Founder and Executive Director at Sundress Publications; Executive Director of the Sundress Academy for the Arts; Founding Editor & Consulting Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Stirring: A Literary Collection; President of the Board of Directors

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Executive Editor of Sundress Publications. She is the author of three full-length collections, most recently DOWN, which was released by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2020. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Guernica, Ecotone, Mid-American, Crab Orchard Review, Waxwing, and Willow Springs, among others. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and teaches in the English Department at the University of Tennessee.

Managing Editor at Sundress Publications; Managing Editor of Best of the Net; Member of the Board of Directors

Anna Black received her MFA at Arizona State University, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Collagist, The Seattle Times, Hotel Amerika, 45th Parallel, Bacopa Review, Wordgathering, SWWIM, The American Journal of Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and New Mobility among others. She has taught composition, creative writing, and/or publishing at Arizona State University, Western Washington University, Perryville Women’s Prison (as a guest lecturer), and the National University of Singapore.

Staff Director at Sundress Publications

Kanika Lawton is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and film scholar originally from Vancouver, British Columbia. She holds a BA in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia and an MA from the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is the Founding Editor-In-Chief of L’Éphémère Review, a 2018 Pink Door Fellow, and a 2020 BOAAT Writer’s Retreat Poetry Fellow. Her work has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Longleaf Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Parentheses Journal, among others. She is the author of the micro-chapbooks Wildfire Heart (The Poetry Annals, 2018), Loneliness, and Other Ways to Split a Body (Ghost City Press, 2018), Monster (Girl) Theory (post ghost press, 2019), and Theories on Wreckage (Ghost City Press, 2020).

Chapbook Series Editor at Sundress Publications

Kathleen Gullion is a writer whose work has appeared in The Boiler, X-R-A-Y Magazine, and Coachella Review, and onstage at various theaters in Chicago. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is based in Houston, where she works in medical simulation.

Acquisitions Editor & Associate Poetry Editor at Sundress Publications

Tierney Bailey is a loudmouth, a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and a dice-collecting gremlin. Currently, Tierney is the Acquisitions Editor and an Associate Poetry Editor with Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons,, slush reader for PodCastle, Publishing Assistant with Escape Artists Inc., and a freelancer. She has earned a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Tierney is most easily found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.

Fall 2021 Writer in Residence

JoAnna Brooker is a graduate from the University of Tennessee, where she studied Journalism & English. Her work has been featured in Figure 1, Jet Fuel Review, HASH Journal, Menacing Hedge, & on stage as a comic. In her spare time, she enjoys petting cats & making cheese-based meals for her loved ones. She can be found on all social media platforms @cupofjoanna.

Anthology Series Editor at Sundress Publications; Host of Shitty First Drafts

Brynn Martin is a Kansas native living in Knoxville, where she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee. She co-hosts Shitty First Drafts, a podcast made for and by writers. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Contrary Magazine, Yes, Poetry, Rogue Agent, and Crab Orchard Review.

Associate Fiction Editor at Sundress Publications

Saba Syed Razvi is the author of the collections In the Crocodile Gardens and heliophobia, as well as the chapbooks Limerence & Lux, Of the Divining and the Dead, and Beside the Muezzin’s Call & Beyond the Harem’s Veil. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Offending Adam, Diner, TheTHE Poetry Blog’s Infoxicated Corner, The Homestead Review, NonBinary Review, 10×3 plus, 13th Warrior Review, The Arbor Vitae Review, and Arsenic Lobster, and others, as well as in anthologies such as Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (forthcoming), Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality, The Loudest Voice Anthology, The Liddell Book of Poetry, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, The Rhysling Anthology, and Dreamspinning. Her works have been nominated for the 2017 Elgin Award, the Bettering American Poetry Awards, The Best of the Net Award, and the Rhysling Award, have appeared on the 2018 Stoker Award’s preliminary ballot and have received a 2015 Independent Best American Poetry Award. She earned her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in 2012. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX, where in addition to working on scholarly research on interfaces between science and contemporary poetry, she is researching Sufi poetry in translation, writing new poems and fiction, and developing community based-programs to highlight poetry and contemporary literature in the Crossroads region of Texas.

Associate Editor at Sundress Publications

Jeremy Michael Reed‘s poems and essays are published or forthcoming in Oxidant|Engine, Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere, including the anthology Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene. He holds a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee, where he was the editor-in-chief of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts and assistant to Joy Harjo. He is now an Assistant Professor of English at Westminster College in Fulton, MO.

Associate Editor at Sundress Publications

Sherrel McLafferty is a first-year doctoral student with Rhetoric and Writing Studies at Bowling Green State University, where she also received her BFA and MFA in Poetry. Her poems have been featured in Requited Journal, Merrimack Review, ArLiJo, and Notre Dame Review. She is currently a poetry editor for Pidgeonholes, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, and Split Lip Magazine.

Author Liaison and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications

Lee Anderson is a nonbinary writer from the American -west with an MFA from Northern Arizona University. They have been published sporadically but with zest, appearing or forthcoming in places such as The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, and Unstamatic Magazine.

Vice President of Board of Directors; Managing Editor of Craft Chaps

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, a first-generation Chicana, is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation and Poetry Foundation. Her work is published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit and a member of Macondo Writers’ Workshop.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications

Emily Capettini is the author of Thistle, winner of Omnidawn’s Fabulist Fiction Chapbook Contest. Her work has previously appeared in places such as Menacing Hedge, Noctua Review, and Stirring. Originally from Batavia, IL, she is now Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Fiction at Indiana State University.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications; Managing Editor of Craft Chaps; Secretary of Board of Directors

Meagan Cass’s first book, ActivAmerica, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction judged by Claire Vaye Watkins and was published in November 2017 by UNT Press. She is author of the chapbook Range of Motion (Magic Helicopter Press, 2014), and her stories have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, Joyland, and Puerto del Sol, among many others. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana Lafayette, where she was a founder of the online journal Rougarou. Her flash fiction was chosen by Dan Chaon for the Wigleaf Top 50 and appeared in Smokelong Quarterly‘s Best of the First Ten Years Anthology. An Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, she advises the undergraduate literary magazine The Alchemist Review and is founder and curator of the Shelterbelt Reading Series. She also co-organizes Gap Garden, a new fiction reading series based in St.Louis, where she lives with many plants.

Member of the Board of Directors; Poetry Coordinator for the Best of the Net Anthology

Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the poetry collections, Hands That Break & Scar (Sundress Publications, 2017) and All Day, Talking (dancing girl press, 2014). Her most recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Xicanx: Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century, IDK Magazine, and Five:2:One #thesideshow. Her new poetry project, Halfbreed Helene Navigates the Whole received a 2019-2020 Tacoma Artists Initiative Award. She recently joined the faculty at the University of Washington Tacoma where she teaches creative writing and Latinx/Chicanx-focused courses. A proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, Chavez serves as the poetry coordinator for Best of the Net Anthology and is currently in the market for her first multispeed bicycle.

Member of the Board of Directors; Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications; Editor-in-Chief of beestung

Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Native (Nanticoke) editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief of beestung, Editor-in-Chief and Features & Reviews Editor at ANMLY, Co-Editor at Bettering American Poetry, a reader at Atlas Review, and a Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology. She curated ANMLY‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio on mental health by trans and queer writers of color, a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, and edited Drunken Boat‘s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, “First Peoples, Plural.” They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant],” on place and meaning, and has guest edited for Glass Poetry‘s Poets Respond series. Sarah has previously read for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net and Curious Specimens anthologies and is a former Co-Curator at Poets in Pajamas. Formerly, they served as a VIDA Board Member.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications; Editor-in-Chief of Best of the Net; Member of the Board of Directors

Darren C. Demaree is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently So Clearly Beautiful (November 2019, Adelaide Books). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications

Alex DiFrancesco is a multi-genre writer whose work has appeared in Washington Post, Tin House, Brevity, New Ohio Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and more. Their novel All City (Seven Stories Press) and their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) were published in 2019, and their short story collection Transmutation (Seven Stories Press) is due in 2021. They are the prose editor at Flypaper Lit, where they also conduct the interview series And We Call Upon the Author to Explain.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications

Samantha Edmonds is the author of the chapbooks Pretty to Think So (Selcouth Station Press, 2019) and The Space Poet (forthcoming from Split Lip Press). Her fiction and nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in such journals as The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Mississippi Review, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She has formerly served as the Fiction Editor for Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts and as the Community Outreach Director for Sundress Academy for the Arts; currently, she works as the Assitant Fiction Editor for Sundress Publications and the Fiction Editor for Doubleback Review. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Tennessee. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in Columbia, MO, where she’s a PhD candidate in Fiction at the University of Missouri.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications

Ashley Elizabeth is a 20-something black poet and memoirist from Baltimore who draws inspiration from her city, her people, her space, and her body. She has been featured in journals such as Rose Water, Rat’s Ass Review, and For the Sonorous, among others.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications

FEYXUAN Nguyen is a disabled fey orchestral music composer, writer-poet, and illustrator-designer. They are also one half of swallow::tale press, a publishing house for Mad books. Their recent projects have involved the solo development of aesthetic interactive fiction games exploring the nuances not exclusive to the following: power, trauma, madness, nonbinariness, divinity, and monstrosity. Their 2021-22 game project is OCHITSUBAKI (demo on Steam now), and other current releases on itch include LYCHEE SEED (poetry novella / audio drama), HEAVEN’S YOLK (poem / illustration webgame), and HEAVEN’S EGG (poem / papertexture visual novel). LIAR, LIONESS 2 is currently releasing as a visual novel on itch. They can be found online at feyxuan.com.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications; Treasurer, Board of Directors

Nicole Oquendo is especially interested in nontraditional, multimodal compositions and translations in all genres. Their work can be found in numerous literary journals, as well as in the chapbooks some prophets, self is wolf, wringing gendered we, and Space Baby, and the hybrid memoir Telomeres. They have also curated the Sundress Publications anthology Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities. Nicole has also been serving the community since 2000, giving time as an editor to several literary journals and presses, and has been working as a writing educator since 2008.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications

Rebeca C. Rivera-Robayo is a writer and poet living in upstate New York. She graduated in 2008 with a B.A. in Creative Writing from Hunter College and in 2014 with an M.A. in Literature from Brooklyn College. Her first chapbook, City Doodles, was published in 2011. She was lead editor and contributing writer at New York Minute Magazine, and a freelance journalist for The Bronx Times and the Sullivan County Democrat. She is currently a full-time faculty member at SUNY Orange and is completing her doctoral degree at Drew University.

Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications

Claire Shang is a student at Columbia University, where she is an editor with The Columbia Review and The Blue and White Magazine. Her work has appeared in or been recognized by Peach Mag, No, Dear Magazine, and Smith College.

Staff Director, Sundress Academy for the Arts

Victoria Mullins recently graduated from the University of Tennessee with degrees in Creative Writing and Philosophy. She is currently working on her first collection of poetry and is enjoying all the learning and toiling over it. In her spare time, she enjoys rock climbing, mediocre cooking, and over preparing.

Literary Arts Director, Sundress Academy for the Arts

Elisha Brewer is a musical poet whose work focuses on the everyday—the absurd, the normal, and not so often pretty—life of the Black American woman. Through the use of dialect, her work pays special attention to her birthplace in the South and her roots up North. Elisha holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. She is also a participant in The 5th Woman Fellowship.

Reading Series Coordinator, Sundress Academy for the Arts

Stacy Estep is a fiction and nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in Atticus Review, bluemilk, and California Quarterly, among others. She has a background in indie publishing, web content creation, and public relations. For her fiction, she has been awarded a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center. After many years in Atlanta, she is now based in Knoxville, where she lives with her artist husband and two cats.

Films Director, Sundress Academy for the Arts

Bailey Martin is a writer and English student at the University of Tennessee. She was awarded the 2019 Michael Dennis Poetry Award and Margaret Artley Woodruff Award for Creative Writing. In her free time, she enjoys learning about linguistics, taking photos of cows, and thinking about the circus.

Community Outreach Director, Sundress Academy for the Arts

With origins in Manila and growing up in Knoxville, TN, Arlynn Dunn is interested in the intersections of poetry, speculative nonfiction, and amplifying representation of transnational adoptees in the context of the Asian American diaspora. A full-time pediatric occupational therapy assistant, Arlynn uses down time to grow as an emerging poet and reader, engage in community advocacy, and is frequently spotted at spoken word events, diving nose first into books, and sometimes flan at La Esperanza.

Gregory Warren received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tennessee in 2012, around the same time he began supporting improvement projects, maintenance, and daily operations at Firefly Farms. When he is not performing duties at the Oak Ridge National Lab, with the Army National Guard, or at Firefly Farms, he can be found riding motorcycles or tinkering in his home workshop.

Raised in Oak Ridge, TN, Joseph Minarick received his Bachelor of Science in Political Science from Excelsior College in Albany, New York. He enlisted in the Army in 1999 and commissioned as an Armor Officer in 2004. He is currently the Plans Officer for the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment, headquartered in Knoxville. Minarick’s interests in Appalachian history and sustainable development led him to co-found Firefly Farms with Dr. Erin Elizabeth Smith in 2012.

Development Director, Sundress Academy for the Arts

Korrin Bishop is a writer and editor with passions for mission-driven work and the great outdoors. Her writing is heavily influenced by a sense of place, as over time she has found home amongst California’s redwoods, Washington, D.C.’s cherry blossoms, Oregon’s caves, South Dakota’s badlands, Florida’s Everglades, and Appalachia’s Smoky Mountains. Korrin has written for the National Park Service, Misadventures Magazine, Sierra Magazine, and Fodor’s Travel, among others. She also works with nonprofit organizations to support their critical work in the social services, arts, and environmental spheres.

Nonfiction Coordinator for the Best of the Net Anthology

Ellen Orner was born and raised in Gary, Indiana, and holds a B.A. in creative writing from Valparaiso University. She has worked in higher ed communications and marketing since 2011, including the University of Montana, University of Tennessee, and Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. She has served as the nonfiction editor for Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts and currently volunteers as the nonfiction coordinator for the Best of the Net anthology.

Director of Prospect Research, Sundress Academy for the Arts

Anna Rider is a North Carolinian now living in Philadelphia with her dog. She graduated from Guilford College and the CUNY Graduate Center with degrees in English. She spends her time wandering around the city and being amazed by her friends’ art.

Fiction Coordinator for the Best of the Net Anthology

Tasha Coryell teaches English at the University of Alabama where she received her MFA. Her first collection of short stories, Hungry People, is coming out July 2018 from Split Lip Press. She’s had work featured in Word Riot, Whiskeypaper, DIAGRAM, Pank, and other journals.

Assistant Editor for the Best of the Net Anthology

Ashley Somwaru is an Indo-Caribbean woman who was born and raised in Queens, New York. As a storyteller and poet, her work is immersed in her mixed tongue, religious upbringings, superstitions, and cultural traditions that have made her into the red hibiscus she is. Her work has been published in Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Peach Velvet Magazine, A Gathering Together, No, Dear, and more. She is currently an MFA candidate at Queens College, City University of New York.

Assistant Editor for the Best of the Net Anthology

Millie Tullis is an MFA poetry candidate at George Mason University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Ninth Letter, Juked, Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, Mud Season Review, and elsewhere. She serves as the Assistant Editor for Best of the Net and Poetry Editor and Social Media Manager for Phoebe. She lives and writes in Northern Virginia.

Managing Editor of Craft Chaps

Amy Sayre Baptista’s fiction collection, PRIMITIVITY (2018), was a Black River Chapbook Competition Winner. Her writing has appeared in The Best Small Fictions (2017), Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other journals. She was a SAFTA fellow (2015), a CantoMundo Poetry fellow (2013), and a scholarship recipient to the Disquiet Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal (2011). She is a co-founder of Plates&Poetry, a community arts program focused on food and writing. She has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Managing Editor of Doubleback Review and The Wardrobe

For money, Krista Cox has been a paralegal at an environmental and insurance coverage firm for almost two decades. For joy, she’s Managing Editor of Doubleback Review, which publishes pieces that disappeared with defunct journals, an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection, and the founder and Executive Director of Lit Literary Collective, a nonprofit serving her local literary community. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Journal, Crab Fat Magazine, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She’s an anti-racist, atheist, feminist, vegan cat lady just tryin’ to be her best self.

Managing Editor of Doubleback Books

After a 20-year career teaching composition, creative writing and literature and a decade-long career serving in the roles of Curator, Guest Editor and Series Editor for literary journals, Metta Sáma is transitioning into a career in publishing. Metta is author of the chapbooks the year we turned dragon (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs), le animal and other creatures (Miel), After After/After Sleeping to Dream (Nous-zot Press), and Nocturne Trio (Yes Yes Books) and the full-length collections, South of Here (published under her legal name) and Swing at your own risk (Kelsey Street Press). Co-winner of the 2016 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from Poetry Society of America, Metta’s poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, literary scholarship & book reviews have been published in various literary journals and anthologies. Founder of Artists Against Police Brutality/Cultures of Violence, a Senior Fellow of Black Earth Institute and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Black Radish Books, Metta has long advocated for equitable access to the art and for equity and parity in the arts.

Poetry Editor of Doubleback Books

Danielle Hanson is the author of Fraying Edge of Sky (Codhill Press Poetry Prize, 2018) and Ambushing Water (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in over 80 journals, won the Vi Gale Award from Hubbub, was Finalist for 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award and was nominated for several Pushcarts and Best of the Nets. She is Poetry Editor for Doubleback Books and is on the staff of the Atlanta Review. Her poetry has been the basis for visual art included in the exhibit EVERLASTING BLOOM at the Hambidge Center Art Gallery, and Haunting the Wrong House, a puppet show at the Center for Puppetry Arts.

Prose Editor at Doubleback Books

Rebecca Youé is a professional editor from Worcestershire, England. She has a degree in English and American Literature from Keele University and has worked in the publishing industry since graduating in 2012. In 2020 she was a reader for the Highland Book Prize. She is working on her first novel in her spare time.

Assistant Prose Editor at Doubleback Books

Bayleigh Kasper recently graduated from the University of Evansville with a creative writing degree, where she was the co-Editor-in-Chief of The Evansville Review. She dreams of owning a tiny home in her native Colorado where she can adopt cats, make music, write, and eat very judge-worth amounts of chocolate without actually being judged.

Assistant Editor-at-Large at Doubleback Books

Robin Gow is a trans queer poet and Young Adult author from rural Pennsylvania. Gow earned their MFA from Adelphi University where they also teach. Gow runs the trans & queer reading series Gender Reveal Party and serves as a Managing Editor at MAYDAY magazine and The Nasiona. They served for four years as the production editor of the Lantern literary magazine. Also working to produce several zines, Gow loves DIY publishing. Gow is also the author of the chapbook Honeysuckle by Finishing Line Press and the collection Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy by Tolsun Books. Their first collection of essays, Blue Blood, is forthcoming spring 2021 with Nasiona Publishing House, and their first Young Adult novel, A Million Quiet Revolutions, is forthcoming Winter 2022 with FSG Books for Young Readers. Their chapbooks have been finalists for competitions hosted by New Delta Review, Glass Poetry, Black Lawerence Press, Digging Press, and Thirty-West Publishing House. Their poetry has recently been recognized by Best New Poets, Brooklyn Poets, Brain Mill Press, and Fearsome Creatures.

Coordinator for Poets in Pajamas

Sarah Jordan Stout has published poems in Connotation Press, Rust+Moth, Sleet, Stirring, and others, and is serving as an associate poetry editor with Stirring: A Literary Collection. She has a masters degree in literature from West Virginia University and currently works with an environmental nonprofit fighting pollution and fossil fuel buildout across the state of Texas.

Coordinator for Poets in Pajamas

Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Louisiana. She is currently a joint MA-MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. She is the Non-Fiction Editor of The McNeese Review, and she also holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge and Great Weather for Media, among others.

Host of Shitty First Drafts

Stephanie Lee Phillips is a writer and photographer from Tennessee currently working at her alma mater and hanging out with mostly poets. She has a BFA in English from the University of Tennessee and an MA in fiction from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers program. Currently living in Knoxville, TN, she works closely with the local literary non-profit Sundress Academy for the Arts and serves as art editor for the online literary journal, Stirring. Her fiction appears in Entropy Magazine.

Managing & Poetry Editor of Stirring: A Literary Collection

Luci Brown is an Appalachian highlander currently pursuing nonprofit work in the bourbon barrel hills of Louisville, Kentucky. Her chapbook, Home Brew, was published in 2015, and her work has appeared in Moon City Review, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and others. She is the managing and poetry editor for Stirring as well as a reader for Best of the Net. She lives with her tall partner, particular child, and strange dogs.

Editor of Rogue Agent

Jill Khoury is interested in the intersection of poetry, visual art, representations of gender, and disability. She is a Western Pennsylvania Writing Project fellow and has taught writing and literature in high school, university, and enrichment environments. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Arsenic Lobster, Copper Nickel, Inter|rupture, and Portland Review. She has also been anthologized in Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Pudding House Press released her chapbook, Borrowed Bodies, in 2009. Her debut full-length collection, Suites for the Modern Dancer will be released by Sundress Publications in 2016.

Editor of Pretty Owl Poetry

Kelly Andrews is the poetry coeditor for Pretty Owl Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Lime Hawk, and Weave Magazine, among others. Her chapbook Mule Skinner is available from dancing girl press (2014). She is a poetry coeditor for Hot Metal Bridge and has a hand in creating B.E. Quarterly, a sometimes-quarterly zine.

Editor of cahoodaloodaling

Raquel Thorne is the Managing Editor of cahoodaloodaling. Additionally, she is an Editor-at-Large for Up the Staircase Quarterly and has served as the Editorial Assistant for The Southern Review, co-director for the Delta Mouth Literary Festival 2018, and Reviews/Interviews Editor for The New Delta Review. A BinderCon Scholarship recipient, her poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Manchester Review, and Midwest Quarterly, among others. She earned her MFA from Louisiana State University where her hybrid thesis, “The Wooden Boy,” was selected by Sawako Nakayasu for the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award for Poetry and has been awarded a three-year University Doctoral Fellowship to study English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she plans to continue her work on the scholarship behind her creative thesis in Southern Studies and Disability Studies to interrogate internalized dominance in American white culture. A genderqueer poet from the North Bay, her body resides in Louisiana, save the heart she left behind in Wisconsin.

Blog Contributor, Lyric Essentials

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi has had work appear in Into the Void Magazine, Mud Season Review, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She currently reads for Mud Season Review and EX/POST Magazine, is the Playwriting & Director’s Apprentice at New Perspectives Theatre Company, and was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Her debut chapbook cartography of trauma is forthcoming from dancing girl press in the summer of 2021.

Lead Designer at Sundress Publications

Kristen Camille Ton is a recent graduate of Lee University, who majored in English Literature and Writing and minored in Graphic Design and Anthropology. When not designing, she’s often writing poetic, lyrical things or reading creative nonfiction, and occasionally, you’ll catch her booting up a gaming system. Kristen hopes to one day write like Annie Dillard, capturing a profound sense of wonder at the world. ‘Til then, she attempts to channel that wonder through her designs, as inspired by the works for which she designs.

Graphic Designer at Sundress Publications

Lori Tennant is a poet pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Georgia College and State University. Her undergraduate degree is in graphic design and that merges with her poetry to become Crankies. She is prone to chasing butterflies, storytelling, and pretending to be a mermaid. Nature and myth play a large role in her work.

Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications

Iqra Abid (she/her) is a young, Pakistani, Muslim writer based in Canada. She is currently a student at McMaster University studying Psychology Neuroscience and Behaviour. She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kiwi Collective Magazine. Her work can be found in various publications such as Stone Fruit Magazine, Tiny Spoon Lit Magazine, Scorpion Magazine, and more.

Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications

Stephi Cham is a freelance editor and author. She received her BM in Music Therapy and Minor in Psychology from Southern Methodist University and is pursuing her MA in Publishing at Rosemont College, where she manages the publishing program’s communications as a graduate assistant. She wrote the Great Asian-American series, published in 2018 by Capstone Press, and her writing has been featured in Strange Horizons.

Social Media Intern at Sundress Publications

Victoria Carrubba is a senior English Publishing Studies student at Hofstra University. She is currently a tutor at her university’s writing center and a copyeditor for The Hofstra Chronicle. She has also worked on her university’s literary magazines, Font and Growl, and was previously a fiction editor for Windmill Journal. Outside of work, Victoria can be found reading, dancing, or drinking chai.

Editorial Intern at the Sundress Academy for the Arts

Kathryn Davis is a writer and editor from Michigan. She graduated in 2018 from Grand Valley State University, where she studied Creative Writing with an emphasis in Fiction, and served as editor-in-chief of the university’s literary journal, fishladder. She enjoys photography, her cats, and her dog (who might as well be a cat).

Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications

Katherine DeCoste is a queer, white settler currently living on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples and the WSANEC peoples, where they are pursuing their MA in English at the University of Victoria. In 2020, they received their BA Honours in English and History from the University of Alberta, as the Rutherford Memorial Medalist in English and Dr. John Macdonald Medalist in Arts. You can find their poetry in Barren Magazine, Grain Magazine, The Antigonish Review, and other outlets. In 2020, their play “many hollow mercies” won the Alberta Playwriting Competition Novitiate Prize. When not writing, reading, or answering emails, Katherine can be found playing Dungeons and Dragons, volunteering with food support initiatives, and forcing their friends to eat their baking.

Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications

Hannah Olsson holds a double BA in Cinema and Creative Writing English from the University of Iowa. During her time in Iowa, Hannah was the president of The Translate Iowa Project and its publication boundless, a magazine devoted to publishing translated poetry, drama, and prose. Her work, both in English and Swedish, has been featured in boundless, earthwords magazine, InkLit Mag, and the University of Iowa’s Ten-Minute Play Festival, among others. Hannah really enjoys works that tell stories of distorted wonders. She also really loves ravens, and, naturally, Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys.

Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications

Saoirse’s name and passion are the same: freedom. As an exophonic writer, their academic interests revolve around linguistic power dynamics, especially in connection to the land. They are always trying to write, and find, poetry that breaks the English language into articulating its own colonial violence. They are a freelance editor and serve as the Guest Editor for Emerging Voices in Poetry at Oyster River Pages. They are a 2021 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and a finalist for the Sophie Kerr Prize. They find excitement in travel, comfort in a good cup of coffee and love in their newly adopted puppy, Malaika. Find them at saoirseedits.com or on twitter @saoirseedits.

Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications

Ryleigh Wann is an MFA poetry candidate at UNC Wilmington. Her past experiences include reading poetry for Ecotone, editing with Lookout Books, teaching creative writing, and working for the Parks and Recreation Department in Michigan. Her writing can be found in Rejection Letters, Flypaper Lit, and Kissing Dynamite Poetry, among others.

Editorial Intern at the Sundress Academy for the Arts

Alexa White is a senior at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the city where she grew up, and is pursuing a BA in Creative Writing with a Studio Art minor. She has enjoyed reading and writing, especially poetry, for most of her life and has had both art and poetry published in UTK’s Phoenix Literary Magazine. Outside of her studies, Alexa enjoys photography, film, hiking and attempting to achieve oneness with nature.