We’re proud to feature these awesome folks in our lit mag and are excited they’ve chosen our journal as a home for their work. Read about who keeps us going, and check out some of their great writing while you’re at it.
Erin Carlyle
Erin Carlyle’s work has been featured in literary magazines such as Up the Staircase Quarterly and Driftwood Press, and forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. Her chapbook, You Spit Hills and My Body, is published with Dancing Girl Press. She holds a MA in Literary and Textual Studies from Bowling Green State University and a graduate certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from Western Kentucky University. Currently she is the Assistant Poetry Editor of Mid-American Review and holds a MFA from Bowling Green State University.
Cathryn Cofell
Cathryn Cofell is a poet with one full-length collection called Sister Satellite, six chapbooks, numerous awards and a music/poetry CD called Lip. She is a passionate advocate for the arts, helping to launch the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and its endowment fund, the literary journal Verse Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poetry Chapbook Prize and the Poetry Unlocked reading series. www.cathryncofell.com
Lisa Fay Coutley
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether (Black Lawrence Press, April 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award, and In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Rona Jaffe scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize. Recent prose and poetry appears in AGNI, Blackbird, Brevity, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, Passages North, Pleiades, and The Los Angeles Review. She is an Assistant Professor of Poetry & CNF in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she coordinates the WRWS Reading Series and advises the student journal 13thFloor.
Romana Iorga
Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga lives in Switzerland. She is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian. Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Lunch Ticket, American Literary Review, and others, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.
Chelsea Kerwin
Chelsea Kerwin earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University and won two Devine Fellowships while completing a poetry thesis. She resides in Baltimore with her partner and their owner, a Siberian husky named Ares. She has been published in The Madison Review, The Tulane Review, Contrary, and Hobart.
J. Ray Paradiso
J. Ray Paradiso is a recovering academic in the process of refreshing himself as an experiMENTAL artist and writer. His work has appeared in dozens of publications online and in print. Equipped with cRaZy quilt graduate degrees in both Philosophy and Business Administration, he labors to fill psycho-social, temporal-spatial holes and, on good days, to enjoy the flow. All of his work is dedicated to his true love, sweet muse and body guard: Suzi Skoski Wosker Doski.
Madison Roe
Madison Roe is earning her BA in Creative Writing at Auburn University. She enjoys writing literary fiction and fantasy and is always carrying around a writer’s journal. She resides in Auburn, Al with her son Alec. This is her first time being published.
Laura Serwe
Laura Serwe has been published in Sundog Lit, Sheepshead Review, Mad Hat Lit, and is forthcoming in The Canopy Review. She works part-time at the Public Defender and as an adjunct instructor. She and her husband live in Columbia, MO with their imaginary dog, Professor Pugglesworth.
The Crossing 