Author Archives: admin

JOHN STRULOEFF is the author of The Man I Was Supposed to Be (Loom Press) and has published poems in The Atlantic, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, ZYZZYVA, PN Review, and elsewhere. He is a former Stegner and NEA Fellow and now directs the creative writing program at Pepperdine University.

ELISSA RUSSELL has always had a penchant for languages and the arts. She graduated from the University of Texas, where she studied English and French. She has worked in theatre education for several years: at the community theatre in her west Texas hometown, and professional theatres in Austin and Richmond, Virgina. Currently, she is a theatre educator and administrator and resides in Colorado, where she continues to explore her passions for theatre, children’s literature, directing, and writing.

KIMBERLY ANN PRIEST is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021) and the chapbooks Still Life (PANK, 2020), Parrot Flower (Glass 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (FLP 2018). Her poetry has appeared in several literary journals including The Laurel Review, RiverSedge, and The Berkeley Poetry Review and she is a winner of the 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize in the New Poetry from the Midwest anthology by New American Press. A former book reviewer for NewPages and intern with Sundress Publications, she is currently Assistant Professor of First-Year Writing at Michigan State University, and an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Embody reader for The Maine Review.

EILEEN O’LEARY attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and won a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Eight of her plays have been produced and she was a Second Rounder/Comedy finalist at the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting competition. She has recently completed a novel titled The Long Rehearsal.

MARY LOTZ is a fiction writer whose stories have appeared in journals such as The MacGuffin, Ruminate, and Ascent. She has a PhD from the University of South Dakota and taught in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University for a number of years. She recently completed the manuscript of a novel about an ex-con who tries to avoid trouble and his sovereign citizen brother who loves creating it.

JUDY KLASS: The Emperor’s Interview was produced by Brutal Sea Production Company at the Dog Story Theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2019. Seven of Judy’s full-length plays have been produced. One, Cell, was nominated for an Edgar and is published by Samuel French. Another, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, won the Dorothy Silver Award. Another, Country Fried Murder, won the S.O.P.S. competition at the Shawnee Playhouse in Pennsylvania in the Full-Length category and was produced there in 2019. Thirty-five of Judy’s one-act plays have been produced, many with multiple productions, all over the country, and a few have gone up in the UK and Ireland. Three are published, each as a stand-alone script, by Brooklyn Publishers. She has a full-length play called Kimberly in Overdrive slated for a premiere production with OPPA! in Layton, Utah, and four short plays, one of them a premiere, that were slated to be produced … and hopefully they will be, when it is no longer a Plague Year.

SONJA JOHANSON holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and has recent work appearing in American Life in Poetry, the Cincinnati Review, and Sugar House Review. Her most recent chapbook is Trees in Our Dooryards (Redbird Chapbooks). Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine. Follow her at  www.sonjajohanson.net

EMILY FRANKLIN’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the New York Times, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, Blackbird, The Journal, Shenandoah, DIAGRAM, Mississippi Review, Lunch Ticket, Passages North, North Dakota Review, Qu, Juked, and The Chattahoochee Review among other places as well as featured on National Public Radio, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her first poetry collection is forthcoming from Terrapin Books.

EMMELINE CLEIN is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia University, and her work has been published in The Nation, Smithsonian Magazine, Buzzfeed News, and ANTIGRAVITY.

HEATHER BARTEL is a writer with roots in Missouri who currently lives and works in Athens, GA. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College.