F(r)iction Staff Publications

Our amazing volunteer readers and editors hail from all over the world and bring unique perspectives and insights to our editorial process. But in addition, our staff members are also incredibly talented and award winning writers. Below you’ll find a showcase of their work running the gamut of literary styles and genres. Dive in and enjoy!

Thomas Chisholm

Assistant Web Editor & Associate Editor

Thomas Chisholm is an editor first and an aspiring creative writer second. When he works up the nerve, he writes a sort of auto-fiction rooted in the associative and dreamlike nature of memories. He’s particularly interested in false memories; the stories and photographs in our minds we swear were real, but everyone else from that time refutes. He’s also known to write essays from time to time.

Criticism

Essays

Fiction

Multimedia

Ally Geist

Junior Editor

Ally has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pencil. She’s studied playwriting, directing, and publishing, and she just can’t seem to stick to one genre! She loves any piece of writing that takes convention and rotates it 45 degrees. Ally’s writing is very “speakable”—she tends to write how she thinks and how she talks, even if it looks weird laid out on a page.

Articles

Interview

Poetry

  • “Nostalgia”, The Dalhousie Gazette, January 29, 2018

Craig Hartz

Junior Editor

Craig is currently focused on writing fiction that brings disparate cultural mythoi into modern contexts to reflect healing and change. He is fascinated with the way magical realism, the sublime, and the grotesque can bridge the gap between literary fiction and the fantastical, manifest emotional spaces that are often hidden (even from ourselves), and interrogate the nuances of memory and trauma. He is interested in writing that bends language and structure to evoke rather than explain and in which bizarre realities or unrealities occur that can be interpreted differently by readers and characters alike.

Essays

  • “Killing for Non-Majors”, Watershed Review
  • “Useful Fictions”, Witness Magazine. Won Witness Magazine’s 2022 Literary Award in Nonfiction. 

Fiction

  • “Towers”, F(r)iction #17: Memory, Fall 2019
  • “Threnody”, the tiny journal. Won their “(re)tell me a story” contest.   

Mia Herman

Creative Nonfiction Editor

The first poem Mia wrote, at the ripe old age of eight, raged against the unfairness of bedtime and the reality of growing pains. Since then, Mia has been fascinated by the way our bodies influence our minds and memories and the way we use our bodies to communicate. When she’s not writing, editing, or playing violin, Mia is most likely a) moonlighting as a matchmaker, b) curating the ultimate road-trip playlist, c) stress baking cookies and cupcakes, or d) watching obscene amounts of reality TV.

Creative Nonfiction

Interview

Poetry

C.E. Janecek

Junior Editor

C. E. Janecek is a Czech-American writer, poetry MFA candidate at Colorado State University, and managing editor of Colorado Review. Janecek’s interests lie in embodiment, ecopoetics, and exploring the permeable membrane between us and nature.

Poetry

Review

  • Review of Pine by Julia Koets, Colorado Review
  • Review of My Husband Would by Benjamin S. Grossberg, Colorado Review

Dominic Loise

Associate Editor

Dominic (he/him) is a bookseller living in Chicago, Il., with his librarian wife and three rabbits. He is open about and advocates for mental health awareness in his writing. Before coming to Brink Literacy Project, Dominic was the Store Manager at Open Books, Chicago’s first literacy nonprofit bookstore. He was also on the planning committee and created virtual sessions for the Ray Bradbury Experience Museum. Find him @dominic_lives on Instagram & Twitter. 

Essays 

Interviews 

Poetry 

Reviews 

Short Stories 

Lauren Lopez

Junior Editor

Lauren spent most of their childhood writing fiction which then worked its way into their major in college. Since becoming more heavily rooted in the slam scene in Boston, they have been writing a lot more poetry, mostly focused on identity and queerness. A lot of their recent work has been looking at baseball and queer identity especially as it relates to their childhood as a very devoted baseball fan. Whatever they’re writing, it’s bound to be gay.

Poetry

Jaclyn Morken

Junior Editor

Jaclyn writes fantasy and speculative fiction, most often about dreamers fighting their way out of darkness. Her stories typically start from the random snippets of dialogue and description that appear suddenly in her mind, which she’ll poke and prod until she has a story. She loves a good mix of ancient libraries, ominous forests, mountaintop castles, and unconventional heroism—and one day she’ll write a novel that features all of that.

Articles

Fiction

  • “Eight Cents.” Tethered by Letters: Dually Noted, 21 Mar, 2019,
  • “Hidden” and  “Nowhere” antilang. no. 1, page 34 – 35, 2018

Reviews

Nate Ragolia

Director of Communications

Nate has always enjoyed writing about worlds that don’t exist… at least not yet. He’s long loved the potent allegory and contemplative power of science fiction, where idealism and real, human experience cross paths to give us a glimpse of possibility. He enjoys eavesdropping as a font for realistic and unexpected dialogue. You’re likely to find him petting dogs, playing video games, or exploring the world on foot.

Long Fiction:

Short Fiction: 

  • “Script Doctor” (Oct. 2021, Outside In Wants to Believe: 156 New Perspectives on 156 X-FILES Universe Stories by 156 Writers, ATB Publishing)
  • “Is It an Acute Shared Psychosis, or Is Your Boss A Monster of the Week?” (Oct. 2020, Outside In Trusts No One: 156 New Perspectives on 156 X-FILES and KOLCHAK Stories by 156 Writers, ATB Publishing) 
  • “God Damn You, Henry Ford” (Feb. 2020, The Future Will Be Written By Robots, Spaceboy Books LLC)
  • “Support Group” (2018, Outside In Takes A Stab: 139 New Perspectives on 139 Buffy Stories by 139 Writers, ATB Publishing)
  • “Ensign Friend” (Sept. 2017, Outside In Makes It So: 174 New Perspectives on 174 STAR TREK TNG Stories by 174 Writers, ATB Publishing)
  • “Ruination” (2016, The Stoneslide Corrective)
  • “Finleymania” (Sept. 2016, Boned: A Collection of Skeletal Writings)  

Poetry:

  • “Alphabet Soup” (2020, South Broadway Ghost Society, Thought for Food)

Other:

Samantha Samakande

Junior Editor

Samantha grew up the daughter of Zimbabwean diplomats. Her experience of being an immigrant and of a life of transience is what made her a poet, an observer, and a daughter of many tongues and in-betweens. She returns over and over to moments of belonging and unbelonging throughout her life in her poems, always paying close attention to the ways we affect and are affected by the people in our lives. She writes about family, love and connection, mental illness, and such mundane things as waiting in line at the immigration office, riding the New York City subway, going to the dentist, and pantry moths.

Poetry 

Miki Schumacher

Junior Editor

Miki mostly writes gentle poetry and subtle horror. Their first love was poetry, but they also find themselves poking around different styles of prose. They’re especially drawn to mythology and folklore.

Fiction

Poetry

Evan Sheldon

Editorial Director

Evan has been writing strange things for a very long time now. He likes to write contemporary fiction that plays with structure and deals with those odd occurrences that might, or might not, be real—depending on the reader. He is interested in deserted buildings, dark woods, dying towns, and the characters who frequent such places.

Long Fiction

Creative Nonfiction

Fiction

Poetry