We're delighted to introduce our magazine contributors who are now also featured in our essay collection, Selected Memories Vol. 2:

Holly Abbe is a mother of five fantastic humans, a cat mom of three, a pie baker, a dahlia grower, and a creative nonfiction writer. She is an associate professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College. She has a master’s degree from Georgetown University and an MFA from Lindenwood University. When she is not mothering, baking, or teaching, you can find her working on her first novel in Hamilton, Virginia.

Camille U. Adams forthcoming.

Sayuri Matsuura Ayers is an essayist and poet. Her work has appeared on The Poetry Foundation website and in Hippocampus Magazine, Chestnut Review, Ninth Letter, TriQuarterly, JOYLAND, and SWWIM Everyday. She is the author of four chapbook collections: The Woman, The River & The Maiden in the Moon (Porkbelly Press), Mother/Wound (Full/Crescent Press), and Radish Legs, Duck Feet (Green Bottle Press.) Ayers' creative work has been supported by Yaddo, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Kundiman, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She creates, teachers, and mothers in Columbus, Ohio.

Brian Benson is the author of Going Somewhere and co-author, with Richard Brown, of This Is Not For You. Originally from the hinterlands of Wisconsin, Brian now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches at The Attic. His essays have been published in X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, Tahoma Literary Review, Hippocampus Magazine, and Cleaver, among several other journals.

Brian Broome is a memoirist, novelist, poet, and screenwriter from Ohio. He is best known for his award-winning memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods.

Katie Burgess lives near a mayonnaise factory in South Carolina. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Read more at katieburgess.fun.

Kim Green is an award-winning writer and public radio producer based in Nashville. Her work has appeared in Fast Company and The New York Times and on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Marketplace, and the New Yorker Radio Hour. She’s managing editor of Pursuit Magazine, an online publication for private investigators. A licensed pilot, she was formerly a flight instructor.

Farah Habib was born in the seaport city of Karachi, Pakistan, and grew up in the west; her real home, however, is that space between cultures, the eastern and western, the religious and secular, the conservative and liberal. Habib is professor of English at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts. She earned her master's of fine arts from Bennington College. Farah’s creative work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she is currently revising a memoir in essays on liminal spaces. Her work appears in a Hole-in-the-Head Review and Hippocampus Magazine. 

Jessica Hindman coming soon.

Craig Holt’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net anthology, and Best American Short Stories, and has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, Psychopomp Magazine, and elsewhere. His first novel, Hard Dog to Kill (Wild Blue Press; 2017) won the Independent Publishers Book Award gold medal. He earned his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and recently completed the BookEnds fellowship program where he enjoyed the mentorship of Susan Scarf Merrell and Meg Wolitzer.

Dina Honour coming soon.

Margaret Luongo is the author of two short story collections: If the Heart is Lean and History of Art. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Granta, North American Review, Consequence Magazine, MicroLit, Hippocampus Magazine, DIAGRAM, the Pushcart Prize anthology and elsewhere. Recipient of the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, Hawthornden Fellowship, and Ohio Arts Council grant, she teaches creative writing at Miami University. She lives with her husband, artist Billy Simms, and their feline companions.

Tom McAllister is the author of four books, most recently the novel How to Be Safe and the essay collection It All Felt Impossible. His short stories and essays have been published in lots of places. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse, and co-hosted the Book Fight podcast for 13 years. He teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers-Camden. 

DW McKinney is an editor, interviewer, and writer based in Nevada. A recipient of a Nevada Arts Council 2026 Artist Fellowship Award, she also received a 2024 Award of Excellence from the Nevada Press Foundation and was a 2024 Best of the Net in Nonfiction winner. She is a fellow with Torch Literary Arts, PERIPLUS Collective, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her writing appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Oxford American, Ecotone, and TriQuarterly. She serves as editor-at-large and fellowship manager at Shenandoah: The Washington & Lee University Review.

Brittany Means was born dead and then lived in a car and then in a huge black barn out in the cornfields of rural Indiana. Her debut memoir, Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways, earned a Kirkus starred review, an Indiana Author's Award, and was a finalist for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Means lives in Albuquerque, where she keeps chickens, does mutual aid, and watches many horror movies.

Matthew Morris is the author of The Tilling (Seneca Review Books; 2024), selected for the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize by Wendy S. Walters. Essays from the collection, which explores Black-white identity through the trope of the “tragic mulatto,” appeared in Fourth Genre via the Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize, Mid-American Review through the AWP Intro Journals Project, and Seneca Review. A Bread Loaf scholar and a graduate of the Arizona MFA program, Matthew is pursuing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Missouri – Columbia. He is from Arlington, Virginia. 

Frenci Nguyen is a PhD in creative writing student at Ohio University and holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Miami University (Oxford, Ohio). They were runner-up for the 2021 Betty Jane Abrahams Poetry Prize and winner of the 2020 Jordan-Goodman Graduate Writing Award in Creative Nonfiction. Frenci’s work has appeared in HerStry, Harpur Palate, GASHER, The Citron Review, Bat City Review, Hippocampus Magazine, peculiar, and elsewhere.

Chantha Nguon was born in Cambodia and spent two decades as a refugee, until she was finally able to return to her homeland. She is the co-founder of Mekong Blue and the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center, a social enterprise that offers a living wage, education, and social services to women and their families in rural northeastern Cambodia. A frequent public speaker, she has appeared at universities and on radio and TV news programs, including NPR’s Morning Edition. She cooks often for friends, family, and for private events. 

Ryen Nielsen is a queer, trans environmental educator living and working along the Pacific Ocean in Washington state. He earned his bachelor's degree in wildlife biology from the University of Wyoming alongside a minor in creative writing. His work has been published in Hippocampus Magazine. When not writing, he can be found in the woods petting moss, listening to birds, and trying to find fairy rings that will transport him elsewhere. For writing updates, please check his instagram: @writingryen.

Claire O’Brien bio coming soon. 

Nicole Piasecki is an assistant teaching professor at the University of Colorado Denver and a consulting nonfiction editor for Copper Nickel. You can find her creative work at This American Life, Longreads, Hippocampus Magazine, Mom-Egg Review, and Literary Mama. She earned an MFA in creative writing at Colorado State University. She is also a member at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.  

Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Hippocampus Magazine, The New York Times, and elsewhere, earning Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her first book is the memoir When She Comes Back, her second the story collection Home is a Made-Up Place. She’s creative nonfiction editor at The Citron Review and hosts the podcast Let’s Talk Memoir, featuring interviews with memoirists about their creative process and writing life. Find her at ronitplank.com, Substack, and social media at @RonitPlank.

Marcos Reyna is an emergency room triage clinician in Albuquerque and director of literary programming at Casa Otro, an international arts nonprofit based in Mesilla, New Mexico. He has an academic background in philosophy, theology, and psychology. After moving to Boston’s north shore for graduate school, he stumbled upon GrubStreet where he started taking workshops. He has been writing ever since. He is a Lena Todd Award recipient for fiction and nonfiction, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. He is working on his forthcoming novel, Thunderbird.

Jane Rucker lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and labradoodle. She is a part-time middle school teacher who likes practicing yoga, writing poetry, traveling, and dabbling in ceramics and knitting. Currently, she has a close relationship with all of her adult children.

Leighton Schreyer (they/them) is a queer, neurodiverse, critically mad writer from Kitchener, Ontario, currently residing in Oxford, UK, as a postgraduate student and Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. Their writing and poetry often explores themes of gender, sexuality, mental health, and the human condition, and has been published in some of the world’s leading medical journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal, as well as many literary and news outlets. They are currently working on their first novel. 

Chutian Shi bio coming soon. 

SJ Sindu is a queer Tamil diaspora author of the literary novels Marriage of a Thousand Lies and Blue-Skinned Gods, the short story collection The Goth House Experiment, and the graphic novels Shakti and Tall Water. Sindu’s books have won or have been selected as finalists for numerous awards, including a Publishing Triangle Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and Stonewall Honor Book Selections. Sindu holds a PhD in English and creative writing from Florida State University.

Michelle Strausburgh is a chronic illness management specialist living the horror and wonder behind the usual surface of health. She plays with words from a bed in Portland, Oregon, and writes erratically at behindthesurface.com.

Christie Tate is an author and essayist who writes about disordered eating, addiction, recovery, isolation, growing up in Texas, and group therapy. Her debut memoir, Group, was a New York Times best seller and has been translated into 19 languages. Her second memoir, B.F.F., explores her trouble with female friendships. 

Tiffany Thompson lives in Seattle with her husband, son, and spaniel. She writes personal essays and is working on a forthcoming collection of her work.

Tori Walters is a writer based in Texoma. Her poetry has been shortlisted in Spellbinder Magazine and her prose featured in publications such as Hippocampus Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Mythic Picnic, and Penultimate Peanut. Tori is the managing editor of flash & micro prose for Variant Literature, was a resident of the NES Artist Residency in 2023, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She works at Austin College as a staff writer.