Masthead 2023

Darren C. Demaree, Editor-in-Chief, is the author of fifteen poetry collections, most recently “Burning It Down”, (December 2020, 8th House Publishing).  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 Editor-in-Chief of the Best of the Net Anthology and the Managing Editor of Ovenbird Poetry.  He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Tennison S. Black, Managing Editor, is also Managing Editor at Sundress Publications. They are the author of Survival Strategies (winner of the National Poetry Series, UGA Press, 2023). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Hotel Amerika, The Seattle Times, Booth, Wordgathering, and New Mobility, among others. They earned their MFA from Arizona State University and have been twice-awarded Virginia G. Piper global teaching and research fellowships.

Erin Elizabeth Smith, founding and consulting editor, is the Executive Director for Sundress Publications and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently DOWN (SFASU 2020), and her work has appeared in Guernica, Ecotone, Crab Orchard, and Mid-American, among others. Smith is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and the Poet Laureate of Oak Ridge, TN. 

Ashley Somwaru, Assistant Editor, is an Indo-Caribbean woman from 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. She received an MFA in poetry from Queens College, City College of New York and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Somwaru published a chapbook in 2021 titled, “Urgent \\ Where The Mind Goes \\ Scattered.” Previous work has been published in Angime, Posit, Solstice Magazine, SWIMM, The Margins, VIDA Review, and elsewhere.

Crysta Montiel, Assistant Editor, is a Toronto-based freelance editor. She graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A. in English and Philosophy. She is currently a poetry and fiction editor for Class Collective Magazine, and a book reviewer for Quill & Quire. When she’s not digging through treasure troves of queries, she’s completing her Criterion Collection bucket list and playing with her cat. 

Sarah A. Chavez, Poetry Coordinator, 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 new project, Halfbreed Helene Navigates the Whole received a 2019-2020 Tacoma Artists Initiative Award. Chavez teaches creative writing and Latinx/Chicanx-focused courses at the University of Washington Tacoma, serves as the poetry coordinator for Best of the Net Anthology, and is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Xicanx: Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century, Diode, & Hotel Amerika. Her micro chap, like everything else we loved, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2021. 

Erica Frederick is a queer, Haitian American writer and MFA candidate in fiction at Syracuse University, where she currently serves as Salt Hill’s fiction editor. She writes about being big in all the ways there are to be big—in body, in worry, in Blackness in Florida suburbia. Her work has been shortlisted in Glimmer Train and has appeared in Storm Cellar & Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. She has received fellowships from VIDA, Lambda Literary, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. You can find her tweeting into the void @ericafrederick. 

Ellen Orner, Nonfiction Coordinator, 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.

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