Issue 22 Contributors

Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey (she/her/hers) is a writer and aspiring physician-scientist from Chicago, currently living in San Francisco. She is a recent graduate from the University of Chicago where she received her Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing with honors, specializing in fiction and a minor in the biological sciences. She is a PROPEL Post-Bacc Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, where her research centers around cancer immunology and cancer immunotherapy.

Her works have been published in Soul Talk Magazine, Blacklight Magazine, Euphony Journal and the Xylom. She is passionate about increasing the intersection between the humanities and STEM, and has been involved/led organizations aimed at advocating and making academia more accessible and equitable for underrepresented minority students. More at www.NaaAshitey.com

twitter: foreverasheley
instagram: foreverasheley

Jes Battis (they/them) teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Regina. Their poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, The Ex-Puritan, The Capilano Review, and Poetry is Dead, among other literary magazines. Their new novel, The Winter Knight, is forthcoming from ECW in April of 2023.

Jenkin Benson is a 1st year PhD student at the University of Notre Dame du Lac. He principally studies the creative interchange between Welsh and Irish modernists. He occasionally writes poetry. You can find his work in the Grinnell Review, New Note Poetry, and KEITH LLC.

Sharon Berg is a poet, a fiction author, and an historian of First Nations education in Canada. She's published her poetry in periodicals across Canada, as well as in the USA, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, India, and Australia. Her first two books were poetry published by Borealis Press (To a Young Horse, 1979) and Coach House Press (The Body Labyrinth, 1984). This was followed by two audio cassette tapes from Gallery 101 (Tape 5, 1985) and Public Energies (Black Moths 1986). She also published three chapbooks with Big Pond Rumours Press in 2006, 2016 & 2017. Her fiction appeared in journals in Canada and the USA. Porcupine's Quill released her debut fiction collection Naming the Shadows in the Fall of 2019. Her cross-genre history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School was published in 2019 by Big Pond Rumours Press and received a Bronze 2020 IPPY Award for Best Regional Nonfiction in Canada East. She lives in Charlottetown, Newfoundland, Canada.

Carla Scarano D’Antonio lives in Surrey with her family. She obtained her Degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing with Merit at Lancaster University in October 2012. Her pamphlet Negotiating Caponata was recently published by Dempsey & Windle (2020); she has also self-published a poetry pamphlet, A Winding Road (2011). She has published her work in various anthologies and magazines, and she has recently completed a PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading. In 2016, she and Keith Lander won first prize in the Dryden Translation Competition with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems. She writes in English as a second language.

JACLYN DESFORGES is the author of Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC's picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. She's also the author of Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), which was shortlisted for a Chocolate Lily Award and selected for the 2023 TD Summer Reading Club. Jaclyn is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of a 2022 City of Hamilton Creator Award, a 2020 Hamilton Emerging Artist Award for Writing, two 2019 Short Works Prizes, and the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Jaclyn’s writing has been featured in literary magazines across Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.

Cianna Garrison lives in California and has an ever-growing TBR pile. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Welter, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and The /tƐmz/ Review. In her spare time, she likes to sing, craft, and act. You can catch her cat mom posts on her Instagram @cianna_garrison or follow her work at ciannagarrison.com.

Ben Berman Ghan is a writer and editor living in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, treaty 7 land and home of the Blackfoot Confederacy, where he’s a PhD student in English literature at The University of Calgary. He’s the author of the collection What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest Books), and the novella Visitation Seeds (845 Press). His novel The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is forthcoming with Wolsak and Wynn for spring 2024. More of his recent work can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine, Wrongdoing Magazine, and Cold Signal Magazine. You can find him @inkstainedwreck and inkstainedwreck.ca

Through her writing Jade Green attempts to understand herself and the world on a deeper level, and hopes to help the reader do the same. She will never forget how affected her English teacher was by a horror story she wrote when she was ten. Jade runs a feminist publication called oranges journal, and co-hosts a podcast about creativity called Pivotal Slice.

Stephanie Holden (she/they) is a Halloween-loving queer living in New Orleans, Louisiana. She writes about love, trauma, gore, and the self. Her interests are fantasy books, body modification, and the South. Find her work at or forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Ghost City Press, Kissing Dynamite, The B’K, Dollar Store Mag, Voidspace, Bullshit Lit, and elsewhere, or her narcissistic tweets at @smhxlden.

Salma Hussain (she/her) is a former lawyer who now writes fiction for children and adults. Her short stories and poems have appeared in filling Station, Line, Other Voices, The Humber Literary Review, Fiddlehead, and in the chapbook anthology, Homebound: Muslim Women Poetry Collection (Outburst Press). Her novel for kids and kids-at-heart, THE SECRET DIARY OF MONA HASAN was published by Penguin Random House in May 2022.

Carol Krause is a writer whose naturally psychoactive mind often disrupts her plans. Sometimes this results in joy. Her poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Minola Review and PRISM international, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming with Guernica Editions. You can find her in a cave at carolkrause.ca.

Rachel Lachmansingh is a Guyanese-Canadian writer from Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Minola Review, Grain Magazine, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and The Ex-Puritan, among others. She was a finalist for the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize and longlisted for the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize. She is currently pursuing her BA in creative writing.

Anson Leung is a graduate of the University of Alberta’s Bachelor of Commerce program. He is an Alberta-based writer.

D.A. Lockhart is the author of multiple collections of poetry and short fiction with North of Middle Island coming out this fall with Kegedonce Press. His work has been shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, Indiana Author’s Awards, First Nations Communities READ Award, and has been a finalist for the ReLit Award. His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, ARC Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poetry from the Midwest, and Belt. He is a graduate of the Indiana University – Bloomington MFA in Creative Writing program where he held a Neal-Marshall Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong and Pelee Island where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.

Daniela Loggia writes from Vancouver and the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is the author of several provincial court documents. Her poem, "Ode to Chris de Burgh", was published in Wordscapes Youth Arts Journal and selected as grand prize winner for the journal’s Ripple Effect Contest. Her chapbook, Apostasia, is forthcoming from Maverick Duck Press, and she is currently working on a novella exploring the nexus of goblins and Alzheimer’s.

Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples - Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit - land still inhabited by their descendants.

Silvae Mercedes (she/they) is a Mad writer, performer and designer based in Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec. Her work explores the liminal spaces between the private and cultural imagination, the corridors of memory, and the ways in which trauma writes itself upon them. They were a featured participant in the Toronto International Festival of Authors: New Embassy 2022, and are a founding member of Other Hearts Collective (otherhearts.ca).

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi is an Iranian-born Toronto-based writer and translator.

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent publication is Without Form from The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book. The Book of Benjamin is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.

Olivia Van Nguyen (they/them) is a Vietnamese-Canadian writer from Northeast Calgary, AB. They are a student at the University of Calgary where they study English and Psychology. They were awarded the Kathleen and Russell Lane Award for their creative work in university. Van Nguyen is not a drag queen, but everyone says they should be, so they guess they just have that vibe. They can be found on instagram: @reeling_and_writhing

Sveta Yefimenko is a writer and researcher based in Boston, Massachusetts and Exeter, England. After receiving her PhD in classical reception from the University of Exeter, she has been working as a Creative Director in a writing agency. Her poetry, short stories, and scholarly work appear in literary and academic journals.

Charmaine Yu is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto studying
English and Political Science. She is a member of Trinity College’s BIPOC Writing circle, an
associate editor at the Trinity Review, and recently received a mentorship grant from the
Writers’ Union of Canada. Canadian-born but Hong Kong-raised, she enjoys exploring
themes of multiculturalism, nostalgia, and life in the city.