JEREMY OKAI DAVIS is a visual artist originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, currently residing in Portland, Oregon. His practice is influenced by popular culture, race relations, design, and portraiture. Each new body of work is a vehicle for exploring the qualities and flexibility of paint. His work has been included in exhibitions regionally and nationally, including Portland State’s White Gallery; Disjecta; The Studio Museum of Harlem in New York; Maine’s Able Baker Contemporary, and elsewhere. His work is permanently collected by Oregon State University, Oregon University’s Allen Hall & The Studio Museum. (@jeremy_okai)
SHASTA GRANT is the author of Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home, a chapbook with Split Lip Press, the 2016 SmokeLong Quarterly Kathy Fish Fellow, and Spring 2017 Writer-in-Residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida. Winner of the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest, judged by Ann Patchett, her stories and essays have appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, Gargoyle, wigleaf, and elsewhere. A graduate of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, she current lives in Singapore and Indianapolis. (@shastagrant)
ASHTON KAMBUROFF is a poet from Cleveland, Ohio. He currently lives in central Texas where he serves as the 2017-2018 L.D. and Laverne Clark House Writer-in-Residence. His most recent work can be found in Calamity, (B)Oink, Rappahannock Review, and other journals. He is the poetry editor for Profane and the poetry co-editor for Opossum.
AMANDA LEIGH LICHTENSTEIN is a writer, poet, and editor from Chicago, Illinois, with a heart tilted toward East Africa’s Swahili Coast. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Explore Parts Unknown (CNN), Fortunate Traveller, The Forward, and Hypertext, among others. A MacArthur Foundation Connections Grantee and Vermont Studio Center Poetry Fellow, Amanda has an Arts in Education Masters from Harvard and a B.A. in English Literature from Kalamazoo College in Michigan. She currently edits for Global Voices Online and is working on a collection of essays set in Zanzibar about faith, identity, and belonging. (@travelfarnow)
PATRICK MAINELLI lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, New Ohio Review, Sport Literate, The New Territory, and elsewhere. His work was twice named among other “Notable Essays” in Robert Atwan’s Best American Essays series, and has been featured on the Public Radio program “Living on Earth.”
VERITY SAYLES is an essayist from New England. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Crab Creek Review, Under the Gum Tree, First Class Lit., and others. She earned her MFA in nonfiction from Oregon State University in 2016 where she taught composition, served on the board of 45th Parallel, and fell in love with the pine trees. She now lives in Seattle, where she teaches English and creative writing at an independent high school. (@saylesteam)
NATALIE SINGER is the author of the new memoir California Calling: A Self-Interrogation (Hawthorne Books, March 2018). Her writing has been published in journals, magazines, and newspapers including Literary Mama, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, ParentMap, Alligator Juniper, Brain, Child and Full Grown People. She has taught writing inside Washington State’s psychiatric facility for youth and Seattle’s juvenile detention center, and she has worked as a reporter at newspapers around the West. Natalie earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington. Originally from Montreal, she lives in Seattle. (@Natalie_Writes)
JONI TEVIS is the author of two books of essays, most recently The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse. Her work has appeared in Orion, The Oxford American, Poets & Writers, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. She serves as the Bennette E. Geer Associate Professor of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. (@JoniTevis)
KAYLA QUEEN studies creative nonfiction at Marshall University, where she is currently completing a Master’s degree in teaching. In 2012, she launched her blog, Mountain Gypsy, as a place to write about and celebrate her Appalachian heritage. Kayla lives in Huntington, West Virginia, and has recently been published in the journal So to Speak from George Mason University, the anthology Voices on Unity: Coming Together, Falling Apart (Mountain State Press), edited by Cat Pleska, and the James Dickey Review. Her essay “A Field of Queens” was awarded first place at both the 2017 Sigma Tau Delta Convention and the Maier Awards. When writing, she enjoys good black coffee and listening to music by fellow Appalachians, such as Tyler Childers. (@KaylaQueen)
Guest Editor SANTI ELIJAH HOLLEY has contributed fiction, essays, and journalism to Tin House, VICE, Pacifica Literary Review, Monkeybicycle, SmokeLong Quarterly, and NAILED, among other places. He is a contributing writer for The Portland Mercury, Portland’s alternative weekly newspaper. A recipient of the 2017 Oregon Literary Fellowship, Holley lives in Portland, Oregon. (@SantiHolley)
Guest Editor ERICA TRABOLD is a writer of family and memory. Winner of the inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, her debut collection, selected by John D’Agata, will be published in 2018. Her essays have appeared in Proximity, Seneca Review, and The Collagist, and are forthcoming in Passages North, South Dakota Review, and an anthology of lyric essays by Tinderbox Editions. A Nebraska native, Erica has an MFA from Oregon State University, previously served as the nonfiction editor of 45th Parallel Magazine, and was a 2016 artist-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She currently lives in Oregon, writes for the Pleiades Book Review. (@ericatrabold)