Shipra Agarwal is a doctor-turned-writer from India, pursuing an MFA in fiction at Arizona State University. Her work exploring the weaponization of shame in collectivist cultures has been published in Witness Magazine and The Rumpus, awarded second place in the Glendon and Kathryn Swarthout Awards, nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize and the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the First Pages Prize and the Iron Horse Long Story Prize, and supported by a Tin House Summer Workshop scholarship, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, a residency at the Sundress Academy for the Arts, an Anaphora Arts scholarship, and a fellowship at the Authentic Voices Program. Shipra is currently working on a novel-in-stories.
Erin Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is the Executive Director of Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently DOWN (SFASU 2020) and the founder of the Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard, and Mid-American. Smith is a Teaching Professor in the English Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (they/them) is the author of the forthcoming story collection Soft Goodbyes Through Broken Veils (University of New Mexico Press, 2027). Their work has been supported by Community of Writers, MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Longleaf Writers Conference, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Erie Arts and Culture, and Tin House. Winner of the Plaza Short Story Prize and finalist for the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, their creative work can be found in Story, Third Coast, The Masters Review, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, American Literary Review, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. Other writing appears in The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, New Ohio Review, and additional journals. They live in Erie, PA with their partner and chocolate lab.
Abubaker Zahoor is an assistant professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University. He received his PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and an MFA from Miami University. His recent fiction has appeared in The Columbia Review and Beloit Fiction Journal. He serves as an associate editor for the South Carolina Review. Born and raised in Pakistan, he now lives in Greenwood, Mississippi.
Ariadne Alexis Macquarie (she/they),a writer and environmental conservationist, lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds an MFA from the University of Kentucky and a BA from Roanoke College. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and photography can be found in the Sonora Review, Salvation South, Barely South Review, and elsewhere. She is on Instagram @flameazaleas but is far more likely to be found fucking off to the woods.
Chekwube Ozieh (she/her) is a freelance editor and founder of a nonfiction publishing service that helps emerging writers bring their work to print. A graduate of History and Diplomacy, she’s passionate about inclusivity in publishing, culture, and jazz music.
Mohammed U. Yusuf is a writer and editor from North-Central, Nigeria. His works have recently appeared—or are forthcoming—in Frontier Poetry, FlowerSong Press, Chestnut Review, Lunaris Review, RoseyRavelston Books, among others. He appreciates the gift of epiphanies and can be found on X @unyomo.
Caroline Majewski (she/her) is Social Media Manager at Best of the Net. She has a degree in English from Oakland University. She reads young writers’ works at The Young Writers Initiative and wrote articles for Save the Water. As a staff member at SeaGlass Literary, Caroline contributed as an editor, an Instagram manager, and the marketing director.
Art
Laura Page lives and works in Eugene OR. She studied English and Writing at Southern Oregon University and is the author of Dove, Coyote, (Ghost Peach Press, 2020). Laura has worked as a literary editor, a poet, and in more recent years, an artist, visually collaborating with writers and small presses in the poetry community.
Lee Anderson is a trans writer with an MFA from Northern Arizona University. Their award-nominated work is published in the Best American Food and Travel Writing 2025 anthology and can otherwise be found in places like Brevity, Salt Hill Journal, and The Rumpus. They are the Managing Editor of Half Mystic Journal and live in Chicago with their partner and a cat named Pretzel.
Creative Nonfiction
Ching-In Chen is author of Shiny City, recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), and The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems, as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Kelsey Street Press collective member, Airlie Press editor and Nonfiction Coordinator for Best of the Net. They serve on Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency’s Governing Council and on Seattle City of Literature’s board. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC, Intercultural Leadership Institute and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They serve as Kundiman’s Pacific Northwest chapter co-lead and on the board. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell.
Noor Alnaaz Islam is a poet, editor, and curator based in Seattle. Originally from Assam, India, Noor’s work explores eco-poetics, the human condition, and matrilineal identity. She is an editor at Kelsey Street Press and a poetry mentor with Pongo Poetry Project. Noor’s writing has appeared/forthcoming in Performance Research Journal, gulmohur quarterly, ambrosia zine, Clamor, The Assam Tribune, and elsewhere.
Fiction
Heather Leigh (they/them) is a queer, disabled, Chicago-based professor, editor, and writer. They have worked with the editing team of Uncanny Magazine, as a fiction and poetry editor for Curbside Splendor, and as managing editor of LacertaPublications. Their most recent publication, “Netflicks and Chill,” was published in CultureCult’s limited print anthology, Bloodlet. They are currently working on completing a collection of flash and short stories composed of a mashup of literary and various speculative fiction genres that critique modern society and culture. Spoiler: Someone usually dies at the end.
Sierra Farrare (she/her) is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter. She currently serves as the assistant executive director for the Sundress Academy of the Arts and is a member of the reader boards for Spellbound Publications, LLC. and Sundress Publications.
Poetry
Jessica Ballen is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and a 2026 Variant Lit Poetry Prize shortlistee as well as a 2025 RHINO Founders’ Prize finalist. She serves as Development Director at Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA). She is a senior editor at Small Harbor Press and a guest editor for Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Okay Donkey, SWWIM Every Day, and Shō Poetry Journal, among others. You can find her compulsively posting on her Instagram stories @jeez_ballen.
Robin LaMer Rahija is a Kentucky poet, currently working as administrative staff at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Inside Out Egg (Variant Lit 2024), and her poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, FENCE, Spoon River Review, and elsewhere.