Editor: Leslie Pietrzyk’s collection of linked stories set in DC, Admit This to No One, was published in 2021 by Unnamed Press. Her first collection of stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Short fiction and essays have appeared in, among others, Ploughshares, Story Magazine, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, Cincinnati Review, Split Lip Magazine, Okay Donkey, Pithead Chapel, and Washington Post Magazine. Awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is a core member of the Converse University low-residency MFA program, teaching fiction and creative nonfiction.

Nonfiction Editor: Laura Platas Scott is a Cuban American writer whose work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Zizzle Literary, and Heinemann Press. She is a creative writing teaching artist for the Arts Reaching Elementary and Middle School Students Program (ARMES) in Greenville, SC. Laura holds an MFA in Fiction from Converse University and is represented by Melissa Edwards of Stonesong Literary.

Poetry Editor: Laurel Eshelman writes from a rural village in driftless Illinois and works a few blocks from home at Eshelman Pottery. Her poetry has appeared in Feral, Relief, Prairie Wind, and the exhibition Writing, Gesture, Shape. She holds an MFA in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction from Converse University.

Brian Bouldrey, is the author of ten books, most recently, of Good in Bed: A Life in Queer Sex, Politics, and Religion (ReQueered Books). His novel The Good Pornographer will be published in March 2026 by University of Wisconsin Press.  He teaches fiction, nonfiction, and literature at Northwestern University, and is pleased to have had several excellent writers in his classroom over the past 25 years, including Karen Russell, Mary South, Rita Chang, Eric Dean Wilson, YZ Chin, Will Butler, and Michael X. Wang.

“Over the decades, my writing and reading priorities have quietly shifted, and I think of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in which a young Marco Polo casts fictions to aged Kublai Khan, who listens and believes, or doesn’t believe. I used to be chatty Marco Polo, and now I’m the Khan, who prefers to listen to listen to younger explorers of fictions in the class and on the page, some of which helps him in his own stories.  Lake Michigan also taught me about listening as well as seeing, and while I consider the necessities of a smart phone a very mixed bag of angels and demons, I’m grateful for having a camera with me at all times, especially when walking the dog along the shore every morning and evening.  The lake is a landscape, but sometimes I take portraits—don’t tell the professionals!”