Tommy Adewale is a Nigerian-born writer whose work explores the intersections of food, memory, and family. Fascinated by how flavors carry stories across generations, he writes flash fiction and short prose that invite readers into intimate, sensory experiences. When not writing, he experiments in the kitchen, creating recipes that honor tradition while embracing new flavors.
David M. Alper’s poetry appears in The McNeese Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Bookends Review, and elsewhere. He is an educator in New York City.
Susan Andrelchik is a writer of short literary fiction and poetry. She is the recipient of the 2023 Terry Kay Prize for Fiction for her story “At the Beach.” Her works have appeared in Locust Shells Journal, Bar Bar Magazine, Roi Faineant, The Paradox Literary Journal, among others. Susan resides in Atlanta with her husband and cat.
Lynn Aprill is a retired educator and current MFA student at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. Her work has appeared recently in Copperfield Review Quarterly, Sky Island Journal, Willows Wept Review, and others. Her latest chapbook, Aging in Place, was published by Water’s Edge Press in April 2025.
Susan P. Blevins, ex-pat Brit, has traveled the world extensively, lived in Italy for 26 years and has now settled in Houston, Texas, where she is enjoying writing stories and poetry based on her travels and life experiences. She has been published in various literary journals in the USA and abroad. She enjoys reading, gardening, in particular growing her own vegetables, and then working her alchemy on them in her kitchen. She also enjoys playing piano, playing with her cats and reading for the blind.
Queer Arno Bohlmeijer is the winner of a PEN America Grant 2021, poet and novelist, writing in English and Dutch, published in six countries – US: Houghton Mifflin, and in Universal Oneness: Anthology of Magnum Opus Poems from around the World. His novel Narrowly appears in October 2025, about rare solidarity. www.arnobohlmeijer.com
Raymond Brunell writes gothic horror and speculative fiction exploring psychological deterioration through contemporary perspectives. His work examines the spaces where obsession becomes revelation and isolation breeds authentic terror. Stories have appeared in Bluebirds Scribe, Manic Author, and Skeleton Flowers Press, with forthcoming publications in Literary Garage, Soul Poetry Subs, The Orange Rose, Moss Puppy Magazine, Rat Bag Lit’, TrashLight Press, and Across the Margin. Published work available at www.unbound-atlas.com.
Rohan Buettel lives in Canberra, Australia. His haiku appear in Australian and international journals (including Presence, Cattails and The Heron’s Nest). His longer poetry appears in various journals, including Rattle, The Goodlife Review, Meanjin, Meniscus and Quadrant.
Ann Calandro is a writer, artist, and classical piano student. Her writing has appeared in Lit Camp, The Fabulist, The Plentitudes, and other literary journals. In February, Serving House Books published her short story collection, Lost in Words, and will publish her poetry collection, To Keep You in This World, in January 2026. Her artwork has appeared in literary journals, been included in the New Jersey Arts Annual, and exhibited at the Monmouth Museum, the Biggs Museum of American Art, and many galleries. Shanti Arts Press published three children’s books that she wrote and illustrated. See artwork at ann-calandro.pixels.com
Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002. His documentary photography has been awarded the prestigious Leica Medal of Excellence and published in The New England Review, New York Quarterly and Orion Magazine. When not at home, he is traveling in the Old World. His work is represented by the Robin Rice Gallery, NY.
Cory Dale Cart writes about food, folklore, and the stubborn beauty of small-town life. A one-time newspaper publisher raised on fried catfish and revival-tent coffee, Cart believes every recipe tells a story about who we are and what we’ve survived. Their essays wander between café counters, drag stages, and red-dirt backroads, mixing humor, history, and a dash of righteous appetite. Cart lives on the Oklahoma prairie with his husband and two dogs and is pursuing an MFA in Popular Fiction at Emerson College.
Clarissa Cervantes is a researcher, poet, and photographer. Clarissa’s gallery includes images from all over the world, where she finds inspiration to share her photographs and poetry with others through her creative lens, inviting the viewer to question the present, look closer, explore more of the array of emotions, and follow the sunlight towards a brighter future.
Jacob Cherry is a PhD student in philosophy living in the United States who avoids finishing his dissertation by painting. Born in Romania and of Romani heritage, he draws on his community’s rich traditions of resilience and storytelling. His work often emerges from procrastination and wonder, utilizing shadow and texture to explore the same questions he attempts to answer in words, albeit with fewer footnotes. Follow on Insta @jcherrycreative
Alex V. Damian is a Romanian writer and visual artist whose work explores identity, introspection, and the fragile nature of human experience. With a background in screenwriting, filmology, and project management, he has worked in both technical and creative environments before devoting himself entirely to writing.
Kemuel DeMoville is an award-winning poet, playwright, educator, and arts leader whose works have been produced around the world every year since 2005. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and an MA in Syncretic Theatre from Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa, New Zealand. He currently serves as the Director of the Drama Program at Spokane Falls Community College, where he teaches, directs, and mentors the next generation of theatre artists in the Inland Northwest.
Ananya Devkirti is a high school senior based in California. Her work has previously been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers at both the regional and national levels and published in DePaul University’s Blue Book for excellence in high school writing.
Drema Drudge is a novelist and poet whose work blends emotional candor, intellectual inquiry, and the everyday with longing. She earned her MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. Her work has appeared in The Louisville Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and is forthcoming in Suspended Magazine and others.
Cynthia Gallaher, a Chicago-based poet, is the author of four poetry collections, including “Epicurean Ecstasy: More Poems About Food, Drink, Herbs & Spices,” and three chapbooks, including “Drenched.” Her award-winning creativity guide is “Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life: How to Live a Poetic Life, Even If You Aren’t a Poet.” One of her poems will be sent on NASA’s manned flight to the south pole of the moon later this decade.
Lesley Grand is an essayist, short story writer and retired TV news reporter living with her very shaggy dog in New York City.
Aston Hemming is a high school student who loves to write fiction and personal essays. She has a strong appreciation for the arts, participating in dance, music, and painting. If she isn’t writing, she is probably listening to her music too loudly.
Danielle Higdon is a marketing consultant and writer living in Edmonton, Alberta. Originally from Newfoundland, her work is heavily inspired by her coastal upbringing and the quiet revelations that come with leaving the familiar behind.
Jordan Honeyblue is a writer from the Baltimore Metropolitan Area. Her writing and poetry manuscript Heartwork explores what it means to be a (un)healthy Black girl and woman in America. She has received nominations for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Honeyblue’s greatest joys include being a mother, teaching English courses at Howard Community College, and creating warm memories with her family and friends. Poetry by Jordan Honeyblue has appeared in the New Orleans Review, The Common, Virginia Quarterly Review, EcoTheo Review, and Inverted Syntax.
Patrick Johnston is a writer of creative nonfiction, poetry, and experimental fiction. His work has appeared in Love and Literature, Blood & Honey, The Bookends Review, and elsewhere. A former professor of psychology and neuroscience, he now writes full-time, often drawing from memory, history, and myth. His essays explore how personal narrative collides with cultural memory, how gaps and silences shape truth, and how family stories illuminate larger histories of war, trauma, and survival.
J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. Chapbooks of her visual poems, How to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23), were published in 2023; a full-length volume, She needs the river (Poem Atlas), was published in 2024.
Josiane Kouagheu is a journalist, poet, photographer, writer and painter from Cameroon.
Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured in more than seventy literary journals, including nonfiction in Collateral, South 85, The Manifest Station, and Vassar Review. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and teaches in New Jersey.
Caroline Laganas is earning her PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. She was an International Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition and a finalist for the Mississippi Review Prize. Her poems and translations appear in Poetry, Best New Poets, The Los Angeles Review, Five Points, New Orleans Review, Tampa Review, and others. She is currently writing and illustrating her first book of poetry while translating an Italian cookbook.
Christina Lloyd holds a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University. Her first full-length collection, Women Twice Removed, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2024. She lives in San Francisco.
Kathryn Mathews is an occupational therapist working on her first speculative fiction novel. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Appalachian State University. She lives in North Carolina with her spouse, kids, and an assortment of pets.
Hikari Leilani Miya (she/they) is an LGBTQ disabled Japanese-Filipina American who graduated from Cornell University in 2019 with a BA in English, and from the University of San Francisco with an MFA in Creative Writing. She is a scholarship-awarded student in Florida State University’s PhD program in creative writing, studying the animals, the nonhuman, and ecology. Her first book of poems, Do Not Feed the Animal, sold out at AWP 2024, was published with Cornerstone Press.
Zara Morgan, who writes under the name Azalea Laine, is an undergraduate student at The University of Alabama studying marketing with a minor in creative writing. She is from the land of peaches and hails just south of Atlanta. She has been a culture writer, newsletter editor and hosted a podcast for The Crimson White. She won a Best of the South award for Arts and Entertainment Writing at the Southeastern Journalism Conference. She has also been named Rookie of the Year for The Crimson White. You can find her work in Space, Dewpoint, and Marr’s Field Journal. In her free time, you can find her drinking matcha at Cafe Haven, getting ready for college worship at First Baptist, or finding a tree on the Quad to read under.
James B. Nicola’s nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice magazine award. Recent nonfiction can be found online at About Place, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Unlikely Stories and Lowestoft Chronicle; fiction, at Neither Fish Nor Foul, The GroundUp, and Sine Qua Non, forthcoming in Platform Review. The latest of his eight full-length poetry collections are Natural Tendencies, Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, and Turns & Twists. A graduate of Yale and returning contributor to Al Dente, he has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller’s People’s Choice award, a Best of Net and a Rhysling Award nomination, and eleven Pushcart nominations – for which he feels both stunned and grateful.
Molly O’Dell is a family physician and loves being outdoors, her primary influencer. She also loves writing and received an MFA from the University of Nebraska in 2009 and published a chapbook, Off the Chart and a multi-genre collection, Care is A Four Letter Verb, thanks to the regional and national literary journal editors who published her poems. Unsolicited 96 Saws and Quips in the Wake of the Pandemic was published for her public health colleagues in 2021. She currently serves as poetry editor for the Journal of Medical Humanities.
David Radavich has published a variety of poetry, drama, essays, and reviews. His plays have been performed across the U.S. and in Europe. His latest books are UNTER DER SONNE / UNDER THE SUN: German Poems (Deutscher Lyrik, 2021) and HERE’S PLENTY (Cervena Barva, 2023).
Matias Revez grew up with a Portuguese mother and a Danish father in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied documentary filmmaking at Prague Film School and later on photography at the Danish School of Media & Journalism. Expressed through a subtle balance of familiarity and otherness, the sentiment of saudade is of the most prevalent themes in Matias’ work. He seeks this nostalgic, pensive and at times mysterious timelessness, finding it in people, places, nature and abstract motifs.
Eighty-year-old late-phase often graphic chronicler arrived in the seventh decade, aphorist, humorist or sometimes meanderist; Gerard Sarnat’s a multiple Pushcart/Best of Net Award nominee who also has been invited to serve as judge for competitions. He’s a Harvard College and Medical School-trained physician, Stanford professor, healthcare CEO. Currently, he’s devoting energy and resources to dealing with climate justice, serving on Climate Action Now’s board. Sarnat’s belonged to the longest-running U.S. Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue Group. Gerry’s been married since 1969 and has three kids, seven grandsons, and looks forward to future granddaughters. gerardsarnat.com
Stephanie Segarra graduated from Fairfield University in 2014 with a BA in English with the intention of making a career out of writing. Instead, she is currently a Director of Marketing at a small consulting company. Stephanie resides in Peekskill, NY, with her husband and two daughters. Though her poems have yet to be published, you can listen to her lifestyle podcast, which she co-hosts with her husband, called “Sipping with the Segarras”.
Johannah Simon (she/her) is a corporate strategist, adjunct professor, and (sometime) creative. A Midwest GenX multi-genre writer, her tiny pieces have appeared in BULL, The Hooghly Review, Underbelly Press, A Sufferer’s Digest, and Fahmidan Journal. You can find her on X @JohannahWrites, @johannah.bsky.social, and at www.thewritingtype.com.
Diane Jones Skelton is an award-winning feature writer with a passion for road trips and food festivals. She co-authored a travel guide for Texas teachers, wrote a series of newspaper travel columns, and contributed over 300 contributions to TripAdvisor. Her articles have appeared in The English Journal, Mississippi Magazine, Florida Hockey Life, and The Gulf Breeze News, among others. For over a decade, she has written the blog, The Gumbo Diaries, which features literary travels, writers and food. A native Mississippian, she spent 45 years in Louisiana, Kansas and Texas before retiring in Florida. She has enjoyed her return to the Gulf Coast so much she wrote a book about it – A Literary Traveler’s Guide to the Gulf South: Bay St. Louis to Apalachicola.
Sophia Upshaw (she/her) is a Tallahassee-based poet and instructor. Her work has been featured in Oddball Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Kudzu Review, and more. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor for the Southeast Review and an MFA student at Florida State University.
Michelle Visser lives near Venice in the foothills of the Dolomites, where she writes poetry and runs a Substack called Being in Italy. She is increasingly convinced that poetry is our only homeland.
Olga Volodina was born in Uzbekistan. At the age of 5, her parents moved her to Russia, where she studied at the Faculty of Journalism. Due to the unpleasant political situation in Russia, in 2007-8, she moved to Thailand, where she lived and worked for more than 10 years. Olga currently lives in Bulgaria.
Ronald Walker is an artist living in the Sacramento area of California. He works in a style he calls “Suburban Primitive”. This style combines his interest in the origin and function of art, along with life in the suburbs. Mr. Walker holds both an MFA and an MA in drawing and painting and his work has been shown in more than 50 solo exhibits over the years. His work can be found in many collections, both private and public. Most recently, he had two paintings added to the Morris Graves Museum of Art’s collection.
Michael Watz is a retired Corporate Chef. In his retirement, he enjoys his 3 passions in life: culinary ideation, travel, and photography.
Multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist Jennifer Weigel lives in Kansas, USA. Weigel is an avid art collector and enjoys playing board and role-playing games, junk store thrifting, and mail art. Weigel’s favorite foods are unagi don or broiled calamari steak and frosting with or without cake. Weigel was a regular contributor to Haunted MTL and is now involved with Nat1 Publishing. Author of Witch Hayzelle’s Recipes for Disaster trilogy and a myriad of short stories, poems, art discourse, and more, drifting around the Interwebs. Learn more on her website here. https://jenniferweigelart.com/
George Yatchisin is Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, 2025-2027, and the author of Feast Days (Flutter Press 2016) and The First Night We Thought the World Would End (Brandenburg Press 2019). He is co-editor of the anthology Rare Feathers: Poems on Birds & Art (Gunpowder Press 2015), and his poetry appears in anthologies including Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Everyman’s Library 2019).
Ash Zeng is a poet from Shanghai, China, who explores gender and immigrant identity in their poems and wishes to use poetry as their conduit of self-expression. They study at Emory University’s English & Creative Writing Program. In their free time, they like to listen to Yorushika and cook food from their hometown.
R.P. Singletary, www.rpsingletary.com, dabbles in various art forms, both visual and literary as well as musical and auditory/sonal. authors guild / dramatists guild. @rpsingletary, socially (digitally socially) : x insta bsky youtube threads – his debut novel <SPEAK SOFTLY AMONG ICEBERGS> out 2006 from parlyaree press.