current issue
T/W: the issue contains traumatic & mature content in parts
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issue 79 - part 1
part 1, featuring:
trini decombe eric abalajon jane ayres shine ballard jerome bergland lizzie challen hubbard seth crook salvatore difalco fiona dignan d’ores&deja (rachel nefkens and luigi galli) tina ehsanipour alexis fedorjaczenko leslie grollman sarah james jen if |
issue 79 - part 2
part 2, featuring:
robert frede kenter ulka karandikar richard kitchen martha lane louise mather leela raj-sankar john rogers jp seabright beatriz seelaender thea smiley paul stephenson laura titzer moira walsh laura warner harry wilding jill zheng |
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biographies - issue 79
Eric Abalajon
Eric Abalajon is currently a lecturer at the University of the Philippines Visayas, Iloilo. Some of his works have appeared in Revolt Magazine, Loch Raven Review, Ani, Katitikan, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, Marias at Sampaguitas, Tint Journal, and elsewhere. Under the pen name Jacob Laneria, his chapbook of short fiction Mga Migranteng Sandali (Kasingkasing Press, 2020) was included in CNN Philippines’ best Filipino books of 2020. He lives near Iloilo City.
Jane Ayres
UK neurodivergent writer Jane Ayres completed a Creative Writing MA at the University of Kent in 2019 aged 57. In 2021, she was nominated for Best of the Net, shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and a Laurence Sterne Prize winner. Her first collection 'edible' is published by Beir Bua Press in July 2022.
Shine Ballard
Shine Ballard, the de minimis dummkopf, uses notebooks . . . and ekes by a pencil.
@shineballard
Jerome Bergland
Jerome Berglund graduated from the University of Southern California’s Cinema-Television Production program and spent a picaresque decade in the entertainment industry before returning to the midwest where he was born and raised. Since then he has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Berglund has exhibited many haiku and senryu online and in print, most recently in Tofu Ink Arts, Vermillion, Hey I'm Alive Magazine, and Fauxmoir. He is furthermore an established, award-winning fine art photographer, whose black and white pictures have been shown in galleries across New York, Minneapolis, and Santa Monica.
Lizzie Challen Hubbard
Lizzie Challen Hubbard is a poet, short story writer and sentence ruiner. Her short story ‘Probably Just Foxes’, came third in the 2021 Aurora Prize from Writing East Midlands. She is currently studying Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. You can find her tweeting about books, poetry, cats, and (sometimes) experimental music at @LizHub
Seth Crook
Seth Crook is transitioning into a seal. His poems have appeared in such places as The Rialto, Magma, Gutter, Pennine Platform, Northwords Now, Poetry Scotland, Poetry Salzburg, Dreich. In e-zines such as Streetcake and Tentacular. In recent anthologies such as The SHOp: An Anthology (Liffey), A470 (Arachne Press), The Centenary Collection (Speculative Books), Places of Poetry (One World). He has a pamphlet of visual poems Chalked On The Path (Dreich).
Salvatore Difalco
Salvatore Difalco is a Toronto writer. Recent appearances in Cafe Irreal and Bombfire.
Fiona Dignan
Fiona is a stay at home mum of four who took up writing during lockdown to cope with the chaos of homeschool! Prior to having children, she worked as a Human Resources manager and has a BA in Social Anthropology and Religion and a MA in Human Resource Management. She has been published in Mslexia, Aayo Magazine and had two poems shortlisted for the E.H.P Barnard Prize.
d’Ores&Deja (Rachel Nefkens and Luigi Galli)
Amsterdam-based creative duo d'Ores&Deja write and produce digital media collaboratively. Their work has appeared in Nine Mile Magazine, The Rhysling Anthology, the London Reader, Antiphon, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the Pact Press Anthology: Changing Tides, and elsewhere.
Tina Ehsanipour
Tina is an Iranian-born, California-raised writer, high school Creative Writing teacher, and school librarian. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Nowruz Journal, South Writ Large Magazine, In Short–The Podcast, Five Minutes, as well as on stage with Golden Thread Productions. She has essays forthcoming in the anthology Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World (Woodhall Press, Sept 2022).
Alexis Fedorjaczenko
Alexis Fedorjaczenko writes poetry, essay, and in hybrid methods, and her visual work includes handcrafted Poem Objects, analog and digital collage, and photography. Alexis tweets as @ObjetAutre and makes home in rural New England.
Robert Frede Kenter
Robert Frede Kenter is a widely published experimental writer & visual artist. Work recently in The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022); FeversOf, Feral, talking about strawberries all the time, Watch Yr Head, Visual Verse, Anthropocene, etc. Robert's most recent VISPO collection, EDEN was published in 2021, now available at the Rare Swan Press bookshop. Robert has won awards and grants from Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council; 2nd Prize in the John B. Aird Gallery Drawing Show (Toronto) (2004); is a Pushcart Nominee and was feature reader at UK Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Autumn, 2020. Robert is editor-in-chief & publisher of Ice Floe Press, www.icefloepress.net.
Leslie Grollman
Leslie Grollman’s work appears in Sweet Lit, Ellipsis Zine, Moist Poetry Journal, Yolk, Spoken Word Scratch Night, Writing Utopia 2020 Anthology, The Selkie, Together: An Anthology, Thimble, Nailed, Pathos, other publications, and is forthcoming. Leslie was chosen to be a reader for one of Octopus Books’ open reading periods. She earned an MSc Creative Writing, Poetry, with Distinction, from the University of Edinburgh in 2020 at age 70.
Sarah James
Sarah James is a poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Her latest collection is Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press, 2022). Other recent projects include an Arts Council England funded multimedia hypertext poetry narrative > Room. Website: www.sarah-james.co.uk. She also runs V. Press, publishing poetry and flash fiction.
Jen If
Jen If is a writer with autism and an M.A. in Creative writing from the university of Chichester. She is a survivor of sex-trafficking and other forms of trauma. She is also a former headteacher. Jen writes poetry, short stories and prose from life. Her writing is a form of therapy, helping her process her experiences.
Ulka Karandikar
Ulka Karandikar’s work is part of the London Writer's Award 2022. Her short stories have appeared in Stylist magazine, the 2021 Creative Future Anthology ‘Essential’ and in Fox and Windmill’s anthology of emerging South Asian writers ‘Into the Wilds’.
You can contact her @ulkakarandikar
Richard Kitchen
Richard Kitchen is a London-born artist and writer. He taught literature and theatre in East Anglia and Spain before settling in York. His cross-disciplinary practice is fuelled by drawings, paintings, photography and poetry. He’s also a freelance editor and proofreader. He is a co-founder of Navigators Art, a community-minded collective which mentors young emerging artists as well as engaging in a range of creative activities.
Instagram and Facebook: @richardkitchenart / @navigatorsart.
Martha Lane
Martha Lane is a writer by the sea. Her flash (almost exclusively about grief) has been published by Perhappened Mag, Sledgehammer Lit, Free Flash Fiction, Bandit and Reflex Fiction among others. Too many projects is her natural state. Tweets at @poor_and_clean.
Louise Mather
Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England and founding editor of Acropolis Journal. A finalist in the Streetcake Poetry Prize and Nominated Best of the Net 2021, her work is published in various print and online literary journals. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dredging of Rituals’ is out with Alien Buddha Press, 2021. She writes about ancestry, rituals, endometriosis, fatigue and mental health. Twitter @lm2020uk
Leela Raj-Sankar
Leela Raj-Sankar is a 16 year old from Arizona. Their work has appeared in Rejection Letters, Brave Voices Magazine, and CLOVES Literary, among others. In his spare time, he can usually be found watching bad television or taking long naps. Say hi to her on Twitter @sickgirlisms.
John Rogers
John Rogers is an English teacher who studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University where he was awarded the Creative Writing Carcanet/PN Review Prize for 2020. He is published in Ink, Sweat & Tears and Allegro. He can be found on one trail or another.
JP Seabright
JP Seabright (she/they) is a queer writer living in London. They have three pamphlets published: Fragments from Before the Fall: An Anthology in Post-Anthropocene Poetry by Beir Bua Press; the erotic memoir NO HOLDS BARRED by Lupercalia Press, and GenderFux, a collaborative poetry pamphlet, by Nine Pens Press. More info at https://jpseabright.com and via Twitter @errormessage.
Beatriz Seelaender
Beatriz Seelaender is a Brazilian author from São Paulo. Her fiction has appeared in Cagibi, AZURE, Psychopomp, among many others, and essays can be found at websites such as The Collapsar and Guesthouse. Her novellas have earned her both the Sandy Run and the Bottom Drawer Prizes.
Thea Smiley
Thea Smiley is a poet from Suffolk. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and other competitions, long listed for the Rialto Nature and Place competition 2022, and published in various magazines, including Spelt, Streetcake, The Alchemy Spoon and Ink, Sweat & Tears.
Paul Stephenson
Paul Stephenson has three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016) and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). He took part in the Jerwood/Arvon mentoring scheme and has an MA from the Manchester Writing School. He co-edited Magma (issue 70 ‘Europe’) and co-curates Poetry in Aldeburgh. Paul interviews poets at paulstep.com. / twitter: @stephenson_pj / instagram: paulstep456
Laura Titzer
Laura resides in Seattle and is a writer and facilitator of possibilities. She’s previously been published in Recipes for a New Normal (a publication of Community Alliance for Global Justice), Bureau of Complaints, Gastronomica, Kosmos, and A Growing Culture and is the author of “No Table Too Small”. Laura lives in adoration with her partner, cat, and ferrets.
Moira Walsh
Moira Walsh makes her home in southern Germany and translates for a living. Recent poem homes include Anthropocene, Bennington Review, Cloudbank, and duality. You can read more and get in touch at linktr.ee/moira_walsh
Laura Warner
Laura Warner (she/her) is a poet and PhD researcher based in the Wellcome Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter. Her project, Menstrual Poetics, uses poetry to explore the impact of menstrual politics on lived experience of the condition endometriosis. Her work has appeared on Lucy Writers Platform, in the SRHM Journal’s anthology of poetry on sexual and reproductive justice, and is forthcoming in Poetry Wales.
Twitter: @warner_writer @MenstrualPoetic
Harry Wilding
Harry Wilding writes in Nottingham, where he fantasises about elaborate heists that steal from the rich and give to the poor. He has had poems published by the likes of Writeresque, The Drabble and Selcouth Station. He likes doughnuts and equality very much.
Jill Zheng
Jill Zheng is a multimodal poet, who works with language as a primary material, oftentimes marrying modes of graphic arrangements, sound, image, translingualism, somatic experience, etc. Her poetics takes its inspirational root from the concreteness of Chinese characters, and seeks to embody cultural hybridity as to traverse linguistic boundaries for re-imagination and reading re-orientation. Her work has appeared in Nationalpoetrymonth.ca, on POETRY magazine, and her latest publication of visual poetry is forthcoming on ctrl + v journal.
Eric Abalajon
Eric Abalajon is currently a lecturer at the University of the Philippines Visayas, Iloilo. Some of his works have appeared in Revolt Magazine, Loch Raven Review, Ani, Katitikan, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, Marias at Sampaguitas, Tint Journal, and elsewhere. Under the pen name Jacob Laneria, his chapbook of short fiction Mga Migranteng Sandali (Kasingkasing Press, 2020) was included in CNN Philippines’ best Filipino books of 2020. He lives near Iloilo City.
Jane Ayres
UK neurodivergent writer Jane Ayres completed a Creative Writing MA at the University of Kent in 2019 aged 57. In 2021, she was nominated for Best of the Net, shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and a Laurence Sterne Prize winner. Her first collection 'edible' is published by Beir Bua Press in July 2022.
Shine Ballard
Shine Ballard, the de minimis dummkopf, uses notebooks . . . and ekes by a pencil.
@shineballard
Jerome Bergland
Jerome Berglund graduated from the University of Southern California’s Cinema-Television Production program and spent a picaresque decade in the entertainment industry before returning to the midwest where he was born and raised. Since then he has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Berglund has exhibited many haiku and senryu online and in print, most recently in Tofu Ink Arts, Vermillion, Hey I'm Alive Magazine, and Fauxmoir. He is furthermore an established, award-winning fine art photographer, whose black and white pictures have been shown in galleries across New York, Minneapolis, and Santa Monica.
Lizzie Challen Hubbard
Lizzie Challen Hubbard is a poet, short story writer and sentence ruiner. Her short story ‘Probably Just Foxes’, came third in the 2021 Aurora Prize from Writing East Midlands. She is currently studying Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. You can find her tweeting about books, poetry, cats, and (sometimes) experimental music at @LizHub
Seth Crook
Seth Crook is transitioning into a seal. His poems have appeared in such places as The Rialto, Magma, Gutter, Pennine Platform, Northwords Now, Poetry Scotland, Poetry Salzburg, Dreich. In e-zines such as Streetcake and Tentacular. In recent anthologies such as The SHOp: An Anthology (Liffey), A470 (Arachne Press), The Centenary Collection (Speculative Books), Places of Poetry (One World). He has a pamphlet of visual poems Chalked On The Path (Dreich).
Salvatore Difalco
Salvatore Difalco is a Toronto writer. Recent appearances in Cafe Irreal and Bombfire.
Fiona Dignan
Fiona is a stay at home mum of four who took up writing during lockdown to cope with the chaos of homeschool! Prior to having children, she worked as a Human Resources manager and has a BA in Social Anthropology and Religion and a MA in Human Resource Management. She has been published in Mslexia, Aayo Magazine and had two poems shortlisted for the E.H.P Barnard Prize.
d’Ores&Deja (Rachel Nefkens and Luigi Galli)
Amsterdam-based creative duo d'Ores&Deja write and produce digital media collaboratively. Their work has appeared in Nine Mile Magazine, The Rhysling Anthology, the London Reader, Antiphon, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the Pact Press Anthology: Changing Tides, and elsewhere.
Tina Ehsanipour
Tina is an Iranian-born, California-raised writer, high school Creative Writing teacher, and school librarian. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Nowruz Journal, South Writ Large Magazine, In Short–The Podcast, Five Minutes, as well as on stage with Golden Thread Productions. She has essays forthcoming in the anthology Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World (Woodhall Press, Sept 2022).
Alexis Fedorjaczenko
Alexis Fedorjaczenko writes poetry, essay, and in hybrid methods, and her visual work includes handcrafted Poem Objects, analog and digital collage, and photography. Alexis tweets as @ObjetAutre and makes home in rural New England.
Robert Frede Kenter
Robert Frede Kenter is a widely published experimental writer & visual artist. Work recently in The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022); FeversOf, Feral, talking about strawberries all the time, Watch Yr Head, Visual Verse, Anthropocene, etc. Robert's most recent VISPO collection, EDEN was published in 2021, now available at the Rare Swan Press bookshop. Robert has won awards and grants from Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council; 2nd Prize in the John B. Aird Gallery Drawing Show (Toronto) (2004); is a Pushcart Nominee and was feature reader at UK Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Autumn, 2020. Robert is editor-in-chief & publisher of Ice Floe Press, www.icefloepress.net.
Leslie Grollman
Leslie Grollman’s work appears in Sweet Lit, Ellipsis Zine, Moist Poetry Journal, Yolk, Spoken Word Scratch Night, Writing Utopia 2020 Anthology, The Selkie, Together: An Anthology, Thimble, Nailed, Pathos, other publications, and is forthcoming. Leslie was chosen to be a reader for one of Octopus Books’ open reading periods. She earned an MSc Creative Writing, Poetry, with Distinction, from the University of Edinburgh in 2020 at age 70.
Sarah James
Sarah James is a poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Her latest collection is Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press, 2022). Other recent projects include an Arts Council England funded multimedia hypertext poetry narrative > Room. Website: www.sarah-james.co.uk. She also runs V. Press, publishing poetry and flash fiction.
Jen If
Jen If is a writer with autism and an M.A. in Creative writing from the university of Chichester. She is a survivor of sex-trafficking and other forms of trauma. She is also a former headteacher. Jen writes poetry, short stories and prose from life. Her writing is a form of therapy, helping her process her experiences.
Ulka Karandikar
Ulka Karandikar’s work is part of the London Writer's Award 2022. Her short stories have appeared in Stylist magazine, the 2021 Creative Future Anthology ‘Essential’ and in Fox and Windmill’s anthology of emerging South Asian writers ‘Into the Wilds’.
You can contact her @ulkakarandikar
Richard Kitchen
Richard Kitchen is a London-born artist and writer. He taught literature and theatre in East Anglia and Spain before settling in York. His cross-disciplinary practice is fuelled by drawings, paintings, photography and poetry. He’s also a freelance editor and proofreader. He is a co-founder of Navigators Art, a community-minded collective which mentors young emerging artists as well as engaging in a range of creative activities.
Instagram and Facebook: @richardkitchenart / @navigatorsart.
Martha Lane
Martha Lane is a writer by the sea. Her flash (almost exclusively about grief) has been published by Perhappened Mag, Sledgehammer Lit, Free Flash Fiction, Bandit and Reflex Fiction among others. Too many projects is her natural state. Tweets at @poor_and_clean.
Louise Mather
Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England and founding editor of Acropolis Journal. A finalist in the Streetcake Poetry Prize and Nominated Best of the Net 2021, her work is published in various print and online literary journals. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dredging of Rituals’ is out with Alien Buddha Press, 2021. She writes about ancestry, rituals, endometriosis, fatigue and mental health. Twitter @lm2020uk
Leela Raj-Sankar
Leela Raj-Sankar is a 16 year old from Arizona. Their work has appeared in Rejection Letters, Brave Voices Magazine, and CLOVES Literary, among others. In his spare time, he can usually be found watching bad television or taking long naps. Say hi to her on Twitter @sickgirlisms.
John Rogers
John Rogers is an English teacher who studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University where he was awarded the Creative Writing Carcanet/PN Review Prize for 2020. He is published in Ink, Sweat & Tears and Allegro. He can be found on one trail or another.
JP Seabright
JP Seabright (she/they) is a queer writer living in London. They have three pamphlets published: Fragments from Before the Fall: An Anthology in Post-Anthropocene Poetry by Beir Bua Press; the erotic memoir NO HOLDS BARRED by Lupercalia Press, and GenderFux, a collaborative poetry pamphlet, by Nine Pens Press. More info at https://jpseabright.com and via Twitter @errormessage.
Beatriz Seelaender
Beatriz Seelaender is a Brazilian author from São Paulo. Her fiction has appeared in Cagibi, AZURE, Psychopomp, among many others, and essays can be found at websites such as The Collapsar and Guesthouse. Her novellas have earned her both the Sandy Run and the Bottom Drawer Prizes.
Thea Smiley
Thea Smiley is a poet from Suffolk. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and other competitions, long listed for the Rialto Nature and Place competition 2022, and published in various magazines, including Spelt, Streetcake, The Alchemy Spoon and Ink, Sweat & Tears.
Paul Stephenson
Paul Stephenson has three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016) and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). He took part in the Jerwood/Arvon mentoring scheme and has an MA from the Manchester Writing School. He co-edited Magma (issue 70 ‘Europe’) and co-curates Poetry in Aldeburgh. Paul interviews poets at paulstep.com. / twitter: @stephenson_pj / instagram: paulstep456
Laura Titzer
Laura resides in Seattle and is a writer and facilitator of possibilities. She’s previously been published in Recipes for a New Normal (a publication of Community Alliance for Global Justice), Bureau of Complaints, Gastronomica, Kosmos, and A Growing Culture and is the author of “No Table Too Small”. Laura lives in adoration with her partner, cat, and ferrets.
Moira Walsh
Moira Walsh makes her home in southern Germany and translates for a living. Recent poem homes include Anthropocene, Bennington Review, Cloudbank, and duality. You can read more and get in touch at linktr.ee/moira_walsh
Laura Warner
Laura Warner (she/her) is a poet and PhD researcher based in the Wellcome Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter. Her project, Menstrual Poetics, uses poetry to explore the impact of menstrual politics on lived experience of the condition endometriosis. Her work has appeared on Lucy Writers Platform, in the SRHM Journal’s anthology of poetry on sexual and reproductive justice, and is forthcoming in Poetry Wales.
Twitter: @warner_writer @MenstrualPoetic
Harry Wilding
Harry Wilding writes in Nottingham, where he fantasises about elaborate heists that steal from the rich and give to the poor. He has had poems published by the likes of Writeresque, The Drabble and Selcouth Station. He likes doughnuts and equality very much.
Jill Zheng
Jill Zheng is a multimodal poet, who works with language as a primary material, oftentimes marrying modes of graphic arrangements, sound, image, translingualism, somatic experience, etc. Her poetics takes its inspirational root from the concreteness of Chinese characters, and seeks to embody cultural hybridity as to traverse linguistic boundaries for re-imagination and reading re-orientation. Her work has appeared in Nationalpoetrymonth.ca, on POETRY magazine, and her latest publication of visual poetry is forthcoming on ctrl + v journal.
