Fredricka ‘Ricki’ Maister calls herself a ‘lifelong mourner.’ At age twelve, she experienced the untimely death of her father. Twenty-five years later, she was forced to cope with the intense, overwhelming emotions unleashed by the brutal murder of her longtime partner. Then came the slow decline of her mother, whose final years were spent in a nursing home.
D.J. Hupp is a filmmaker, actor, and comedian based in Portland, Oregon. He is known for: Comedy shorts and mashups. Creating BardSubs.com (comedic modern language subtitles for movies based on Shakespeare plays). Editing James Nguyen’s (famous for creating one of the worst movies ever made, Birdemic) film, Julie and Jack, featured on RiffTrax. Creating the AI fan edit, AI: The Kubrick Edit.
The painful, sudden ending of a long-distance relationship and the pains of trying to love someone living as two different versions of himself due to his high profile career. The hollowing fact that the ghost of his image across my screen, in my suggestion feeds, his voice on the radio will now haunt me forever.
Laura (she/her) is an author, educator, and writing coach/developmental editor from Oxford, Ohio. Her memoir Mosaic (Unsolicited Press, March 2025) delves into loss, motherhood, and parenting a child with disabilities. Mosaic was named on LitHub’s Notable Small Press Books of 2025 list. She has been published in Thin Air Magazine, Stonecoast Review, Brevity Blog, and elsewhere.
Kim Greenfield Alfonso, MBA, is an entrepreneur, executive leader, and passionate advocate for accessibility and inclusion. She is the CEO of Results One LLC, a certified minority- and woman-owned business that partners with organizations to make their digital content, workplaces, and programs accessible to all.
Just like her character, Ana from Sweden lives in Stockholm and keeps her personal life behind the scenes. She might shop at the same grocery store as you or bring her kids to the same sports activities. Look around, there are plenty of women like her, present but often unnoticed. Ana the author holds a bachelor’s degree in literature. Confessions of a Female Dominant is her debut novel.
Kim Bainbridge, born as Kim van Rossum, I grew up in the small Dutch town of Megen in the Netherlands. After serving for ten years in the Royal Dutch Army, I have spent the next twelve years travelling through nearly eighty countries across Asia, Central America, Australia, and beyond.
D.J. Slater is a Milwaukee native with a love for sharing stories. He wrote his first in third grade followed by several more during his school years, mostly about dinosaurs and an ambitious detective. His passion for writing took him on an appropriate career path—journalism, magazines, and marketing.
Amanda Linnemeyer was born and raised in Portland, Oregon but now considers herself a Texan after spending most of her adulthood in San Antonio. She attended Brigham Young University and graduated Cum Laude with an English degree and emphasis in creative writing (though she never managed to make it through the waitlist for Brandon Sanderson’s class). She and her physician husband have two incredible daughters who are polar opposites of each other and are living in Florida as an Air Force family.
I write under a pen name of Josie Christie, which was my paternal grandmother’s name. I thought Christie may bring me luck. I’ve been writing since I was fifteen, mostly for family and friends, but decided it was time I wrote a novel. I live with my partner Andy in Surrey. We enjoy music, dancing and travelling, particularly to Italy, where I have family connections.
John Togher is a Wigan-based writer whose fiction blends folk horror, coastal mystery and psychological unease as explored in debut novella, Bound by the Salt, set in the strange village of Cairnshore. John’s writing explores obsession, memory, and the strange pull of places we thought we had escaped.
Have you ever gone on a hike that was really, really, really, long? Well, the conception of Out of Embers and Shadows was on said type of hike when Shelby Oval’s partner dragged her twenty miles into the mountains of Slovenia. The only way she could push through the gruelling hike? Dragons. She imagined having her own and soaring above the clouds, and once she made it to the top, she imagined riding it back down to the ground. From the hike, Oval began to play with the idea of dragons and war, building a world that would quickly become the baseline for Out of Embers and Shadows.
Had a career mostly in law and finance. Now live in Florida where I write and battle hurricanes.
I am a writer whose work embodies the profound depth of my richly interwoven cultural heritage and historical legacy. As a descendant of an English Protestant who fled England during the perilous reign of Mary Tudor, my lineage is a testament to resilience and adaptation. My ancestor’s courageous escape from England to Calais and eventually to France anchors my family’s narrative in a legacy of survival, faith, and defiance in the face of adversity.
I grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, where I obtained a PhD in physics-acoustics and worked in this field. Since 1993, I’ve lived in the United States, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1998. Working at a consulting company in Arlington, Virginia, I led an applied acoustics group and published dozens of scientific articles, conference papers, and technical reports. Upon completion of my scientific career, I turned to long-sought literary activities in creative writing, including prose and poetry.
E.J. Mankin is a Queer author from Missouri who writes as a form of resistance to the status quo. Though their works are fantasy, they can be read as allegories of the reality that we live in today.
I’m an educator, strategist, and theological thinker. My work focuses on how people learn, lead, and live with integrity across systems, cultures, and roles. Whether I’m designing leadership frameworks, coaching neurodivergent leaders, exploring fictional worlds, or writing about beauty in learning, I’m committed to one thing: helping people grow without pretending.
Twenty-two-year-old writer, musician, and indie filmmaker Justin Hughes was born in Warrington, England, on April 12, 2004. Growing up in Cheshire, Hughes would write short stories and television pilot screenplays for fun before eventually taking the step into long-form work.
Alana Dowley balanced a legal career with raising three amazing children. She told them stories as they were growing up and now writes for clever, curious kids.
Even though I graduated from Tufts University with a BS in zoology, I knew I wasn’t cut out for the jobs being offered in science labs or hospitals or any of the usual spaces you might expect to find science-minded people. Instead, I took a job in the secondary school science department at a textbook publishing house and now have enjoyed a long career devoted to books—from textbook editing and management to tradebook publishing and finally to my own fiction and nonfiction writing.