Listed alphabetically.
Mileva Anastasiadou
Collective Nouns for Poets in Therapy
Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist from Athens, Greece, and the author of “We Fade With Time” and “Christmas People” by Alien Buddha Press. A Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions nominated writer, her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals, such as the Forge, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, and others. She’s the flash fiction editor of Blood+Honey and the Argyle journals.
Lis Anna-Langston
Leaving the Rosenthaler Strasse on an Evening in Late September
Hailed as “an author with a genuine flair for originality” by Midwest Book Review and “a loveable, engaging, original voice…” by Publishers Weekly, Lis Anna-Langston is the author of Skinny Dipping in a Dirty Pond, Gobbledy, Tupelo Honey, Maya Loop, Wild Asses of the Mojave Desert and the short story collection Tolstoy & the Checkout Girl. Raised along the winding current of the Mississippi River on a steady diet of dog-eared books she attended a Creative and Performing Arts School from middle school until graduation, went on to study Literature at Webster University, Creative Writing through the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and recently graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in Creative Writing. Her novels have won the NYC Big Book Award, Independent Press Awards and dozens of other book awards. As writer and producer her films have screened and won at film festivals around the world. A three-time Pushcart award nominee, her work has been published in dozens of literary journals including The Brussels Review, Emerson Review, Hobart, Barely South Review, and Emrys Journal.
You can find her in the wilds of South Carolina plucking stories out of thin air.
Get social with her @lis.anna.langston on Insta or find more at www.lisannalangston.com
Sarah Archer
Sarah Archer’s debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for the screen. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship, the Tracking Board’s Launch Pad, and the Austin Film Festival. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and reached the finals of the Doris Betts Fiction Prize. She has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries, and interviewed authors around the world as a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast. You can find her online at saraharcherwrites.com.
Sudha Balagopal
Sudha Balagopal is an Indian-American writer whose work appears in Smokelong, swamp pink and Vast Chasm among other journals. Most recently, her novella-in-flash, Nose Ornaments was published by Ad Hoc Fiction, UK. She has had stories included in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top 50.
X: @authorsudha
Bluesky: @sudhab.bsky.social
Grace Ballard
Grace is a trans writer in Brooklyn, and an MFA student at The New School. The story “Eating My Ex” is their debut fiction publication in Doric Literary. Grace has published in Bust Magazine, and authored a cultural and political column for 4 years in the zine, BRAT. Grace is polishing a novel while biking around New York and MMA fighting. Grace hosts a morning writing club every weekday morning free for anyone to drop in and write. Learn more at www.gballardauthor.com.
Joe Baumann
Joe Baumann is the author of six collections of short fiction, most recently A Thing Is Only Known When It Is Gone, from University of Wisconsin Press, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction and currently directs the MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
Mick Bennett
Mick Bennett lives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with his wife and golden retriever. He is the author of five novels. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Flash Frog, Porcupine Literary, Beloit Fiction Journal, Confrontation, and others. A collection, Messes We Made, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2026. Find Mick at X:@michaelbennet29, @mickbennett7.bsky.social, IG mickbennettauthor, and mickbennettnj.com.
Patricia Quintana Bidar
Patricia Quintana Bidar is a Port of Los Angeles area native and working-class elder. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, Wigleaf, Smokelong Quarterly, The Pinch, Atticus Review, and Moon City Review, and has been widely anthologized including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024, and Best Microfiction 2023. Patricia is the author of Wild Plums (ELJ Press) and Pardon Me For Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press). She lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, CA. Visit patriciaqbidar.com
Vanessa Blakeslee
Vanessa Blakeslee’s latest book, Perfect Conditions: stories won the Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for the Short Story (2018). Blakeslee is also the author of Train Shots: stories and Juventud, a novel, both of which received prizes and accolades. Her writing has appeared in The Southern Review, The Paris Review Daily, Kenyon Review Online, Joyland, The Smart Set, and many other places. She has been awarded grants and residencies from Yaddo, The Banff Centre, Ledig House/Writers Omi, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and many more. Blakeslee has taught for the MFA in Writing programs at Goddard College and the City University of Hong Kong, and currently teaches at the University of Central Florida.
Lori Sambol Brody
Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California. Her short fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Tin House Flash Fridays, the New Orleans Review, Craft, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her stories have been chosen for the Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019 and Best Microfiction 2021 anthologies, Longform Pick of the Week, and Wigleaf Top 50. She can be found on social media at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.
Exodus Oktavia Brownlow
Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a writer, sewist, author and editor native to Blackhawk, Ms. She is a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a BA in English, and Mississippi University for Women with an MFA in Creative Writing.
She is an associate editor at Fractured Lit and is the Editor-in-Chief of The Loveliest Review.
Exodus has been published or has forthcoming work with Electric Lit, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, F(r)iction, BOOTH, CRAFT and more. She has been nominated for Best of The Net, Best MicroFiction, Best Small Fictions and a Pushcart Prize. Her pieces “Chicken-Girls and Chicken-Ladies and All the Possibility of Pillowcases” and “It’s 5am-ish, and My Father Tells Me A Story From His Time in Singapore” were included in Best MicroFiction 2021 and 2022. Her piece “The Terrible Darling” was featured as a Wigleaf Top 50 2022 selection. She is the recipient of the 2022 “The Changing American South” fellowship at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Exodus also received a Mississippi Arts Commission Grant for an Individual Nonfiction Artist Fellowship in 2023.
Exodus’ essay “When the World Was Ending We Wore the Cornrows, We Twisted Our Coils, and We Waited” was selected for Best American Essays 2024 as notable.
Exodus is the author of a fiction chapbook—”Look at All The Little Hurts of These Newly-Broken Lives and The Bittersweet, Sweet and Bitter Loves”—which was published with Ethel Zine and Press in the Spring of 2023. Additionally, Exodus is the author of a debut collection of essays—”I’m Afraid That I Know Too Much About Myself Now, To Go Back To Who I Knew Before, And Oh Lord, Who Will I Be After I’ve Known All That I Can?” [a Mississippi Top (ten) Reads with The Clarion Ledger debuting at #6], was published with ELJ Editions in the Summer of 2023.
Her favorite color is green.
Aaron Burch
Rambling, Sidling, Absolved, Cradled
Aaron Burch is the author of the essay collection, A Kind of In-Between, and the novel, Year of the Buffalo, among others. He edited the craft anthology How to Write a Novel: An Anthology of 20 Craft Essays About Writing, None of Which Ever Mention Writing, and is currently the editor of the journals Short Story, Long and HAD.
Dana Cann
Dana Cann is the author of the novel Ghosts of Bergen County (Tin House). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Florida Review, LitHub, and Colorado Review. He’s received grants and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the Maryland State Arts Council, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. He’s on the faculty of New Directions in Writing, which is affiliated with the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis.
Bluesky: @danacann.bsky.social
Janet Ciejka
Janet Ciejka has an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School with a concentration in Fiction. Her short story “Hotel Praha,” inspired by her childhood in Prague not long after the downfall of Communism, appeared in the literary journal Epiphany. Janet’s international background informs her work: she has lived in Kenya, Hong Kong, the Czech Republic, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia. Her website is www.janetciejka.com.
D. W. Davis
D.W. Davis (he/him) is a native of rural Illinois. His work has appeared in various online and print journals. You can find him at Facebook.com/DanielDavis05, @dan_davis86 on Twitter, and @dwdavis.bsky.social
Diamond
Diamond was born in Nigeria. Her goal has always been to share her works with the world, telling moral lessons through dark and ironic stories.
Yvonne Fein
Yvonne Fein has had three novels (April Fool, 2001; The Torn Messiah, 2008; Rachel Racing Time, 2014) and an anthology of short stories (Choose Somebody Else, 2018) published by traditional Australian publishers. A Pushcart nominee, she has edited two literary journals as well as Abraham Biderman’s award-winning Holocaust memoir, The World of My Past. She holds a Dip. Creative Writing, a BA (Hons) in Literature and an MA in History.
Julie Esther Fisher
Julie Esther Fisher’s other stories and poetry appear or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Prime Number Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Waxwing, On the Seawall, Sky Island Journal, Radar Poetry, The Citron Review, Litmosphere, Leon Literary Review, Passager’s Contest Issue, and elsewhere. She is also the recipient of Sunspot Lit’s Rigel Award, and multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations. A poetry chapbook is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, and her collection of linked stories, Love is a Crooked Stick, is about to go out on submission. Raised in London, she holds degrees in fiction writing and counseling psychology. Today, she lives on conserved land in western Massachusetts, where she designs gardens and breaks her back building stone walls. Visit her website at julieestherfisher.com or follow her on Bluesky @julieestherfisher.bsky.social.
Jennifer Fliss
Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is the writer of the story collections As If She Had a Say (2023) and The Predatory Animal Ball (2021.) Her writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She can be found via her website, https://www.jenniferflisscreative.com/
Janet Goldberg
Janet Goldberg’s novel The Proprietor’s Song (Regal House) was released in 2023. Her story collection Like Human is due out next fall from Cornerstone Press.
Gordon Grice
Gordon Grice’s stories have lately appeared in The Arkansas International, Zone 3, and Concho River Review. They’ve been included on Best of the ‘Net, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and listed among the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. His nonfiction books include The Red Hourglass and National Geographic’s Shark Attacks. He reads poems on Youtube @DeadlyKingdom and occasionally remembers to post at GordonGrice.com.
Hannah Grieco
Hannah Grieco is a writer in Washington, DC. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on Bsky/IG @writesloud.
Ulrica Hume
Ulrica Hume is the author of An Uncertain Age, a spiritual mystery novel, and House of Miracles, a collection of stories, one of which was selected by PEN and broadcast on NPR. Her work appears online, in literary journals, and in anthologies. Find her @uhume.bsky.social
Anna Vangala Jones
Anna Vangala Jones is the author of the short story collection Turmeric & Sugar (Thirty West, 2021). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Craft Literary, Wigleaf, Berkeley Fiction Review, Short Story Long, Necessary Fiction, and Terrazzo Editions, among others. Her stories have been selected for Longform Fiction’s Best of 2018 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find her online at annavangalajones.com.
Twitter: @anniejo_17
Bluesky: @anniejowrites.bsky.social
Instagram: @anniejowrites
Ann Landi
Notes on the Kingdom of Eleutheria
Ann Landi has been an art journalist and critic (ARTnews, The Wall Street Journal) for most of her career. She has lately been making her first efforts at fiction, aiming for a coherent collection on the theme of Bad Romance. Born and raised on the East Coast, mostly in New York City, she now lives in Taos, NM.
Keith Pilapil Lesmeister
Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the forthcoming story collection Ask Me About the Money (Cornerstone Press, Fall 2026). His most recent work appears or will appear in the Bennington Review, december magazine, Jabberwock Review, North American Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. He’s fiction editor at Cutleaf Journal. More info at keithlesmeister.com
Paul Luikart
Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021), The Realm of the Dog (J. New Books, 2024), Cult Life (Tenpenny Books, 2024), and Mercy (Walnut Street Publishing, 2025.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, USA. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.
Niamh Mac Cabe
Niamh Mac Cabe is published internationally in numerous journals and anthologies, including Narrative Magazine, The Stinging Fly, The Offing, Aesthetica, The London Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, Mslexia, Southword, The Irish Independent, The Exacting Clam, and Minor Literature[s]. She writes fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid prose.
She’s won many awards, including The London Magazine’s Short Story Prize, the Wasafiri Prize, the John McGahern Award, and the Molly Keane Award.
She’s been placed or shortlisted in several contests including the Costa Short Story Award, Glimmer Train Press Award, American Short Fiction’s Prize, Harvard Review’s Chapbook Prize, New Ohio Review’s Editor’s Award, Lit Mag’s Virginia Woolf Award, and SoA’s ALCS Tom Gallon Trust Award.
She’s represented by Marianne Gunne O’Connor at MGO’C Literary Agency, Dublin.
She lives in Leitrim, Ireland.
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NiamhMacCabe
Barbara E. Miner
Barbara E. Miner earned an undergraduate degree in Liberal Studies from University of Nevada Las Vegas, where she had the honor of working with Douglas Unger, a Pulitzer nominee for his novel, Leaving the Land. From that project, her short story, “The Snake Stomper,” won first prize in the National Organization for Women fiction writing contest in 1993.
She went on to earn a Master of Science from the University of North Texas in Library Science and worked as a librarian in the Clark County Library District in Las Vegas. Just recently, she began the quest for a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from University of Nevada Reno – Tahoe Campus.
She is currently working on a speculative fiction novel set in the United States approximately fifty years in the future. A bio-engineered woman with an extraordinary intellect, Lute Phexan, is stalked by a rogue artificial intelligence system that wants to merge with her, achieving the singularity.
Barbara E Miner was born in North Carolina and grew up on small farm with lots of animals, especially dogs. She is currently a fiction editor with the Sierra Nevada Review.
Franz Jørgen Neumann
Franz Jørgen Neumann’s stories have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, and Water~Stone Review. His published work can be read at www.storiesandnovels.com.
Meg Pokrass
Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International; Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023; Wigleaf Top 50; and numerous literary magazines including Electric Literature, Lit Hub, New England Review, and other places. Meg is the Founding Editor of the Best Microfiction series.
Damien Roos
Damien Roos is an author and playwright with an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. His work has appeared in such outlets as Southern Indiana Review, New South Journal and Barrelhouse. He is a former editorial fellow for Guernica Magazine, a former reader for PANK, and has completed his first novel, Sounds of Leaving, which was a semifinalist for the Big Moose Prize by Black Lawrence Press. By day he works in homeless outreach, previously in New York City and currently in Asheville, NC, where he lives with his wife, pitbull and bewitching black cat.
Patricia Sammon
Patricia Sammon (she/her) was born and raised in Canada and now lives in the Tennessee Valley, in the foothills of the Appalachians. Her short stories have appeared in literary journals such as Mid-American Review (Sherwood Anderson Prize), Narrative, December, Philadelphia Stories, The Chicago Tribune Literary Supplement (Nelson Algren Award) and New Millennium Writings. One of her short stories was anthologized in “Ordinary and Sacred as Blood”; another in “Alabama Bound”. Her short story “Hill Country” was included in the 2019 edition of “Best American Nonrequired Reading.”
Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work appears in Atticus Review, Centaur Lit, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and other lovely journals. Her stories were selected for the 2023 and 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlists and nominated for Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s books include award-winning flash collection, Wolfsong, and award-winning YA novel, Roots of the Banyan Tree. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and curly-tailed pup, Kaya.
More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com
facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo
Patrick Strickland
Based in Athens, Greece, Patrick Strickland is a writer and journalist from Texas. His short fiction has appeared at Epiphany, Pithead Chapel, and Porter House Review, among others. He’s the author of three nonfiction books, including You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave (Melville House 2025), and the forthcoming story collection A History of Heartache (Melville House, Spring 2026).
Bluesky: @patrickobrienstrickland.com
Instagram: @patrickstricklandjournalist
Website: patrickobrienstrickland.com
Leo Vartorella
Leo Vartorella is a writer from Brooklyn, NY, who lives in Glasgow. His work has appeared in New World Writing, HAD, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, Burial Magazine and scaffold.
Doric Literary 