDx event in Bangladesh. She has won the Rising Stars India Award (2017), and 100 Most Inspiring Writers by Indian Awaaz (2018). She was a Program Mentor for the Chevening Writers Series held in Malaysia in 2020.

Danny Thiemann Venegas, an attorney at Earthjustice, is a recipient of the 2021 Nelligan Prize for Fiction for his story “One Bad Night in San Jose, Costa Rica”, the 2020 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction for “Echolocation for Mixed Race Runaways”, a Table4 Foundation New Writer Award for “Gotham, Mexico”, a Madalyn Lamont Award for fiction from the American University in Cairo, and his story "Our Bodies Are in the Clouds Above Their Cities" was a finalist for the 2023 Kurt Vonnegut prize. He has published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the New Delta Review, Bosque Magazine, the Idaho Review, and elsewhere.

Shane Tivenan is an Irish writer, currently based in Madrid. His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. In 2020 he won the RTÉ Francis MacManus Award for ‘Flower Wild’, a short story about Violet Gibson, the Irish woman who shot Mussolini in the nose.

Mary Wang is a writer and editor based in New York. Her work has been featured in BOMB, the Guardian, Michigan Quarterly Review, New York Public Radio, Vestoj, and Vogue, among others. She was a 2021-2022 Emerging Writers Fellow at the Center for Fiction and a senior editor at Guernica. At the latter, she founded and led Miscellaneous Files, a series of virtual studio visits that used writers’ digital artefacts to understand their practice.

Emily Roth is a librarian and writer. She was the first place winner of Reflex Fiction’s Winter 2022 flash fiction competition, and her writing has also been published by SmokeLong Quarterly, The Masters Review, Exposition Review, and others. She lives in Chicago with her rescue dog, Obie.

Ruth Moore writes fiction and poetry for all ages. Her as-yet unpublished novel The Enemy Inside won the Bath Children’s Novel Award (2020). Before success in 2023, her flash fiction was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2021) and her story Homecoming was highly commended in the 2022 Historical Writers’ Association short fiction awards. She is represented by Stephanie Thwaites at Curtis Brown. After a first career in theatre, creative education, and project management, Ruth is embarking on a PhD at Exeter University. Her research focuses on the possibilities and problematics of exploring silenced (hi)stories through children’s time-slip fiction.
Instagram: @ruthmoorewrites

Allison Field Bell is originally from northern California but has spent most of her adult life in the desert. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. Her prose appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Epiphany, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, South Dakota Review, Sugar House Review, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.

Rachel Lastra is a writer and editor currently based in the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction has been published in Barrelhouse, Smokelong Quarterly, Apparition Lit, Chestnut Review, and MoonPark Review, and she was a finalist in the 2023 Flash Frog flash fiction contest. She is a student in the MA in writing program at Johns Hopkins University and is currently at work on a novel. Find her at www.rachellastra.com.

Kathleen Latham is a poet and writer living outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Twice nominated for The Best Small Fictions, she’s won the Web Microfiction Prize for Women Writers, Writer’s Digest’s Short Short Story Competition, and placed third in Bath Flash Fiction. Her work has been shortlisted for the First Pages Prize, Welkin Writing Prize, Fish Flash Fiction, Fractured Lit, and New Flash Fiction Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Reflex Fiction, The Masters Review, and Fictive Dream. She tweets from @lathamwithapen and can be found online at KathleenLatham.com.

Christopher Notarnicola's work has appeared in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Best American Essays, Best Microfiction, Chicago Quarterly Review, Image, River Teeth, The Southampton Review and other publications. Find him in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and at christophernotarnicola.com.

Adam Z. Robinson is a writer and theatre-maker. His work includes: Upon the Stair (“Everyone needs to see this show” - The Reviews Hub) and Smile Club (✭✭✭✭ The Guardian) co-written with Andrea Heaton. His plays The Book of Darkness & Light and Shivers toured nationally between 2016-2019. Adam has adapted classic works for the stage: Haunted (two national tours, 2023) and A Christmas Carol (national tours 2019-21, residency at Barons Court Theatre, London, 2022, forthcoming residency at Saint John Theatre Company, New Brunswick, Canada, 2023). Adam's other writing includes: Conscientious (national tour 2014) and Seaside Terror (national tours 2017-20) with OddDoll Theatre.

Stephen Wunderli is a writer living in Utah. He has published work in The Kalahari Review, Grub Street Literary Magazine, and The Dawn Review. He grew up idolizing cowboys, riding motorcycles and hoping the world wouldn’t end before he’d run out of stories. So far so good.

Lucy Foster is a writer and teacher living in Cornwall. She specialises in the art, literature and cultural history of Mexico and teaches on Latin American and Spanish papers at Cambridge University, where she did her PhD. Lucy has worked in fiction editorial, as a literary scout and as a translator from French and Spanish and has also spent happy years living on the west coast of Mexico, dancing and having adventures.

Pauline Diamond Salim works for a human rights charity in Glasgow. She is an ex-journalist and wrote for UK newspapers and magazines before moving into the charity sector. For the last ten years she has worked for a refugee agency that supports people seeking safety in Scotland. Her second novel, I Just Live Here, was shortlisted for the 2023 Caledonia Novel Award and the 2023 Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award.

Faiza Hasan worked as a journalist, trained as a chef from Cordon Bleu, ran a pop-up restaurant and an online macaroon shop in London until a life changing diagnosis of Fibromyalgia returned her to her first love, writing. She has an MA in Journalism from Stanford University, an MA in Creative Writing from Cambridge University and has attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her short stories have been short and longlisted in competitions, including third place at the Bristol Prize, 2020, and her novel has been longlisted for The Yeovil Prize, Pontas Emerging Writers and TLC Pen Factor.
Twitter:@paandaan, @thetatteredcovers
Instagram:@paandaan

Jenny Jack is originally from Fife, and studied medicine in Edinburgh, where a fascination with patients’ stories led her to specialise in psychiatry. After further training in London and Oxford, she now lives on the edge of the Peak District with her partner and three children, working as a consultant psychiatrist in a service for Early Intervention in Psychosis. Her writing is inspired by her work and by an interest in folktales, mythology and elements of magical realism. She has an MPhil in Writing, has published various pieces of short fiction and been shortlisted in the Off the Shelf Sheffield Short Story Competition.

Rebekah Miron is a Freelance Writer and Editor from the South West of England who not-so-secretly would rather be working on her own books. She was awarded a Distinction and the Kate Bertram Prize for her Master’s work in Creative Writing at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. Her poetry has been broadcast internationally and published both online and in print, featuring in The Emma Press Anthology of Illness and shortlisted in The Frogmore Poetry Prize in 2020. She started writing her novel, Love, I Must Go, in January of 2023. Twitter: @rebekahmiron

Rebekah Miron is a Freelance Writer and Editor from the South West of England who not-so-secretly would rather be working on her own books. She was awarded a Distinction and the Kate Bertram Prize for her Master’s work in Creative Writing at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. Her poetry has been broadcast internationally and published both online and in print, featuring in The Emma Press Anthology of Illness and shortlisted in The Frogmore Poetry Prize in 2020. She started writing her novel, Love, I Must Go, in January of 2023. Twitter: @rebekahmiron

georgia campbell is from Stroud and graduated from UEA’s Creative Writing MA in 2022. She has written a novel about an obsessive actress, and her story digestible has formed the grounds for another novel, this time set behind the scenes of a theatre rather than on the stage. She used to be a tutor and now works as a transcription editor.

Mustapha Enesi is a short story writer whose works explore minority voices and complex familial relationships. In 2021, he won the K&L Prize for African Literature with a story about a young girl who develops severe mental health issues. In the same year, he won the Awele Creative Short Story Prize with a story about a woman who, after seven miscarriages in seven years of marriage, decided to remove her womb as a way to seek agency from the toxic clutches of patriarchy; it was later published in Harvard’s Transition Magazine. He is Ebira, and he writes from Lagos, Nigeria.