John Lewis

John is a writer and editor who makes a living as a Private Investigator. He has investigated false convictions, wrongful deaths, and has been a capital defender for well over a dozen years. John has experience successfully helping authors develop and prepare their book-length manuscripts for pitching and querying, leading to publication. His own creative writing has appeared in the Portland Mercury and The Trentin Paisley Press. His work has also been produced by the Northwest Playwright Guild in their 10 Minute Play series. All of these media groups no longer exist through no fault of John’s, but it makes him wonder sometimes.

Mary Ann Dimand

Mary Ann lives in Colorado, where she is working to turn a small horse property into a mini-farm.

Doris Ferleger

Doris Ferleger, MFA, Ph.D., former poet laureate of Montgomery County, PA, and winner of the New Millennium Poetry Prize, New Letters Poetry, Songs of Eretz Prize, Montgomery County Poet Laureate Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among others, is the author of three full volumes of poetry, Big Silences in a Year of Rain, (finalist for the Alice James Books Beatrice Hawley Award), As the Moon Has Breath, and Leavened, and a chapbook entitled When You Become Snow. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, L.A. Review, and South Carolina Review. . Aliki Barnestone writes: Ferleger’s memorable poems keep singing with their insistent beauty.

Julian Danback-McGhan

Jillian Danback-McGhan is a former Naval Officer. Her work appears in Line of Advance, Minerva Rising, and the anthology Our Best War Stories (Middle West Press, 2020) and she is the recipient of the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial writing award. Jillian holds degrees from the U.S. Naval Academy, Georgetown University, and Cambridge University. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her family and is working on a collection of short fiction.

Kevin Norwood

Ricardo Moran

Ricardo Moran’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Beatific Magazine, Cider Press Review, DASH Literary Journal, Perceptions Magazine, Potomac Review, The Seattle Star, Willa Cather Review, and in the Nebraska Writers Guild, San Diego Writers, Ink, and Wingless Dreamer anthologies. He has attended the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference, the Willa Cather Foundation Spring conference, and San Diego Writers, Ink workshops. Ricardo serves on the board of San Diego Writers Ink. Currently a copywriter, Ricardo is the former director of nonprofit education programs and appeared in television interviews for the American Red Cross. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling and learning how to say “good morning” in as many languages as possible.

Mark Hummel

Mark Hummel is a novelist, editor, and teacher. His comedic literary novel titled Man, Underground is forthcoming in 2023 from Regal House Publishing, and he is the author of the novel In the Chameleon’s Shadow and the story collection Lost and Found. Writing as Mark Leichliter, he is the author of the crime novel The Other Side. His work has regularly appeared in a variety of literary journals including The Bloomsbury Review, Dogwood, Fugue, Talking River Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, and Zone 3. He is the editor of the nonfiction magazine bioStories, and he regularly consults with clients as a writing coach and editor. Mark lives in Montana’s Flathead Valley. To learn more about his work, visit: www.markhummelwriter.com.

Joddy Murray

Joddy Murray’s chapbook, Anaphora, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in over 70 journals, including, most recently, The Adirondack Review, Caliban Online, The Cape Rock, Cobalt Review, Crack the Spine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, The Fourth River, Moon City Review, Nude Bruce Review, OxMag, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pembroke Magazine, Perceptions Magazine, Poydras Review, Prism Review, Southampton Review, Texas Review, and Westview. He currently teaches writing and rhetoric in Fort Worth, Texas.

Amar Benchikha

Amar Benchikha is an American writer born and raised in western Europe whose short fiction has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The MacGuffin, New Plains Review, The Summerset Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in northern Italy and can be found at www.amarbenchikha.com.

J.G.P. MacAdam

Short Bio: J.G.P. MacAdam is a disabled combat vet, the first in his family to earn a college degree and a stay-at-home dad. His short stories about veterans, felons and intergalactic gay awakenings have found homes in Bewildering Stories, Apeiron Review, Passengers Journal and Line of Advance. You can find him hiking the snowy slopes of a volcano with his wife and son, or otherwise at jgpmacadam.blogspot.com

Emily Hyland

Emily Hyland’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in armarolla, The Brooklyn Review, Mount Hope Magazine, Sixfold, Palette Poetry, Maryland Literary Review, and The Hollins Critic, among others. She earned her MFA in poetry and her MA in English Education from Brooklyn College. A restaurateur, educator, and mindful movement teacher from New York City, her cookbook, Emily: The Cookbook, was published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, in 2018. She has been a member of the Community of Writers since June 2019. Emily is the co-founder of the national restaurant groups Pizza Loves Emily and Emmy Squared Pizza. emilyhyland.com / emmysquaredpizza.com

Maggie Harrison

Maggie Harrison’s creative work has been published in the anthology Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color, Entropy, Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, The Ignatian Review, Prism Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, New Letters, Blithe House Quarterly, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, and Sinister Wisdom. Their story “Everything I Know of You I Know From Your Warts” received a Pushcart nomination and an Honorable Mention for the Readers’ Award for Fiction. Their unpublished manuscript, Molehills of Mississippi: A Novel of Grace in an Age of Terror, was named as a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and for the Lee Smith Novel Prize from Blair/Carolina Wren Press. Harrison is a professor of English and chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies department at City College of San Francisco.

Karl Meade

Karl Meade’s novel, Odd Jobs, was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews Book of the Year for Humor, and an iTunes Top 20 Arts and Literature podcast. His work has been longlisted for four CBC Literary Prizes, shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Creative Nonfiction Award, and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. He has been or will soon be published in Literary Review of Canada, Tusculum Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Grain Magazine, Chronogram, Umbrella Factory Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Open Letter, Under the Sun, Dandelion, and many others.

Carol Graser

Carol Graser grew up in an Air Force family, witnessing anti-war demonstrations from “inside the fence”. Her first CD action was fittingly at the Seneca Army Depot, climbing the fence to protest the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles. She is the author of the poetry collection The Wild Twist of Their Stems, Foothills Publishing, 2007 and her work has appeared in many literary journals, most recently in I-70 Review, Midwest Quarterly and Hollins Critic. She hosts a monthly poetry series at Saratoga Spring’s legendary Caffe Lena that she initiated in 2003.

Jim Speese

Jim Speese holds a PhD in post-WWII American Literature from Lehigh University. He is a singer/songwriter with the band Cloud Party, Jim currently teaches writing at Albright College. He lived in and worked for Yellowstone National Park for four years and spent three months hiking the Appalachian Trail. His fiction is published in the book, Anthology of Babel, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Potato Soup Journal, Umbrella Factory Magazine, and Voices de la Luna. He lives in a cabin in the woods.

Betsy Martin

Betsy Martin is the author of the poetry chapbook, Whale’s Eye (Presa Press). Her poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Cloudbank, Crack the Spine, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Juked, The Louisville Review, The Penmen Review, Pennsylvania English, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and many others. She has advanced degrees in Russian language and literature. She is also an artist. Visit her at betsymartinpoet.com.

Damion Meyer

Damion Meyer was an infantryman deployed to Iraq for two tours from 2003 to 2005. He received his Master of Arts in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is currently working on a semi-autobiographical novel about his experiences during deployment. He has had work published by Action A Gogo and Six Word Memoirs.

Hadeel Salameh

Hadeel Salameh earned her MFA in Fiction at Bowling Green State University and BA in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in Torrid Literary Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Apogee, Anchor Still Harbor, Muftah, SLAB Literary Art & Sound Book and as honorable mentions in Jerusalem Quarterly and Carnegie Mellon’s 2014 MLK Jr. Day Writing Awards.

Tony Marconi

Tony Marconi is a retired teacher living in Ohio. He has published a book of experimental fiction, The Complete Works of the Literate Dead, and two novels, Toscotti’s War and Upon the Hush of Night. His poetry has appeared in The Cornfield Review, Grand Little Things, and The Voices Project, and he has had numerous short stories and poems published in various chapbooks and journals.

Jon Imparato

Jon Imparato began his writing career with “Irrevocably Yours,” a fifteen-minute monologue performed live for the pacific Dance Ensemble. Jon began working at the LGBT Center with homeless youth for ten years. For twenty-four years, Jon has served as the artistic director of the award-winning Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. He was a recipient of the LA Stage Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award and has written speeches for notable celebrities such as Zachary Quinto, Chelsea Handler, and Kathy Griffin. Jon has also written comedy sketches with and for Lily Tomlin. He enjoys music, swimming, and is a huge Yankee fan.

DW McLachlan

D.W. McLachlan is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is currently enrolled in the MFA program for creative writing at Warren Wilson college.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is an International Merit Award Winner in the Atlanta Review 2020 Poetry contest. She won the Blue Light Poetry Prize for her chapbook, The Little House on Stilts Remembers. Her fourth full length collection, The Faust Woman Poems, trace one woman’s Faustian adventures through Women’s Liberation and the return of the Goddess. Her fifth full length poetry collection, Death and His Lorca, is forthcoming from Blue Light Press. She is the poetry editor for Psychological Perspectives and blogs about poetry and life at sisterfrombelow.com.

Bettina Rolyn

BETTINA ROLYN SERVED IN THE U.S. ARMY FROM 2003 TO 2007 AS A PERSIAN-FARSI LINGUIST AND EARNED HER MASTER’S IN PERSIAN AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND IN 2008. AFTER LEAVING THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY IN 2012, SHE STUDIED THEOLOGY IN STUTTGART, GERMANY. SHE HAS A MASTER’S OF FINE ARTS IN CREATIVE NONFICTION FROM CARLOW UNIVERSITY IN PITTSBURGH AND IS HAPPY TO MAKE A LIVING AS A FREELANCE GERMAN TRANSLATOR, WRITER, AND EDITOR IN BERLIN.

Adam Straus

Adam Straus graduated from Yale with a BA in Philosophy in 2017. Afterwards, he served in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Okinawa, and Twenty-nine Palms as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. His work has also appeared in Duffel Blog, where he contributes under the pseudonym 29ReasonsWhy. Adam is currently an MFA candidate at Rutgers-Camden. He can be reached at adam.straus@rutgers.edu.

Alison Hicks

Alison Hicks’s forthcoming book of poems, Knowing Is a Branching Trail, won the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Books, and is forthcoming in September, 2021. Previous books include poetry collections You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, a chapbook Falling Dreams, a novella Love: A Story of Images, and an anthology, Prompted. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.

Sam Cherubin

Sam Cherubin's poetry has been published in Perceptions Literary Magazine, Brushfire, Euphony Journal, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Packingtown Review, Old Crow, Wallace Stevens Journal, and Palo Alto Review. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He works as a director of digital strategy, and enjoys blending humor, empathy, and curiosity to roll out human-centered AI, Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies.

Moe Hashemi

Moe Hashemi was born in Iran and grew up in the shadow of the Iran-Iraq War, often described as the 20th Century’s longest conventional war. Moe holds an M.A. in English Literature and teaches English at Collège La Cité in Ontario, Canada. Besides fiction, he has also written several academic textbooks.

Gladys Justin Carr

Gladys Justin Carr is an award-winning poet whose work has been published in over 100 literary magazines and journals. She is a recovering publishing executive who dropped out of Corporate America to write full time. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, she was the Nicolson Trustee Fellow at Smith College and the Wilcox Fellow at Cornell. A Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Toadlily Press Quartet Chapbook Prize, and recipient of a California Poetry Society Award, she is the author of the chapbook Augustine's Brain--The Remix. Her debut poetry collection, brunch, is forthcoming, as is her short-short fiction work, Hopper's Women. She lives in New York City and East Hampton, NY, with her partner and a formidable Havanese dog.

Susanne Aspley

Susanne retired from the US Army Reserve, having served as a photojournalist in Bosnia, Cuba, Panama and twice in Kuwait. She also trained as a drill sergeant. She is a former Peace Corps Volunteer, Thailand, and also worked in Israel and North Yorkshire, England. She holds a English degree from the University of Minnesota and is the recipient of the 2015 McKnight Artist Fellowship in Creative Prose. Her website is: www.aspleywrites.com

Elise Swanson Ochoa

Elise Swanson Ochoa’s work is forthcoming in Los Angeles Poets for Justice. She holds a BA in Spanish and linguistics from UCLA and a Doctor of Optometry degree from Southern California College of Optometry. Elise is an optometrist for a multi-specialty clinic serving the farmworkers of rural Ventura County. She currently attends Creative Writing courses through UCLA Extension.

Mason Boyles

Mason Boyles's first novel, Bark On, will be available from Driftwood Press in 2022. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Wisconsin Review, the Baltimore Review, and the Master's Review, among others. He holds an MFA from UC Irvine, and is a second-year PhD student from FSU. You can find him on Instagram as @prolific_mover .

Philip Alcabes

Philip Alcabes’s essays on race, conflict, health, and American culture have appeared in The American Scholar, LA Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Consequence, and Arrowsmith Journal. Alcabes teaches at Hunter College of the City University of NY. He lives in the Bronx.

G.H. Mosson

G.H. Mosson is the author of two books and three chapbooks of poetry, most recently Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (FLP 2019) and co-author of Simultaneous Revolutions (PM Press 2021). His poetry has appeared in The Hollins Critic, The Tampa Review, Measure, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Mosson has an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where he was a lecturer and a teaching fellow, and BA in English. After an early career as a writer and teacher, Mr. Mosson practices law and enjoys raising his children, day-hiking, and reading. For more, check out some poems, essays and mysteries at www.ghmosson.com.

Mike McLaughlin

Mike McLaughlin is a writer for Vietnam Veterans of America and Wrath-Bearing Tree. His historical features have appeared in The American Veteran, WWII History and American Heritage. Not to be outdone, he has written three novels and dozens of short stories. He lives in Boston with his family.

David Chrisinger

David Chrisinger directs the Harris Writing Program at the University of Chicago as well as The War Horse's writing seminars program, which offers workshops for military veterans and their families. He is the author of Public Policy Writing That Matters and the editor of See Me for Who I Am: Student Veterans' Stories of War and Coming Home.

Barbara Tramonte

Barbara Tramonte has had poetry published in literary magazines and anthologies. She has had two books of poetry published, (Oddities, Finishing Line Press) and Letter to a Friend with the Oyster Couch Blues, (Blue Star Press). She has taught as poet-in-the-schools in New York City, as a writing instructor at the Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities in Holyoke, MA, and as a professor at SUNY Empire State College School for Graduate Studies. For many years, she owned a children’s bookshop in Brooklyn Heights, NY with her husband Bob.

Kristina Usaite

Kristina Usaite is a writer and filmmaker from Kyiv, Ukraine. A recent graduate from Brooklyn College, earning a degree in Film Production, she is currently working on a memoir surrounding her fight for freedom, immigration, and finding herself alone after holding her mother’s hand through a tragic battle with cancer. She strives to write short stories and personal essays about the deepest parts of ourselves, feelings that never die and can be touched. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her partner and her cat.

Alita Pirkopf

After receiving a master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Denver, Alita became increasingly interested in feminist interpretations of literature. Years later she enrolled in a poetry seminar taught by Bin Ramke. Poetry became a long-term focus and necessity.

James Warren Boyd

James Warren Boyd’s creative nonfiction work has been published in Memoir, cream city review, Transfer, Tusculum Review, Big Muddy, Amarillo Bay, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Superstition Review, and Evening Street Review. As a writer/performer, he has been featured in the SF Theater Festival, The LGBT International Storytelling Festival, and Gay Writes! at The Marsh. Boyd teaches writing, public speaking, and performance at SFSU and USF; he lives in San Francisco with his husband, Sean, and their dog Mochi.

Jesse Frewerd

Jesse Frewerd was recently published in Line of Advance for his science fiction short story “Apraxis” and in 0-Dark-Thirty for an autofiction piece written about his time in Iraq. He was also featured in Medium, where they published his essay “Listen to the Music.” His poetry can be found in Southeast Missouri State University Press’s Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Volume 9, under Woodland Pattern’s online blog, and in Blue Nostalgia, a military journal for Post-Traumatic Growth. Jesse is a US Army Veteran, singer/songwriter, poet and writer.

David Ervin

David P. Ervin is an infantry veteran of the Iraq War who went on to study history at West Virginia University, earning a BA in 2009. He wrote and published a memoir of his time in war as well as numerous short nonfiction and fiction works.

Logan Hoffman-Smith

Logan Hoffman-Smith is a queer, Chinese American adoptee writer with a degree in Politics from Mount Holyoke College. They are a Kundiman Fiction Fellow and an incoming MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You can find them speculating about shrimp and mola molas on Twitter @wcnderwcnder and on Instagram @pseudobutch.

Hannah Jane Weber

Hannah Jane Weber’s poetry has been published in I-70 Review, Kansas City Voices, Slippery Elm, and The Poeming Pigeon. She is also a recipient of the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize. She is a children’s librarian, writer, and tennis enthusiast who lives in Prairie Village, KS with her husband and golden retrievers.

James Wells

Dr. James B. Wells has a Ph.D. in Research and is a Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU). Besides having over forty peer-reviewed publications, he has authored or co-authored multiple books and over 150 research reports for various agencies in the justice and safety discipline. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at EKU's Bluegrass Writing Studio. Recent excerpts from his in-progress memoir investigating the classified circumstances of his father's 1965 death in Vietnam appear or are forthcoming in Collateral Journal, About Place Journal, Alternating Current, Shift, Wild Roof Journal, and Military Experience and the Arts. He has also written a few short plays based on his research, one of which, The Toll, was recently read in a Kentucky Playwright’s Workshop. Signs, including the note his mother left him a few days after her death and the essay topic published in Wrath-Bearing Tree's current issue, were some of the critical precipitating factors that initiated his quest to find the truth. James.wells@eku.edu https://jamesbwells.com

John Vrolyk

John Vrolyk is a writer, national security policy wonk, and former active duty Marine infantry officer. He is a veteran of the defeat ISIS campaign in Syria and a peacetime rotation to Darwin, Australia. He has published essays on great power competition, gun control in America, and sailing the New England coast.

David Blome

David Blome is a combat veteran of the US Marine Corps. He earned a PhD in history and taught at Stanford University before leaving academia for a career in urban education. He began writing fiction in 2019 after publishing a book on the ancient Greeks. To date, his work has appeared in As You Were, Line of Advance, and The Penman Review. A father of three, he lives and works in Philadelphia.

Alise Versella

Alise Versella is a Pushcart-nominated contributing writer for Rebelle Society whose work has also been published in COG Magazine, Entropy, Enclave, The Opiate, Penumbra Literary and Art Journal, Ultraviolet Tribe, What Rough Beast, Steam Ticket, and Elephant Journal, among others. Versella has worked with author Francesca Lia Block and Women’s Spiritual Poetry, whose latest anthology, Goddess: When She Rules, raised money for the Malala Fund. Kirkus has called her “…[A] boundlessly energetic and promising technician [who] crafts a unique blend of the symbolist and the confessional; a talented, promising newcomer.” She performs at local coffeehouses in Southern New Jersey and has taught poetry workshops at local libraries and schools.

Susan Chehak

Susan Taylor Chehak is the author of several novels, including The Great Disappointment, Smithereens, The Story of Annie D., and Harmony. Her most recent publications include two collections of short stories, This Is That and It’s Not About the Dog, and a novel, The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci. Her work has appeared in Five on the Fifth, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hawaii Pacific Review, Ragazine, Rougarou, Sandpiper, The Magnolia Review, Maryland Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, Moon City Review, Nelle, Ducts, Crack the Spine, Bryant Literary Review, Pennsylvania English, The Chariton Review, Jet Fuel Review, Sliver of Stone, Limestone, The Literary Nest, and The Coachella Review. Susan has taught fiction writing in the MFA program at Antioch University, the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, the University of Southern California, and the Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa.

Gregory Johnsen

Gregory D. Johnsen has been a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan, a Fulbright Fellow in Yemen, and a Fulbright-Hays Fellow in Egypt. In 2013-14 he was selected as BuzzFeed’s inaugural Michael Hastings National Security Reporting Fellow where he won a Dirksen Award from the National Press Foundation and, in collaboration with Radiolab, a Peabody Award. He is the author of one book of non-fiction and is currently at work on his first novel.

Tyler Vaughn Hayes

Tyler Vaughn Hayes is a poet and writer living and learning in central Kentucky. His work has appeared in Thimble Magazine, Ponder Review, and elsewhere. His habits include hiking, running, and shaming his friends for their smartphone use, but words are his whole world.

J. Malcolm Garcia

J. Malcolm Garcia lives in San Diego. His novel, Out of the Rain (Seven Stories Press), will be published in 2024.

Andy Conner

Andy Conner is a Birmingham, UK-based poet, activist and educator, with a long track record of performing his work nationally and internationally. His work has also featured in numerous publications. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His credits include BBC Radio 4, Jaipur Literature Festival and India International Centre. He has also conducted workshops for The British Council.

William Alton

illiam L. Alton started writing in the Eighties. Since then his work has appeared in Main Channel Voices, World Audience and Breadcrumb Scabs among others. In 2010, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has published several books. One collection of flash fiction, Girls, two collections of poetry titled Heroes of Silence and Heat Washes Through, a memoir titled My Name is Bill and three novels: Flesh and Bone, Comfortable Madness, and The Tragedy of Being Happy. He earned both his BA and MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Sarah Haak

BIO: Sarah Haak is an essayist from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati, where she studies literary nonfiction writing and composition. She holds a master’s degree in creative nonfiction writing from Ohio University. Before taking up writing, she was a chef, a small business owner, and a natural therapeutic specialist with a focus in herbal medicine making. She currently serves as an Assistant Editor for Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and her work is published in Essay Daily, Conceptions Southwest, and is forthcoming in Sonora Review, Fourth Genre, and other journals. Find her at sarahhaak.com

Lauren Davis

Lauren M. Davis attended the University of Southern Maine to obtain her Masters of Fine Art in creative writing with a concentration in poetry and alternative pedagogy for literacy. Work from her poetry collections Sleeping Through the Earthquake and Women Bones have appeared in numerous literary journals and an anthology. She teaches and has taught creative writing, English writing, and philosophy at several universities. She has appeared as a genre editor for the Stonecoast Review, and works as a freelance writer for a variety of businesses and non-profits. She designed, wrote, and taught Poetry Through Literacy, a curriculum for illiterate adults, worked as an artist for Artlink’s CSA project, and was the writer in residence in Washington State’s Hypatia in the Woods in 2016. In 2017, she attended Naropa University's summer writing program through the Jack K. School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado and was the Keynote Speaker at the Poet Society of Indiana's annual conference in October 2017 . In addition to her work as a professor, she works for Spark Placemaking as a Placemaking Coordinator for Electric Works of Fort Wayne promoting arts, culture, outdoor activity, local food initiatives, and community.

Ken Harvey

Ken is the author of the forthcoming novel The Book of Casey Adair (University of Wisconsin Press), which partly takes place during the Spanish coup attempt of 1981. He is also the author of a collection of short stories (If You Were With Me Everything Would Be All Right) and a memoir (A Passionate Engagement). The story collection won the Violet Quill Award for Best New Gay Fiction at the Lambda Literary Festival. The memoir was named a Rainbow Book by the American Library Association, an award given to books of lasting LGBTQ+ interest and quality. Ken has been published in over twenty literary magazines, including The Massachusetts Review, Consequence,and The Buenos Aires Review.He has read his work on National Public Radio and has been the recipient of numerous grants and writing residencies. A regular book reviewer for Lambda Literary, Ken holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College.

Scott Janssen

Scott is a hospice social worker at UNC Hospice in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in dozens of professional and literary magazines as well as academic journals. He has written extensively about working with combat veterans at the end of life and is a member of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization's Trauma-Informed Work Group. His book, Standing at Lemhi Pass - Archetypal Stories for the End of Life and Other Challenging Times explores the use of therapeutic storytelling with dying patients and their loved ones.

Erin Carpenter

Erin teaches middle school in the mountains of North Carolina. Her friends at UNC-Chapel introduced her to Appalachian bluegrass during college, but then she moved to Northern California to ride a motorcycle, study jazz piano and work at UC Berkeley. Returning to the Southeast over a decade ago, she now finds fulfillment pressure washing the dog piss out of her rugs. Bits of her creative non-fiction have appeared in The Sun Magazine’s Readers Write column and Tiny Love at the New York Times. She published a short story in Zero-Dark Thirty called After Phu Bai and occasionally works to make a novel out of it.

Nestor Walters

Nestor Walters was born in Bangladesh and raised in Greece. After high school, he moved to the U.S. and joined the Navy, where he served for ten years. He is now a junior at Stanford University, where he studies math (barely) and is a staff writer for The Stanford Daily. Find him on Instagram @nestor_walters, on his blog, or by email at nestor.walters.293@gmail.com.

Sheila Bonenberger

Sheila is a poet who lives in CT. Her poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, and The Massachusetts Review among others. She was also the recipient of a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Grant.

Brian Castner

Brian Castner is a nonfiction writer, former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. His most recent book is Disappointment River, which was named a Best Book for 2018 by Amazon. He is also the bestselling author of All the Ways We Kill and Die and the war memoir The Long Walk, which was adapted into an opera and named a New York Times Editor’s Pick. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Esquire, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and on National Public Radio. He is the co-editor of The Road Ahead, a collection of short stories featuring veteran writers, and has twice received grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, to cover the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014, and to paddle the 1200 mile Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean in 2016. In March 2018 he joined Amnesty International as a Senior Crisis Advisor.

Kyle Seibel

Kyle Seibel is 36 years old and lives in Santa Barbara, CA. He works as a copywriter and is a Navy veteran. His stories have been featured in The Masters Review and Toho Journal.

Mack Freeman

Mack Freeman is the pen name of Pat McCann. He’s a former Navy intelligence officer who works in Texas as a criminal defense attorney. He was a founding team member of both the Harris County and Fort Bend Veterans' Treatment courts.

Ben Weakley

BEN WEAKLEY SPENT FOURTEEN YEARS IN THE U.S. ARMY, BEGINNING WITH DEPLOYMENTS TO IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN AND FINISHING AT A DESK INSIDE THE PENTAGON. HE WRITES POETRY AND ESSAYS ABOUT THE ENDURING NATURE OF WAR AND THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE. HIS FIRST COLLECTION OF POEMS, HEAT + PRESSURE IS FORTHCOMING IN NOVEMBER 2022 FROM MIDDLE WEST PRESS. BEN’S WORK APPEARS IN THE ANTHOLOGIES, "OUR BEST WAR STORIES", BY MIDDLE WEST PRESS, AND “WE WERE NOT ALONE”, BY COMMUNITY BUILDING ART WORKS. OTHER POEMS AND ARTICLES APPEAR OR ARE FORTHCOMING IN SEQUESTRUM, CUTLEAF JOURNAL, THE WRATH-BEARING TREE, AND ARMY UNIVERSITY PRESS., AMONG OTHER PUBLICATIONS. HIS AWARDS INCLUDE FIRST PLACE IN THE 2019 HEROES’ VOICES NATIONAL POETRY CONTEST, AND FINALIST IN THE 2020 COL. DARRON L. WRIGHT MEMORIAL WRITING AWARDS. TODAY, BEN LIVES IN NORTHEAST TENNESSEE WITH HIS WIFE, THEIR CHILDREN, AND A VERY MISCHIEVOUS HOUND DOG. YOU CAN READ MORE OF BEN’S WORK AT HTTPS://WWW.JBENWEAKLEY.COM/.

Tara Coughlin

Tara Coughlin is a writer and artist from Philadelphia, PA. As a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, she explores the intersectionality of a soldier’s experiences with the world at large. When not conceiving through words, Coughlin can most often be found doing so with a paint brush.

Francisco Martinezcuello

Francisco Martínezcuello is a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He was born in Santo Domingo, República Dominicana and raised on Long Island, New York. His passion for storytelling began as a teenager and continued throughout his 20 years of Marine Corps service. He serves as an editor and contributing writer to Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel. He is an Into the Fire Writing Retreat Scholarship Recipient, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, and a contributing co-editor of the veteran anthology, Incoming: Sex, Drugs, and Copenhagen. Francisco has been published in Hobart Pulp, Construction Literary Magazine, The War Horse, Split Lip Magazine, River Teeth: Beautiful Things, Collateral Journal and the Dominican Writer’s Association. Publications and social media are posted on his website – www.themotorcyclewriter.com.

Nazli Karabiyikoglu

AUTHOR BIO: Nazli Karabıyıkoğlu is a Turkish author, now full-time resident in Georgia, who recently escaped from the political, cultural, and gender oppression in Turkey. She helped create the #MeToo movement within the Turkish publishing industry, from which she was then excommunicated. With an M.A. in Turkish Language and Literature from Bogazici University, Karabıyıkoğlu has five published books in Turkish and has recently completed translations of three new books for international publication. Having won six literary awards in her country, she was nominated for Pushcart Prize in Fiction in 2019 and won The UnCollected Press/Raw Art Review Full Length Book of Short Stories with her book "Subdermal Sky". Web: www.nazlikarabiyikoglu.com ******* TRANSLATOR BIO: Eylul Deniz Doganay was born on May 24th, in 1996, in Istanbul, Turkey. She discovered her interest in the English language at a young age and therefore focused on foreign languages and translation. She graduated from Bilkent University in Ankara, where she added French to her working languages, and is an aspiring literary translator. She took on her first long-term project when she began translating the works of Nazli Karabiyikoglu in the summer of 2018, as she believes in the particular work and its universal value, and the translator’s mission to convey that value.

George Kramer

George R. Kramer hails from Canada, Colorado, Kenya and Alabama, but is a long-time Virginia transplant. The child of European refugees from Nazism and Communism, his parents' legacy and his peripatetic childhood leave a trace in much of his writing. He makes his living as an attorney. His recent published poems are on his website, https://blueguitar58.wixsite.com/website.

Westley Smith

Westley Smith is a fifteen-year Army veteran who served during and after Desert Storm as Tactical Military Intelligence. He was born in Ohio and earned an MA in English from Indiana University. He now resides in Boston, MA where he is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His work has appeared in Veteran’s Voices, Deadly Writers, his poem “The Watch” took Honorable Mention in the Southeast Missouri State 2019 anthology Proud to be Written By.

Jacqlyn Cope

Jacqlyn Cope is an 8-year Air Force veteran that worked as an aeromedical evacuation mission controller and decided to leave the military in 2016 to pursue her writing career and education. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Mount Saint Mary’s University and is currently a 7th and 8th grade English teacher for LAUSD.

Henry Kronk

Among other things, Henry Kronk has planted trees in Alberta, bootlegged in New Zealand, and conducted market research in a Wyoming town with a population of 10,000. He began his writing career as an intern reporter for the Burlington Free Press, the local newspaper in his hometown in Vermont. His journalism has also appeared in Exclaim!, Montreal Rampage, and IBL News. He serves as the editor for eLearning Inside. While studying at McGill University in Montreal, he won the Peterson Memorial Prize for his fiction and poetry. His creative work has been published by Omega, Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, Ricky’s Backyard, and The Veg. He is currently working with DJ Disciple, a Brooklyn-based DJ, on a non-fiction book about house music.

Dennis Etzel

Dennis Etzel Jr. lives in Topeka, Kansas where he teaches English at Washburn University. He has a number of books of poetry including My Secret Wars of 1984 (BlazeVOX 2015) which was selected by The Kansas City Star as a Best Poetry Book of 2015 and Fast-Food Sonnets (Coal City Review Press 2016) is a 2017 Kansas Notables Book selected by the State of Kansas Library. His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, BlazeVOX, Fact-Simile, 1913: a journal of poetic forms, 3:AM, Tarpaulin Sky, DIAGRAM, and others.

Lisa Erin Sanchez

LISA ERIN SANCHEZ RECEIVED HER PH.D. FROM UC IRVINE AND WAS AWARDED A FORD POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP BEFORE SERVING AS FULL-TIME FACULTY IN NEW YORK (UB), CHICAGO (UIC), AND AT UC SAN DIEGO. HER SHORT STORIES, REVIEWS, AND ESSAYS APPEAR IN LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS, THE MILLIONS, THE RUMPUS, THE WRATH-BEARING TREE, AND PORTER GULCH REVIEW. HER WORK HAS BEEN SELECTED AMONG FINALISTS FOR THE PUSHCART PRIZE, THE NARRATIVE MAGAZINE STORY CONTEST, THE VIRGINIA WOOLF AWARD, AND OTHERS. SHE IS AN AVID HIKER, NATURE ENTHUSIAST, AND MOM TO ONE DISABLED SON AND ONE FEISTY RESCUE PUPPY. HER RECENTLY COMPLETED NOVEL, THE GIFT, A NEAR-FUTURE WORK OF SPECULATIVE FICTION AND POST-PANDEMIC NOVEL IS BASED ON HER OWN INHERITED IMMUNE CONDITION AS DESCRIBED IN HER ESSAY, “ON INSPIRATION” AT WWW.LISAERINSANCHEZ.COM.

D.A. Gray

D. A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain. His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, Collateral Journal and Wrath-Bearing Tree among others. He earned his MFA at the Sewanee School of Letters. A retired soldier and veteran, Gray now teaches, writes and lives in Central Texas.

Rebecca Rapp

Rebecca Rapp is a student of Political Science and English Literature at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Through an exchange to Detroit, MI she has found not only a second family in the U.S. but also a strong interest for America's society and political structure. A class on American War Fiction further introduced her to the examination of society's relationships to war, veterans and national pride. She aims to understand society more thoroughly and use her given perspective as a foreigner to contribute to the discourse.

Mbizo Chirasha

Mbizo Chirasha is the Poet in Residence at the Fictional Café (International publishing and literary digital space). 2019 Sotambe Festival Live Literature Hub and Poetry Café Curator. 2019 African Fellow for the International Human Rights Art Festival( ihraf.org) , Essays Contributor to Monk Art and Soul Magazine in United Kingdom .Arts Features Writer at the International Cultural Weekly .His Profiles , Interview and Poems are featured on poesis.si ,in Slovenia. Founder and Chief Editor of WOMAWORDS LITERARY PRESS. Founder and Curator of the Brave Voices Poetry Journal. Co-Editor of Street Voices Poetry triluangal collection( English , African Languages and Germany) intiated by Andreas Weiland in Germany. Poetry Contributor to AtunisPoetry.com in Belgium. African Contributor to DemerPress International Poetry Book Series in Netherlands. African Contributor to the World Poetry Almanac Poetry Series in Mongolia. His latest 2019 collection of experimental poetry A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT was released by Mwanaka Media and Publishing and is both in print, on Amazon.com and at is featured at African Books Collective. Mbizo Chirasha is the Originator of the Zimbabwe We Want Poetry Campaign. Founder and Creative Director of Girl Child Talent Festival and GirlChildCreativity Project. 2003 Young Literary Arts Delegate to the Goteborg International Book Fair Sweden (SIDA AFRICAN PAVILION) .2009 Poet in Residence of the International Conference of African Culture and Development (ICACD) in Ghana.The Vice President of Poetsof the WORLD,poetasdelmundo.com ,African Region. Global Peace Chain Ambassador. 2009 Fellow to the inaugural UNESCO- Africa Photo- Novel Publishers and Writers Training in Tanzania. 2015 Artist in Residence of the Shunguna Mutitima International Film and Arts Festival in Livingstone, Zambia. A globally certified literary arts influencer, Writer in Residence and Recipient of the EU-Horn of Africa Defend Defenders Protection Fund Grant, Recipient of the Pen Deutschland Exiled Writer Grant. He is an Arts for Peace and Human Rights Catalyst, the Literary Arts Projects Curator, Poet, Writer, publicist is published in more 200 spaces in print and online.

Elliot Ackerman

Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Green on Blue, and Dark at the Crossing. He is also the author of the memoir Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning. As a Marine, he served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.

Brian Van Reet

Brian Van Reet is the author of Spoils, named one of the best books of 2017 by the Guardian, Military Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, he has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters short story award. He lives in Austin with his family.

Larry Abbott

Larry Abbott is a retired college and high school English, film, and American Studies teacher, and the author/editor of numerous articles and 2 books on Native American art. His interviews with artist Monty Little and photographer Ron Whitehead appeared in War, Literature, and the Arts; an interview with PTSD treatment pioneer Dr. Frank Ochberg was published in Journal of Military and Veterans Health. The Journal of Veterans Studies published his essay "'But meanwhile the dead poison us and those who come after us': The Presence of Ghosts in Veterans’ Writing and Art and the Implications for Medical Professionals" and War, Literature, and the Arts published “A Little War Music: The Songs of Vince Gabriel, Jason Moon, and Emily Yates,” in Volume 34, Winter 2023. Abbott holds an MA in Cinema Studies from NYU and a M. Ed. in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia. His father served in WW2, and research into his service led to Abbott's essay in The War Horse: “My Father Died Over 60 Years Ago. I Feel That I’m Just Now Meeting Him."

Arin Yoon

ARIN YOON IS A KOREAN AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER, VISUAL ARTIST, AND ARTS EDUCATOR BASED IN KANSAS WHOSE WORK EXPLORES ISSUES ON THE MILITARY, WOMEN, REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY. SHE HAS EXHIBITED AT VENUES SUCH AS THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF KOREAN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY IN SEOUL, CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART IN WASHINGTON, DC, ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES AND A.I.R. GALLERY IN NEW YORK. ARIN'S WORK HAS APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, REUTERS, THE ATLANTIC, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE KOREA TIMES. SHE IS A MEMBER OF WOMEN PHOTOGRAPH AND AN ALUMNA OF THE MISSOURI PHOTO WORKSHOP. HER CURRENT PROJECT, TO BE AT WAR, IS FUNDED BY GRANTS FROM WE, WOMEN, THE NATIONAL MILITARY FAMILY ASSOCIATION, AND THE CITY OF LEAVENWORTH. ARIN HOLDS A BA IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE AND A BA IN POLITICAL SCIENCE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, AND AN MFA FROM THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS IN PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO AND RELATED MEDIA. WWW.ARINYOON.COM IG@ARINYOON

Ruth Mukwana

RUTH MUKWANA is a fiction writer from Uganda. She is also an aid worker currently working for the United Nations in New York. She’s a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars (MFA) and holds a Bachelors degree in Law from Makerere University. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Solstice Magazine, Black Warriors Review, Consequence Magazine and The Compassion Anthology, Speak the Magazine and Water~Stone Review. She lives with her daughter in New York.

Dalton Brink

Dalton C Brink is a dropout of the U.S. Navy, where he studied nuclear engineering. Originally from Memphis, TN, he made his way to Livingston, MT in search of mountains and streams lacking dirty mattresses and broken refrigerators. Dalton founded and is president of the arts non-profit The Cottonwood Club. He is a musician and songwriter for WireRider, a painter, a sculptor, a member of the art collaborative group PAINTALLICA! and the Rat Trap Clay Club. He’s an avid member of the Free Art School movement. He’s also an award-winning filmmaker, as well as the author of three books of poetry and three novels, the latest one being Of A Seedless Generation. His work can be found at www.daltoncbrink.com. PORTRAIT: Pastel by Jennifer Pulchinski.

R.T. Castleberry

R.T. Castleberry is a widely published poet and critic. His work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Trajectory, Blue Collar Review, White Wall Review, The Alembic and Visitant. Internationally, Castleberry’s work has been published in Canada, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand, the Philippines and Antarctica. Mr. Castleberry’s work has been featured in the anthologies, Travois-An Anthology of Texas Poetry, The Weight of Addition, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen and You Can Hear the Ocean: An Anthology of Classic and Current Poetry. He lives and writes in Houston, Texas.

Rufi Thorpe

RUFI THORPE received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. She is the author of Dear Fang, with Love and The Girls from Corona del Mar, which was long listed for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. A native of California, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sons.

Joshua P.F.

Josh lives in the Washington D.C. area with his wife and two daughters. He spent five years in the U.S. Army before going back to school and earning degrees in physics and electrical engineering. In his day job, Josh works at the intersection of technology and national security. In his free time, he likes to write.

Gregg Williard

Gregg Williard's fiction, nonfiction and visual art can be found in The New England Review, Shenandoah, Iowa Review, The Rupture, Raleigh Review, Carve and Into the Void, among others. He teaches ESL to refugees in Madison, Wisconsin and does a long-running book reading show on WORT, "Fiction Jones."

Jesse Goolsby

JESSE GOOLSBY is an Air Force officer and the author of the novel I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them and the short story collection Acceleration Hours. His fiction and essays have appeared in Narrative, Epoch, the Literary Review,Alaska Quarterly Review, the Greensboro Review, and other publications. He is the recipient of the Richard Bausch Fiction Prize, the John Gardner Memorial Award in Fiction, and a Holland & Knight Distinguished Fellowship from the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts. He has earned honorable mentions in both The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories, and his work has been included in The Best American Mystery Stories. Goolsby was raised in Chester, California, and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

henry 7. reneau, jr.

henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience, like a discharged bullet that commits a felony every day, a spontaneous combustion that blazes from his heart, phoenix- fluxed red & gold, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. He is the author of the poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press) and the e- chapbook, physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press), now available from their respective publishers. Additionally, he has self-published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of Resistance, and his collection The Book of Blue(s) : Tryin' To Make A Dollar Outta' Fifteen Cents, was a finalist for the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook Series. His work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Chad Corrigan

Chad Corrigan is a soldier and writer. He has served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. His work can be found in the anthology Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War.

Anthony Gomes

Dr. Anthony Gomes, MD, FACC, FAHA, is a Professor of Medicine at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, and The Icahn School of Medicine, New York. He is the author of over 150 scientific articles in Cardiovascular Medicine and in the Humanities. He has also published several books in Cardiovascular Medicine, two books of poetry: Visions from Grymes Hill and Mirrored Reflections, and three novels: The Sting of Peppercorns, Nas Garras do Destino and Have A Heart.

Ken Galbreath

Ken Galbreath is a student at the University of North Carolina Asheville. Prior to the university, Ken was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. He served four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. His work has been published in The Great Smokies Review and all the sins.

Stephen Mead

Stephen Mead is an Outsider multi-media artist and writer. Since the 1990s he’s been grateful to many editors for publishing his work in print zines and eventually online. He is also grateful to have managed to keep various day jobs for the Health Insurance. Currently he is resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall, The Chroma Museum

Matt Gallagher

Matt Gallagher is a Wake Forest graduate and US Army veteran. He's the author of the novels Youngblood and Empire City, and the memoir Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War. He holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review.

Charles Stromme

Charles Stromme served 3 1/2 years of his misspent youth in the US Army as an Infantry officer and aviator. In his misspent adulthood, he worked for 28 years as an IRS tax collector and manager, and another 4 years an international tax consultant where he was published on two occasions in two languages and received the Georgian Medal of Honor. In his dotage he writes commentary, essays, and memoir. Fiction eludes him.

Robert Alderman

Bio: Robert Alderman holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida. He has published fiction and poetry in The Mailer Review, Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Door is a Jar, and various other literary magazines. His poem "Watch for the Patterns, Watch for the Wires" won the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) "Secret" contest in 2015, and was later published in Southeast Missouri State University Press's Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Volume 6. He was a semi-finalist for The Poet's Billow 2013 Atlantis Award. In 2011, he won the Scholarly and Creative Excellence Award in the Fine Arts at the University of South Florida. The same year, he was also the recipient of the Thomas E. Sanders Scholarship in Creative Writing. Finally, while he served 8 years in the U.S. Army, he was never (thankfully) a hero.

Suzanne Rancourt

Ms. Rancourt, Abenaki/Huron descent, is a multi-modal Expressive Arts Therapist and CASAC with degrees in psychology, and creative writing. Her book, Billboard in the Clouds, Curbstone Press, (now in its 2ndprint at NU Press,) received the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas First Book Award. Her 2nd, murmurs at the gate, Unsolicited Press, released in 2019. Ms. Rancourt’s work is internationally published. Inspired by the multiracial poetess, Ai, Ms. Rancourt remarks, “poetry isn’t always pastoral fantasy, sometimes it is the skill of finding the beauty in a single moment, a single gesture, and the courage to write about that truth no matter where you are or what is happening around you. Artists have a responsibility.” She is a USMC and Army Veteran who continues to serve as a Mentor for the Saratoga County Veterans’ Peer to Peer program. Ms. Rancourt is an Aikido and Iaido practitioner. To view more of her works, please visit her website: www.expressive-arts.com

Colin James

Colin James has a book of poems, Resisting Probability, from Sagging Meniscus Press.

Olivia Garard

Olivia Garard is a Marine Officer. She is an Associate Editor for The Strategy Bridge, is a member of the Military Writers Guild, and tweets at @teaandtactics.

John Darcy

John Darcy is from Madison, Wisconsin. Along with Wrath-Bearing Tree, he publishes regularly in Conjunctions.

Caitlin McGill

Caitlin McGill’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, The Chattahoochee Review, Consequence, CutBank, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Southeast Review, Vox, War, Literature, & the Arts, and several other magazines. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is also a 2019 Somerville Arts Council Grant recipient, a 2016 St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award winner, and the 2014 winner of Crab Orchard Review’s Rafael Torch Nonfiction Literary Award. She recently completed a memoir about intergenerational trauma, inherited survival mechanisms, immigration, race, class, addiction, mental illness, war, and the cost of ignoring our histories.

Paul Lomax

Human Nature investigator, Research Scientist, and an Education Psychologist. An author who holds simplicity is the greatest panacea for that which ails the self. Poetry published in North American Review(forthcoming), African American Review, Making/Connections – Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cultural Diversity, and Ars Medica – A Journal of Medicine, the Arts, and the Humanities.

Bryan Blanchard

Bryan Blanchard is a native of Glens Falls, New York and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom (Army Reserve, 2006-2007). He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Albany and a B.A. in Criminal Justice from SUNY Pittsburgh. In 2013, his poem "Pillar of Salt" appeared in O-Dark-Thirty, the literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project. He lives in upstate New York, with his wife, also a vet, and youngest son. Sarah Blanchard is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom (Army Reserve, 2006-2007) and Operation Enduring Freedom (2013-2014). She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts and English from the University of Albany. She lives in upstate New York, with her husband, also a vet, and youngest son.

Amy Waldman

Amy Waldman’s first novel, The Submission, was a national bestseller, a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and the #1 Book of the Year for Entertainment Weekly and Esquire. She has received fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, Ledig House for International Writers, the MacDowell Colony, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Waldman was previously national correspondent for The Atlantic and a reporter for the The New York Times, where, as a bureau chief for South Asia, she covered Afghanistan. She lives in Brooklyn.

Peter Lucier

Pete Lucier is a Marine veteran and a student at St. Louis University School of Law. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and America Magazine.

Aaron Graham

AARON GRAHAM hails from Glenrock, Wyoming, population 1159, which boasts seven bars, six churches, a single 4-way stop sign, and no stoplights. His work explores the relationship of desire, compassion, and violence in combat situations and the resilience, latency, and impact of trauma and moral injury on maritime society. He served as the assistant editor for Squaw Valley Review, is an alumnus of Squaw Valley Writers Workshop and The Ashbury Home School (Hudson), and is a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where he served with The Marine Corps’ Human Intelligence and Counterterrorism Task Force Middle East as analyst and linguist. His work has appeared in SAND, The Tishman Review, The East Bay Review, Print Oriented Bastards, Zero-Dark-Thirty, and f(r)iction. His first book, Blood Stripes, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ 2015 Berkshire Prize, and his poem, “Olfaction,” won the 2015 Seven Hills Penumbra Poetry Prize.

Colin Halloran

Colin Halloran is an OEF Veteran, poet, and professor. He is the award-winning author of Shortly Thereafter & Icarian Flux.

Michael Chang

MICHAEL CHANG hopes to win the New Jersey Blueberry Princess pageant one day. Michael strongly suspects that they were born in the wrong decade. A recovering vegan, their favorite ice cream flavor was almost renamed due to scandal.

Brian Barry Turner

Brian Barry Turner once cleared roads of land mines as a U.S. Army combat engineer in Iraq. His explosive, often-humorous short fiction has been published in So It Goes: the Literary Journal of The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library; the Deadly Writers Patrol; and Forward March. He is a regular contributor to the online news and culture magazine Task and Purpose.

Edison Jennings

Edison Jennings is a Head Start school bus driver and occasional teacher living in the Appalachian region of southern Virginia. His poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. He is the author of three chapbooks, “Reckoning” (Jacar Press), Small Measures (Wild Leek Press), and A Letter to Greta (Plan B Press).

Andrew Clark

Andrew K. Clark is a writer whose work has recently appeared in UCLA’s Out of Anonymity, Good Juju, and fall / lines. Main Street Rag Press will publish Jesus in the Trailer, his full-length collection of poetry in the fall of 2019. His short story “Tangled Limbs” won second place in the 2018 Scribes Valley Short Story Contest. He is a native of Alexander, NC, near Asheville, and is searching for a home for his first novel, The Day Thief.

Lauren Kay Johnson

Lauren Kay Johnson is a former military public affairs officer and Afghanistan veteran. Her memoir, The Fine Art of Camouflage, chronicles her coming-of-age against the backdrop of war—beginning with her mother's Army career and deployment in support of Operation Desert Storm when Lauren was seven years old, and later with her own service. Lauren's essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Glamour, Yale Medicine Magazine, CONSEQUENCE magazine, Drunken Boat, Pleiades, and several anthologies. Her writing and interviews have been used in the creation of dance and theater productions, and she has lectured at schools, conferences, and veteran centers across the country, including the Association of Writers and Writing Programs national conference, the Boston Book Festival, and the University of Iowa. She is a writing consultant with GrubStreet, an editor at the Wrath-Bearing Tree, and a former editor-in-chief of Redivider. Lauren lives with her husband and twin daughters outside Seattle. By day, she is a Program Director at IGNITE Worldwide, a non-profit that aims to combat the gender imbalance in STEM fields. By night, she writes (with the help of her fat tabby cat) and eats copious amounts of ice cream.

Roz Wiggins

The men in Roz Wiggins’ family have served in all the major U.S. wars since WW II and her brother is a Navy Chaplain. She is a reformed lawyer who has a life-long passion for writing journals, essays, and fiction. Roz lives in Connecticut, is working on a novel, and writes wherever she finds herself.

Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain’s most recent book is Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution, and is based on the Pulitzer Prize-nominated essays and reportage that he wrote on the 2016 presidential election for The Guardian. He is also the author of a novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and a short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. His work has received the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and a Whiting Writer’s Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award in both the U.S. and the U.K. (international authors division). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, IntranQu’îllités (Haiti), Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, and elsewhere.

Sara Novic

Sara Nović is the author of the novel Girl at War (Random House 2015), which won the American Library Association Alex Award, was an LA Times book prize finalist, and was longlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper's, BOMB, Guernica, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly and others. Nović studied fiction and literary translation in the MFA at Columbia University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stockton University in NJ. Her next book, America is Immigrants, is forthcoming in 2019.

Jerri Bell

Jerri Bell is a retired naval officer and the managing editor of O-Dark-Thirty, the literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project. Along with Tracy Crow, she is co-editor of, 'It's My Country Too: Women's Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan.'

Alex Pitre

Alex Pitre recently completed a decade long journey for a Bachelor of Arts with CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies with a dual concentration in Performativity in New Media Arts and Critical and Contemporary Writing through the guidance of Katherine Behar, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Meredith Mowder, and ZhenZhen Qi. During Alex’s recent studies, they were awarded the Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship and won second place poetry prize for The Sydney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program in 2018. Prior to seeking this aforementioned undergraduate degree, they had completed many hours (in no particular order) hiking and camping, farming, sewing, knitting, babywearing, providing full-spectrum doula support, tattooing, fermenting vegetables, dancing, and performing in Maine, in Bali, in NYC, in Louisiana with University of Louisiana at Lafayette, with Hope’s Edge Farm, with Garth Fagan Dance, with Yayasan Bumi Sehat, with The Doula Project and with so many others. Currently Alex has a particular interest in words, natural fibers, games, and coding languages’ semantic morphology. Originally from the Cajun Heartland of Louisiana, Alex owes much of their point of view and humor to Cajun culture and they are continually confused amidst the sentiments of the Northeastern United States where they have now lived for nine years.

Brooke King

Brooke King is an adjunct professor of English and creative writing at Saint Leo University. She served in the United States Army, deploying to Iraq in 2006 as a wheel-vehicle mechanic. Her nonfiction work has appeared in numerous publications, including Prairie Schooner and War, Literature, and the Arts, and the anthologies Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families, World War II to Present (Potomac Books, 2014) and It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (Potomac Books, 2017).

Matthew Komatsu

Matthew Komatsu is a writer currently hunkered down in Anchorage, Alaska whenever he’s not at work planning COVID-19 responses for the National Guard. He’s happy to report his family is healthy, and still somehow on speaking terms with each other. The best way to see if he’s still alive is by checking out his Twitter feed (@matthew_komatsu).

Aidan Gowland

Aidan Gowland is a queer/trans poet with roots in theatre, politics, history and science. His works examine war, survival and LGBT experiences. He lives in Toronto. He can be found on Twitter @aidangowland.

Antonio Addessi

Antonio Addessi is currently studying poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts Creative Writing Program. He runs and teaches for Columbia’s Veteran Creative Writing Workshop and the Manhattan Veterans Affairs Center’s Creative Writing Workshop. An Iraqi War Veteran, he served in the US Navy from 2005-2011. In 2015, Antonio received his BA from the University of Maine in English. He was raised in Cleveland and lives in Harlem.

Walter Cummins

Walter Cummins has published seven short story collections—Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: stories of bent realism, Telling Stories: Old and New. He also has two collection of essays and reviews, Death Cancer Madness Meaning and Knowing Writers. More than one hundred of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines such as New Letters, Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Under the Sun, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, The Laurel Review, Other Voices, Georgetown Review, Sonora Review, Broad Street, Weber Studies, Midwest Quarterly, West Branch, South Carolina Review, Crosscurrents, Crescent Review, The MacGuffin, in book collections, and on the Web. With Thomas E. Kennedy, he was founding co-publisher of Serving House Books, an outlet for novels, memoirs, and story, poetry, and essay collections. He teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

John Milas

John Milas served as a red patcher in the Marine Corps before studying creative writing at the University of Illinois and Purdue University. His work has appeared in Superstition Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hypertext Magazine, and elsewhere. Learn more at johnmilas.com.

Mike Freedman

MIKE FREEDMAN was born and raised in Houston. He volunteered for the infantry after 9/11, later serving three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan in the U.S. Army Special Forces. He received his MBA from Rice University. He is the author of SCHOOL BOARD.

Paul Crenshaw

Paul Crenshaw is the author of the essay collection This One Will Hurt You, from The Ohio State University Press. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review and Brevity, among others.

Rob Bokkon

ROB BOKKON MANAGES THE PRODUCTION LINE FOR A SMALL PRINTING COMPANY IN A KENTUCKY COLLEGE TOWN. HE IS CIS/BI, A 2ND GENERATION HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN, A MEMBER OF THE IWW, AND A SOCIALIST. HE WRITES, READS VORACIOUSLY, COOKS, DRINKS KENTUCKY BOURBON, AND IS (UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE) THE FIRST PERSON KNOWN TO HAVE WORN A DO-RAG AND A MONOCLE AT THE SAME TIME. HE LIVES WITH HIS WIFE, TEENAGE SON, AND TWO LEFTIST CATS.

Eric Chandler

Eric Chandler is the author of Kekekabic (Finishing Line Press, 2022) and Hugging This Rock (Middle West Press, 2017). His writing has appeared in Northern Wilds, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Talking Stick, Sleet Magazine, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, Collateral, The Deadly Writers Patrol, PANK, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, Consequence Magazine, and Columbia Journal. Chandler was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014 for creative nonfiction. He’s a three-time winner of the Col. Darron L. Wright Award for poetry. Chandler is also a US Air Force veteran of both the active duty and the Minnesota Air National Guard. He flew 145 combat missions and over 3000 hours in the F-16. He’s happiest when he’s on a trail in Duluth with his wife, two children, and faithful dog, Leo.

Frank Blake

F.S. Blake is a Bronze Star decorated U.S. Army Veteran. He is a photographer, advanced SCUBA diver, licensed general contractor, ordained minister, entrepreneur, and proud husband and father. He has poems published or forthcoming in o-dark-thirty, As you Were, and Line of Advance. His first chapbook, Terminal Leave, is scheduled for release in November 2018 through Finishing Line Press.

Nick Fox

Nick Fox served as a Sapper Platoon Leader in Iraq from 2006-2007. He continues to serve in the Army Reserves as a Military History instructor. During the day, he teaches Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy as well as Studio Art at a private high school. He lives across the street from a beautiful graveyard in Minneapolis with his wife and daughter.

Shana Youngdahl

Shana Youngdahl was born and raised in Paradise, California. Her full-length poetry collection History,Advice and Other Half-Truths was published in the fall of 2012 by Stephen F Austin State University Press. She also authored three chapbooks, most recently winter/windows from Miel books. She was a 2016 American Antiquarian Society Artist Fellow where she researched tin. She lives with her husband and daughters in Maine where she teaches at the University of Maine, Farmington, co-directs the Longfellow Mountains Young Writers Workshop. She also has a Young Adult novel forthcoming from Dial.

Jerad W. Alexander

Author with bylines in @rollingstone, @esquire, @ozy, @narratively and elsewhere. Editor of Natelys. USMC combat veteran

Mark Galarrita

Mark Galarrita is a Filipino American writer and a graduate of the 2017 Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. His work can be found in Mcsweeneys, Electric Literature, Split Lip, and elsewhere. Currently, he is the editor of the Black Warrior Review. "Homeboy" is an excerpt from his novel "Thanks For Your Service." Follow him on Twitter (@MarkGalarrita) and check out his web site: markgalarrita.wordpress.com

Claudia Hinz

Claudia Hinz graduated with honors from Harvard and received her MA in English from Southern Methodist University. She began her journalism career as a television reporter working for network affiliates in Northern California, Seattle and Dallas. Her essays, articles, book reviews and fiction have appeared in The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, 1859 Oregon’s Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bend Lifestyle Magazine and BLUNTMoms. Her first novel is out on submission with Writers House in New York

Amanda Fields

Amanda Fields co-edited My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After (forthcoming The Experiment Press, May 2019) with Rachel Moritz. Other publications include Indiana Review, Brevity, So to Speak, and Nashville Review. She is an Assistant Professor of English and the Writing Center Director at Central Connecticut State University. "Buffalo" placed third in (b)OINK's 2017 flash fiction contest, judged by Kathy Fish. Learn more at amandajfields.com or on Twitter at @aj_fields. Author photo by John Lovretta.

Patrick Medema

Patrick hails from the great state of Illinois. He has been a member of the armed forces for 14 years and still enjoys his work. When not at work, or working on his writing, he is spending time with his wife and kids. He currently lives in San Diego.

D.F. Brown

Born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks, D.F. Brown served as a medic with Bravo, 1/14th Infantry in Vietnam, 1969–70. Educated at the University of Missouri and San Francisco State University, he is the author of Returning Fire, The Other Half of Everything, and Assuming Blue. His work has been anthologized in American War Poetry, Carrying the Darkness, and Unaccustomed Mercy. Brown lives in Houston.

Patrick Hicks

Patrick Hicks is the author of over ten books, including The Collector of Names, In the Shadow of Dora, Adoptable, and This London—he also wrote the critically and popularly acclaimed novel, The Commandant of Lubizec. His work has appeared on NPR, The PBS Newshour, American Life in Poetry, and his work has appeared in some of the most prominent literary journals in North America. He has won a number of grants, including ones from the Bush Artist Foundation, The Loft Literary Center, the South Dakota Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. After living in Europe for many years, he now lives in the Midwest where he is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University as well as a faculty member in the MFA program at the University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. His latest novel is Across the Lake.

Nicole Oquendo

NICOLE OQUENDO is the author of several chapbooks of poetry including 'wringing gendered we' (2016, Zoo Cake Press), 'Space Baby' (2016, ELJ Publications), 'Telomeres' (2016, Zoetic Press), and a forthcoming visual poetry collection called 'we, animals' (Wicked Banshee Press). She is a nonfiction editor for The Florida Review. // JAMES A.H. WHITE is a first-generation Asian-American currently residing in Maryland. He is the winner of an AWP Intro Journals Project award (selected by Iris Jamahl Dunkle) and five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in renowned publications such as Best New British & Irish Poets 2018 (selected by Maggie Smith). Black Warrior Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Flyway: A Journal of Writing & Environment, Gertrude Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Lambda Literary, New Orleans Review, Nimrod International Journal, Passages North (online), Quarterly West, River Styx, Tahoma Literary Review, The Journal, Washington Square Review, and wildness, among many others. Also nominated for inclusion in Best New Poets 2018 and Bettering American Poetry Vol. 2 anthologies, his full-length manuscript was a recent finalist for Hub City Press’s New Southern Voices Poetry Prize. He is the author of hiku [pull], a chapbook (Porkbelly Press, 2016).

Roy G. Guzman and Miguel M. Morales

Roy G. Guzmán was born in Honduras and raised in Miami. Their work has been featured in Kenyon Review, Verse of April, and The Best American Poetry blog. Guzmán has earned degrees from Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and the Honors College at Miami Dade College. They are the recipient of a 2016–2017 Minnesota State Arts Board grant, the 2016 Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry, two Pushcart prize nominations, four Best of the Net nominations, and a 2015 Gesell Award honorable mention in fiction. In 2017, Guzmán was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Guzmán lives in Minneapolis, where they are pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Minnesota. // Miguel M. Morales grew up in Texas working as a migrant/seasonal farmworker. He is a Lambda Literary Fellow and an alum of the Macondo Writers Workshop. His work appears in From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction, Hibernation and Other Poems by Bear Bards, Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland, and in Raspa and Pilgrimage magazines, Duende Journal, Green Mountains Review, and Texas Poetry Review, among others. He is also the co-editor of Pulse/Pulso anthology for Orlando. Miguel laughs, cries, and writes in Kansas (yes, mija, there are queer Latinx in Kansas).

Curtis J. Graham

Curtis is a writer from New Hampshire, and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He is a Candidate in the Mountainview MFA program, where he is writing a memoir about finding hope in disillusionment. Curtis is a contributor at Assignment Magazine Online, and his essay “Romance” will appear in Vol. 61 of The Literary Review.

Kiley Bense

Kiley Bense is a writer and journalist based in New York. Her essays have appeared online for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Rumpus, Saveur, and Narratively, among others. You can read her work at kileybense.com and follow her on Twitter at @kileybense.

Ulf Pike

Ulf Pike is a fifth generation Montanan and a combat veteran. He spends his summers in Idaho staffing a fire lookout for the Forest Service with his dog Zuul. When not fortifying himself for approaching lightning storms, scanning the forest for smoke, or watching turkey vultures spiral effortlessly upward, Ulf is most likely bowed over his mother's 1965 Royal Safari, snapping ink into paper. He's been published in previous issues of Wrath-Bearing Tree, SmokeLongQuarterly (https://www.smokelong.com/stories/mother-of-god/), and was recently published in the excellent Line Literary Review: https://www.thelineliterary.org/ulf-pike.

Jennifer Orth-Veillon

Jennifer A. Orth-Veillon, who holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Emory University, curates the WWrite blog from the perspective of a writer, scholar, teacher, and French-English translator specializing in the literature of war and the experience of the American veteran. She has led writing workshops for veterans on university campuses and has taught over twenty courses on different modes and mediums for war veteran memoirs. For two summers she served as a teaching assistant to Dr. Mark Facknitz's James Madison University's summer abroad program on the Great War and modern memory, which took place at various WWI memorial sites in France, Belgium, and England. In her writing and research, she seeks to understand the complexity of war through its shifting place in cultural memory and history.

Aubrey Dunn

John McNamara

John M. McNamara’s short fiction has been published in Crosscurrents, Old Hickory Review, the Piedmont Literary Review, the Minotaur, Snapdragon, Four Quarters, FlashFiction, Quick Fiction, Bear River Review, Inside Running, Prairie Light Review, and Hypertext Magazine. His short story, “Testimony,” won first prize in the College of DuPage 2016 Writer’s Read Emerging Voices contest. In the summer of 1999, he was awarded a professional artist residency at the OxBow Summer Arts Program for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Saugatuck, Michigan

JD Duff

JD Duff obtained a Master of Arts in Writing and a Master of Arts in Teaching English Education from Manhattanville College. She taught college level writing for seven years. Married to a Marine Corps and Navy veteran, she has also worked with many combat veterans to help improve their writings. Some of her publications may be found in Storgy Magazine, Crack the Spine, and Melancholy Hyperbole.

Jacob Siegel

Jacob Siegel is a writer, intellectual, poet, and Army veteran whose work has appeared in many publications including Tablet Magazine and The Daily Beast.

Patrick Mondaca

Patrick Mondaca served in Baghdad, Iraq with the Connecticut National Guard in 2003 and later earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, and Military Experience & the Arts.

Sari Fordham

Sari Fordham's essays have appeared in Brevity, Best of the Net Anthology, Passages North, Green Mountains Reviews, and others. Her memoir about growing up in Uganda, 'Wait for God to Notice,' was published by Etruscan Press in 2021 and was described as "gripping, astutely written, and moving."

Janaya Martin

Janaya Martin is a Minneapolis poet and mother of three. Between poems, chasing children and amateur gardening, she works in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota and hosts a monthly reading series, Writers Read, at The Coffee Shop Northeast. Janaya had a tumultuous childhood--teenage parents, drug addiction, violence--and uses poetry as a way to reflect on and rewrite her history. Through her work and her reading series she hopes to inspire people to “write it out”, to be authentic and unashamed, and to be wholly present in their lives. Her poems have appeared in Oddball Magazine, The Grief Diaries, The Real Us, AutoAnatta, Juste Milieu and Gyroscope Review. Her first book of poetry, Tiptoe and Whisper, was released in March 2016. She blogs at janayamartin.wordpress.com.

Rachel Kambury

Rachel Kambury is a writer, editor, and publishing professional specializing in war and military literature and history. She earned a BA in literature from Eugene Lang College in 2013 and studied war history at the American University of Paris. She lives and works in New York City.

Hilary Plum

Hilary Plum is the author of the novel Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose (2018); the work of nonfiction Watchfires (2016), winner of the 2018 GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction; and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013). She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program, and is associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press.

Abdi Nor Iftin

Abdi Nor Iftin is a naturally gifted speaker and story teller. His stories have been featured on various radio and television stations, most recently on BBC and This American Life. Abdi’s stories are personal narratives about growing up in a country shredded by a civil war and radical Islamists and about his sheer luck to win a green card lottery to immigrate to the United States in 2014. He is currently living and working in Maine and his book Call Me American comes out on June 19th.

Lynn Houston

Lynn Marie Houston holds a Ph.D. in English from Arizona State University and an MFA from Southern Connecticut State University. A Fulbright scholar (Switzerland 1994-1998), she has also held writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Art Farm. Her first collection of poetry, The Clever Dream of Man (Aldrich Press 2015), won the 2016 Connecticut Press Club prize for creative work and went on to take 2nd place in the nationwide competition sponsored by the National Federation of Press Women. Her recent work focuses on the legacy of her father’s service in Vietnam and the challenges veterans’ face in reintegrating into civilian life after combat. Unguarded, her collection of poem-letters to a deployed soldier, was the winner of The Heartland Review Press inaugural chapbook contest in 2017. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals such as O-Dark-Thirty, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ocean State Review, Word Riot, Gravel, Squalorly, and many others. She is the founding editor of Five Oaks Press and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. For the 2016-2017 academic year, she served as poetry editor for the Noctua Review.

Liam Corley

Liam Corley has taught American literature at Cal Poly since 2005. He teaches primarily texts written before 1900, but occasionally poetry, veterans studies, and Asian American from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the Bible as Literature. In 2008-2009, he was deployed to Afghanistan as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and since that time he has published several essays, poems, and stories on the connections between literature, the university world, and military life. Most recently, he was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Helen Benedict

Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven novels, five books of nonfiction, and a play. Her just-published novel Wolf Season was called "required reading" by Elissa Schappell and received a starred review in Library Journal, which wrote, “In a book that deserves the widest attention, Benedict ‘follows the war home,’ engaging readers with an insightful story right up until the gut-wrenching conclusion.” Benedict's previous novel, Sand Queen, was named a “Best Contemporary War Novel” by Publishers Weekly.

Krystal Sital

Krystal A. Sital was born in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and moved to the United States in 1999. A PEN Award finalist and Hertog fellow, she holds an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Today's Parent, the Margins, the Caribbean Writer, Brain Child, and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and children.

Sherrie Fernandez-Williams

Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, author of Soft: A Memoir holds an MFA in Writing from Hamline University. She is a recipient of an Artist Initiative Award through the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Beyond the Pure Fellowship and SASE/Jerome Grant through Intermedia Arts of Minneapolis. She was a Loft Mentor Series winner for Creative Nonfiction, a Jones’ Commission Award Winner through the Playwrights’ Center and was selected for the Givens Black Writers Collaborative Retreat. She's been published in various literary journals and anthologies such as Aquifer: Florida Review, Subtle-Tea, R-CVRY, Segue, Summit Avenue Review, Branches, The Poverty and Education Reader and How Dare We! Write. Fernandez-Williams discovered her need for words in Brooklyn, New York, where she was born and raised, but she “grew up” as a writer in the Twin Cities. Currently, she resides in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Yuan Changming

Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan and hosts Happy Yangsheng in Vancouver. Credits include ten Pushcart & three Best of the Net nominations, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 1,399 others across 41 countries.

Will Mackin

Will Mackin is a veteran of the U.S. Navy His work has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Tin House, and The New York Times Magazine. His story “Kattekoppen” was selected by Jennifer Egan for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2014, and his essay about being an extra on Breaking Bad, published in GQ, was nominated for an American Society of Magazine Editors “Ellie” award. Mackin’s debut collection of short stories, Bring Out the Dog, is on sale now.

M.C. Armstrong

M. C. Armstrong embedded with JSOF in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. He published extensively on the Iraq war through The Winchester Star. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Esquire, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Mayday, Monkeybicycle, Epiphany, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. His memoir, 'The Mysteries of Haditha,' was published in 2020 and his acclaimed first novel 'American Delphi, the first part of a trilogy and excerpted here, was published in October 2022 by Milspeak Books. Recently, he curated and edited an issue of The American Book Review called 'Soldier Writing.' He is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Viva la Muerte and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with Yorick, his corgi, whose interruptions to his writing are frequent but welcome.

Peter Molin

Peter Molin is a retired US Army infantry officer. For over ten years, his blog Time Now has chronicled art, film, and literature about the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the coming year, he will write a monthly column titled “Strike Through the Mask” for Wrath-Bearing Tree exploring matters of war, military, and veteran interest.

Lauren Hough

Lauren Hough was raised in seven countries, and West Texas. She’s been an Air Force Airman, a green-aproned barista, a bartender, and a stand-up comic. Her work has appeared in Granta, the Guardian Observer, and the Daily Beast. She lives in Austin.

Jay Nicorvo

JAY BARON NICORVO lives on an old farm outside Battle Creek, Michigan, with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their son, and a couple dozen vulnerable chickens. He is the author of a novel, The Standard Grand (St. Martin's Press), picked for IndieBound's Indie Next List, Library Journal's Spring 2017 Debut Novels Great First Acts, and named "New and Noteworthy" by Poets & Writers. He's published a poetry collection, Deadbeat (Four Way), and his nonfiction can be found in The Baffler, The Iowa Review, and The Believer. Find Jay at www.nicorvo.net.

Mary Doyle

Mary L. Doyle aimed to prove her brother wrong when she joined the Army on his dare. Almost two decades later, she not only confirmed that she could, contrary to his warning, make it through basic training, her combat boots took her to the butt-end of nowhere and back countless times and she lived to tell about it … or write about it as it turned out. Unafraid of genre jumping, Mary has co-authored two memoirs, including those of Shoshana Johnson, which covers her time as POW in the Iraq War; a three-book mystery series, a four-novella erotic romance series, and has just published the first book in a planned urban fantasy series. Mary served almost two decades in the Army Reserve and spent much of her civilian career telling the Army story as an Army broadcaster through stories, documentaries, spots and training videos. Stationed in Germany and Korea and the U.S., her work has taken her to the far corners of the world from Central America to the Middle East and all across Western and Eastern Europe.

Amalie Flynn

Amalie Flynn is a poet and the author of FLESH (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH (Middle West Press, 2021), WIFE AND WAR: THE MEMOIR (2013) and a collection of poetry blogs: SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH, WIFE AND WAR, THE SUSTAINABILITY OF US, BORDER OF HEARTBREAK, and NOT YOURS TO DESTROY. Flynn’s writing has appeared in THE THINGS WE CARRY STILL, AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW, BEYOND THEIR LIMITS OF LONGING, THE NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, and THE HUFFINGTON POST and has received mention from THE NEW YORK TIMES and CNN. Flynn has a BA in English/Studio Arts, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Humanities. Flynn lives in Rhode Island with her husband and their two children.

Lisa Stice

Lisa Stice is a poet/mother/military spouse. She is the author of three full-length collections, Forces (Middle West Press, 2021), Permanent Change of Station (Middle West Press, 2018) and Uniform (Aldrich Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Desert (Prolific Press, 2018). While it is difficult to say where home is, she currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter and dog. You can learn more about her and her publications at lisastice.wordpress.com, at facebook.com/LisaSticePoet, and on Twitter @LisaSticePoet

Abby Murray

Abby E. Murray teaches creative writing at the University of Washington Tacoma, where she also offers free workshops for soldiers, veterans and their loved ones. She is the editor of Collateral, an online literary journal that showcases writing about the impact of military service beyond the combat zone. A recent recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, Abby has poems in current or forthcoming issues of Prairie Schooner, Radar, and Minerva Rising. She is the author of a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, How to Be Married After Iraq, and a collection of poetry which won the 2019 Perugia Press competition, Hail and Farewell.

Taylor Brown

Taylor Brown is the author of In the Season of Blood and Gold (Press 53, 2014), Fallen Land (St. Martin's Press, 2016), The River of Kings (2017), Gods of Howl Mountain (2018), and Pride of Eden (2020). You can find his work in The New York Times, The Rumpus, Garden & Gun, the North Carolina Literary Review, and many other publications. He is a recipient of the Montana Prize in Fiction and the founder of BikeBound.com. He lives in Savannah, GA.

J. E. McCollough

J. E. McCollough is a Marine combat veteran and the author of the poetry collection, Aftermath.

Nathan Webster

NATHAN WEBSTER REPORTED FROM IRAQ IN 2007-09 AS A FREELANCE PHOTOJOURNALIST. HE IS ALSO AN ARMY VETERAN OF DESERT STORM. HIS WORK APPEARS IN MANY PUBLICATIONS.

Julia Wendell

"A Beautiful Day to be Buried" won the 2015 Consequence Magazine Poetry Award. Julia's most recent poetry books are "Take This Spoon" and "The Sorry Flowers." She is currently finishing a memoir, "Come to the X," which is a sequel to "Finding My Distance: A Year in the Life of a Three-day Event Rider." Julia recently moved to Aiken, South Carolina, with her five horses, two Labs, one cat, one fish, and husband—poet and essayist, Barrett Warner.

Maurice Decaul

Maurice Emerson Decaul, a former Marine, is a poet, essayist, and playwright, whose writing has been featured in the New York Times, The Daily Beast, Sierra Magazine, Epiphany, Callaloo, Narrative and others. His poems have been translated into French and Arabic and his theatrical works, Holding it Down and Sleep Song, collaborations with composer Vijay Iyer and poet Mike Ladd, have been produced and performed at New York City’s Harlem Stage, Washington DC’s Atlas Intersections Festival, in Paris and in Antwerp. His play Dijla Wal Furat, Between the Tigris and the Euphrates was produced in New York City by Poetic Theater Productions in the winter of 2015. Maurice is a graduate of Columbia University [BA] and New York University [MFA]. He is currently pursuing a MFA degree in playwriting at Brown

David Abrams

David Abrams is the author of Brave Deeds and Fobbit, two novels about the Iraq War. His short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appeared in the anthologies Montana Noir, Watchlist, and Fire and Forget. Other stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salon, F(r)iction, High Desert Journal, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, Consequence, and many other publications. He lives in Helena, Montana with his wife.

Jennifer Murphy

Jennifer Murphy is an award-winning writer and performer whose work has been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies. A recipient of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award honoring excellence in multicultural literature, she has performed her work at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, Kitting Factory, The Nuyorican Poets Café, and will be featured at TEDWomen in November 2017. Jennifer also maintains a parallel career as a private investigator in the business intelligence and security sectors, specializing in online investigations, crisis communications, and threat monitoring for high-consequence events. She moonlights as an E.M.T. Jennifer holds a B.A. from Syracuse University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from NYU, where she assisted with the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop. She lives in Brooklyn.

Daniel Ford

Daniel Ford is the author of Sid Sanford Lives! and Black Coffee. He’s also the co-founder of Writer’s Bone, a literary podcast and website that champions aspiring and established authors. A Bristol, Connecticut, native (and longtime Queens, N.Y., transplant), Ford now lives with his wife Stephanie in Boston’s North End, where coffee and cannoli are always within arm’s reach. Author photo by Cristina Cianci.

Denise Jarrott

Denise Jarrott is the author of the chapbook Nine Elegies (dancing girl press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Bombay Gin, Bat City Review, small po[r]tions and elsewhere. She grew up in Iowa and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Steven Kiernan

Steven Kiernan is a short story and essay writer. He is a veteran of the Iraq War and U.S. Marine Corps, where he served as an infantryman from 2005-2010. During that time, he was wounded in an IED blast which resulted in the amputation of both legs and spent two years recovering at Walter Reed Army Hospital. After being medically discharged he received a BA in English Literature from the University of Virginia and is now pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Oregon. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and O-Dark-Thirty. He currently lives in Eugene, OR with his wife and two dogs.

Aaron Wallace

Aaron Wallace is a former U.S. Army Medic. During his enlistment he served as a combat medic, rape crisis counselor, and women’s health coordinator. Since Aaron’s honorable discharge in 2013 he has graduated from Jacksonville University (JU) with honors. At JU he won several prizes for his poetry and held the Editor-in-Chief position for the Aquarian, the university’s arts and literary journal. Aaron is currently in the first semester of his MFA at Lesley University. Outside of writing poetry, Aaron manages the Jacksonville University Writing Center. and is an avid supporter of Liverpool Football Club. He lives with his beautiful wife, Darby, and their dog, Benji, in Jacksonville, Florida.

Scott Price

J. Scott Price served as an infantryman in the Virginia Army National Guard from 1986 to 2011, and deployed in support of OIF and OEF during that time. Though he occasionally wrote poetry during his time in service, he's been slowly allowing it a more prominent place in his life, and recently began MFA in Writing studies at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He now volunteers with numerous veteran service organizations and, for fun, sings barbershop harmony. Please feel free to connect with him on Twitter, @ABoyAndHisSons.

Teresa Fazio

Teresa Fazio is a former Marine Corps officer and award-winning writer. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Task and Purpose, and Penthouse, among other outlets. In addition to Consequence Magazine, her fiction has been featured in the anthology The Road Ahead: Stories of the Forever War. Her memoir, FIDELIS, is forthcoming in September 2020 from Potomac Books. She lives in New York City.

Race Hochdorf

Race Hochdorf is a writer and private military contractor. His work has been featured at The Humanist, Intellectual Takeout, Thought Catalog, and Areo Magazine. His website is www.racehochdorf.com.

Justice Castaneda

Justice Castañeda serves as the Executive Director of Common Wealth Development, a long-standing community development organization in Madison, WI, and is completing his dissertation work in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. An educator and community development specialist by trade, Justice’s professional and academic work explores the intersections of housing policy, economic development and community violence, looking at the role these intersections play in educational & life outcomes for youth who have experienced traumatic events in early childhood and adolescence. His most recent research explores the relationship between land-use polices (including housing policy) and economic / educational outcomes for youth in Madison, WI. His academic career began at the Red Caboose Early Childhood Center in Madison, and his professional career began in the US Marine Corps, where he served for 8 years before being honorably discharged.

J.J. Starr

J.J. Starr was born and raised all over the Chicagoland Area. She received her MFA from New York University. Her work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Apeiron, and Stirring. She lives with her three dozen plants in Brooklyn.

Therese Cox

Therese Cox lives in Brooklyn. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Stinging Fly, gorse, Banshee, and The Brooklyn Rail. She has taken writing workshops with Words After War and is currently a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Yael Hacohen

Yael Hacohen has an MFA in Poetry at New York University where she was an Adjunct Professor, an NYU Veterans Workshop Fellow, and International Editor at Washington Square Review. Her poems appear in The Poetry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Every Day Poets Magazine, Nine Lines Literary Review, and many more. She was a finalist in the 2015 Glimmer Train Very Short Story Competition, Consequence Poetry Prize, and the 2013 MSLexia Poetry Prize for Women. In the fall of 2017, she will begin her PhD in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

Ben LeRoy

Ben LeRoy is the founder and publisher of the critically acclaimed publishing companies Bleak House Books (2000-2009) and Tyrus Books (2009-2017). Ben works as a freelance editor, helping authors identify the story they intend to tell and how to best tell it. In 2014, after the suicide death of a friend, Ben did volunteer work in all 50 states as part of the Be Local Everywhere project. In addition to his role on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree, Ben serves on the board of Common Wealth Development. He lives in Madison, WI.

Andria Williams

Andria Williams is the author of The Longest Night (Random House, 2016), which was Amazon's debut novel for January of that year and a Barnes & Noble "Discover" pick. Since 2014 she has been the editor of the Military Spouse Book Review, which publishes essays and book reviews by women connected to the military. Andria grew up in northern California with public-school-teacher parents, got her English degree from UC-Berkeley and her M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Mary Carroll-Hackett

Mary Carroll-Hackett is the author of six collections of poetry: The Real Politics of Lipstick, Animal Soul, If We Could Know Our Bones, The Night I Heard Everything, Trailer Park Oracle, and A Little Blood, A Little Rain. Her newest collection, Death for Beginners, will be out from Kelsey Books in September 2017. Mary teaches in the Creative Writing programs at Longwood University and with the low-residency MFA faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan. Mary is currently at work on a novel.

Gregory Brereton

Gregory Brereton is originally from Long Island, New York. He currently resides in central Pennsylvania.

Katey Schultz

Katey Schultz grew up in Portland, Oregon, and is most recently from Celo, North Carolina. She is a graduate of the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program and recipient of the Linda Flowers Literary Award from the North Carolina Humanities Council. She lives in a 1970 Airstream trailer bordering the Pisgah National Forest. This is her first book. Learn more at www.kateyschultz.com.

Matthew J. Hefti

Matthew J. Hefti is the author of A Hard and Heavy Thing (Gallery / Simon & Schuster 2016), which was named to Booklist's Top Ten Debut Novels of 2016 and Military Times Top Ten Novels of the Year. A Hard and Heavy Thing was also awarded the Wisconsin Library Association's Outstanding Achievement Recognition, and it was selected by the Women's National Book Association as a Great Group Read for National Book Club Month in 2016. Matthew's work has appeared in print in anthologies such as The Road Ahead: Fiction from the Forever War (Pegasus Books 2017), Retire the Colors (Hudson Whitman 2016), MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2014) and others. His literary criticism and cultural and personal essays have appeared at Literary Hub and Electric Literature, among many others. Matthew is a fiction and poetry editor for the Wrath-Bearing Tree. He spent 12 years as an explosive ordnance disposal technician, deploying twice to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. While enlisted, he earned a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing. After he left the military, he got his JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School. He lives with his family in Houston, Texas.

Adrian Bonenberger

Adrian Bonenberger is a writer. He published his war memoirs, Afghan Post, through The Head and The Hand Press.

Drew Pham

Drew Pham is a queer, transgender writer of Vietnamese heritage. A child of war refugees, her work centers on legacies of violence in times of conflict. She has published in Blunderbuss Magazine, McSweeny's, Slice Magazine, Foreign Policy, Time Magazine, The Daily Beast, and Columbia Journal, among others. She lives with her two cats in Brooklyn, NY, and serves as an adjunct English lecturer at CUNY Brooklyn College.

Dan Murphy

Dan Murphy is a former Marine. He lives in Connecticut and works in New York City.

Randy Brown

Randy Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. A 20-year veteran with a previous overseas deployment, he subsequently authored the 2015 poetry collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire. He also co-edited the 2019 Military Writers Guild-sponsored anthology Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War. As “Charlie Sherpa,” he blogs about poetry at www.fobhaiku, and about military-themed writing at www.aimingcircle.com.

David Tomlinson

T. Mazzara

T. Mazzara was born in Virginia.

Genevra MacPhail

Genevra MacPhail writes fiction, poetry, essays, and plays. She’s an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts, studying fiction, and has also spent many years performing in and producing theater. She lives in Burlington, Vermont with her husband and daughter.

Michael Carson

Michael Carson served in the U.S. Army Infantry from 2005 to 2009. He studied history and fiction in New England and now lives on the Texas Gulf Coast.

David James

David James served as a Fire Support Officer in the 173d Airborne in Afghanistan from 2005-2006 and 2007-2008. He now teaches History in Italy where he lives with his wife and twin daughters. His hobbies include reading, writing, and rock climbing. He agrees with Borges that "reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual".