Editors
Editor in Chief
Meagan Lucas is the author of the Anthony nominated collection, Here in the Dark, and the award-winning novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs. Meagan has published over 40 short stories and essays. Her work has been named to the Best American Mystery and Suspense Distinguished list twice. She is Pushcart, Best of the Net, Derringer, and Canadian Crime Writer’s Award of Excellence nominated and won the 2017 Scythe Prize for Fiction. Her novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs was chosen to represent North Carolina in the Library of Congress 2022 Route 1 Reads program, and won Best Debut at the 2020 Indie Book Awards. Meagan teaches Creative Writing at Robert Morris University and in the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville. Born and raised on a small island in Northern Ontario, she now lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Managing Editor
Charlotte Hamrick’s creative writing and photography has been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies including Still: The Journal, The Citron Review, Atticus Review, Reckon Review, Trampset, and New World Writing, among many others. Her fiction was selected for the Best Small Fictions 2022 and 2023 anthologies and she’s had several literary nominations including the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She was formerly Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Citron Review and Barren Magazine. She also writes intermittently on her Substack, The Hidden Hour. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and a menagerie of rescued pets where she sometimes does things other than read and write.
FICTION EDITOR
Drew Coles is a Hooiser transplant now residing in Asheville, NC. His fiction has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as well as Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and can be found in Reckon Review, BULL, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.
Assistant Features Editor
Sandra K. Barnidge is an Alabama-based writer with a passion for small towns and overlooked places. Her fiction leans speculative and has appeared in Barren, Nimrod, The Fiddlehead, Reckon Review, Reservoir Ridge, and elsewhere. sandrabarnidge.com
Creative Nonfiction Editor
Jim Almo is a writer and musician who grew up in the hills of Virginia. After spending time in Austin and New Orleans, he now lives in New England with his wife, kids, and furry creatures. His work appears in Reckon Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, Five Minute Lit, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among others. He is currently working on a memoir about growing up in, and leaving, a high-control religious group.
Wind & Root Columnists
Barlow Adams
Barlow Adams is a chronically ill writer in the Northern Kentucky area. He has survived kidney failure, lymphoma, and a saccular aneurysm. He occasionally wins writing awards and international competitions. He is overly fond of pie and smush-faced dogs.
Amy Cipolla Barnes
Amy Cipolla Barnes is the author of three short fiction collections: AMBROTYPES published by word west, Mother Figures at ELJ, Editions and CHILD CRAFT, forthcoming from Belle Point Press. Her words have appeared in a wide range of publications including: The Citron Review, JMWW Journal, Janus Lit, Flash Frog, Nurture Lit, Complete Sentence, Gone Lawn, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, SmokeLong Quarterly, Apartment Therapy, Southern Living, Motherly, Romper, Allrecipes and many others. She’s been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, long-listed for Wigleaf50 in 2021 and 2022, and included in Best Small Fictions 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor and reads for Retreat West, The MacGuffin, and Narratively.
Edward Karshner
Edward Karshner was born in Ross County, Ohio and grew up in the Salt Creek Valley of Southeast Appalachia Ohio which draws together Ross, Hocking, and Pickaway Counties. After earning a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Philosophy from Bowling Green State University, he began to explore cultural rhetoric as expressed in folklore. His primary interest was how landscape influences folk-ideologies. In the early part of his career, he travelled extensively in China, Slovakia, Austria, and the Czech Republic before spending over a decade working with the Dinè(Navajo). Now, as a Professor of English at Robert Morris University, he has returned to researching, teaching and writing about Appalachian folklore, magic, and mysticism. A 2022 Research Fellow in Folklore at Berea College’s Special Collections and Archives, Karshner is the author of “These Stories Sustain Me” in the collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Replies to Hillbilly Elegy. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and is forthcoming in Still: The Journal.
Brandy Renee McCann
Brandy Renee McCann, PhD is a writer and social scientist whose work is focused on life in Appalachia. Her creative work has been published in Reckon Review, Still: The Journal, Change Seven, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, The Dead Mule, and other literary venues. Brandy’s scholarly, collaborative work on aging in Appalachia can be found in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including the Journals for Gerontology: Social Sciences, Journal of Rural Mental Health, and Journal of Family Issues among others. Brandy is a research associate and project coordinator at the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech. To learn more about the family caregiving research in which she’s currently involved, visit here: https://careex.isce.vt.edu. Her social media handle is appalbrandy.
Valerie Peralta
Valerie Peralta is an intermittent practitioner of just about everything she does striving to be more tortoise and less hare. After copy editing for two decades, she’s finally trusting her own words on the page. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University; her work has been published by The Blended Future Project and is forthcoming in Heart Balm. She lives in South Florida within running distance of the Everglades.
Stuart Phillips
Stuart Phillips is an expatriate Mississippian, former Army officer, and recovering lawyer who now lives and writes in the Mohawk Valley of New York. A graduate of Ole Miss, Pepperdine (JD) and Fairfield University (MFA), Stuart is slowly driving himself mad with revisions on The Great Southern Novel. You can follow his descent at stuartphillips.work or on Instagram @deltawriter12.
Susan Schirl Smith
Susan Schirl Smith is a writer, photographer and holistic nurse living on the Seacoast of New Hampshire. Her essays have been published in WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Pangyrus, Silver Birch Press, Kind Over Matter, and the Porter House Review, among others. Her photography has been featured in Barren Magazine and L’Ephemere Review, along with local newspapers.
She has always been fascinated by the infinite possibilities of the world, and has owned a holistic wellness center, worked as a creative coach, designed websites, taught meditation and self-development classes, along with working in nursing in hospital and community settings. Her memoir in revisions is Desperado, a story of grief and hope, and the connection with loved ones that lasts forever.
First Readers
Kate Carey
Kate M Carey grew up on 88 acres in Ohio and now explores her coastal environment meeting natives and newcomers chronicling their stories. Carey’s work has appeared in Reckon Review, Noctua, The Tishman Review, Panoply, and the anthologies, Things We Carry Still, Dialogue at the Bar With Drinking Partner, Savannah Writers, and County Lines Journal. She lives on the NC coast with her husband and cat and writes for Topsail Magazine.
Jessica Cory
Jessica Cory teaches in the English Department at Appalachian State University and is a PhD candidate specializing in Native American, African American, and environmental literatures at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the editor of Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press, 2019) and the co-editor (with Laura Wright) of Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (UGA Press, 2023). Her creative and scholarly writings have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Northern Appalachia Review, and other fine publications. Originally from southeastern Ohio, she currently lives in western North Carolina.
Tammy L. Evans
Tammy L. Evans is a writer, teacher, and coach living in a tiny house on a peninsula with her husband and adventure cat. Her location device is her loud laugh. Her fiction has been published in Gone Lawn, South
Florida Journal, Five on the Fifth, Fiction Berlin Kitchen, and others. You can follow @writertammy X and IG or Blue Sky
Pat Jameson
Pat Jameson is a writer from Pennsylvania, now based in Roanoke, VA. He is currently working towards his MFA in fiction writing at Hollins University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, and BULL, among others. His story “Death Drive” was a finalist for the 2022 SmokeLong Quarterly Flash Fiction Award. Find him on Twitter @jameson_pat
Olga Katsovskiy
Olga Katsovskiy is a writer, editor, and educator. She works in a healthcare organization and is a writing instructor at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, a non-profit offering multidisciplinary classes in the heart of Harvard Square. She proudly serves as Creative Nonfiction Editor at Minerva Rising Press and Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at JMWW journal. Her essays have been published in Atticus Review: The Attic, Barzakh Magazine, Brevity blog, Gone Lawn Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Boston with her muse and biggest fan, her husband. Find her at theweightofaletter.com
Justin Lee
Justin Lee lives in East Tennessee with his wife and children. His work has appeared in Punk Noir Magazine, The Airgonaut, Reckon Review, Mirrors Reflecting Shadows: An Anthology, Cowboy Jamboree, among others. He is currently at work on a novella.
Kim McVicker
Kim McVicker is a life-long resident of Iowa but has no cows, chickens nor any farming experience. She worked for decades in the financial services industry, which is as dull as it sounds. Mother of one, now gone, she finds solace in writing about her experiences with her daughter, even the ugly memories. When not reading, writing, or listening to NPR, she enjoys letting her granddaughters squish mud, fingerpaint and otherwise make whatever messes bring them joy. Her other pieces have been published in a folder labeled Writing on her desktop as well as in HerStry, Pithead Chapel, BackChannels and Anti-Heroin Chic. She lives in Des Moines, IA with her delightful, patient and mess-hating husband David.
BettyJoyce Nash
BettyJoyce Nash’s essays and short stories have aired on NPR’s local affiliate WVTF, and appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, North Dakota Quarterly, Broad River Review, Across the Margin, Reckon Review, and elsewhere. She also writes editorials for Carolina (N.C.) Commentary. A MacDowell fellow in 2013, she co-edited, and contributed, to Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, an anthology of short stories probing Americans’ complicated relationship to firearms (University of New Mexico Press, 2017.) Her fiction has also been recognized with fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Tyrone Guthrie Center. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville. In Everybody Here is Kin, her first novel, characters marooned on a barrier island are forced to question traditional notions of family as they struggle to stay afloat. Literally.
Megan E. O’Laughlin
Megan E. O’Laughlin (she/they) is a psychotherapist and artist whose essays can be found in Watershed Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Defunkt Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and others. She is the Managing Editor of The Black Fork Review and co-host of the I’M TRIGGERED! Podcast. She is currently writing an essay collection about wounded healers. Megan lives on a peninsula by the sea in Washington State.
Melayna Pongratz
Melayna Pongratz is a writer and visual artist born, raised, and currently residing in western PA. They are pursuing their B.A. in English from Robert Morris University. Melayna primarily writes poetry and creative nonfiction, and they enjoy finding ways to blend their visual art with writing. Regardless of genre, their work focuses on topics such as queerness, family, grief, and religion. In their free time, they can be found at coffee shops, on the phone with their mom, or napping with their cat, Scout.
Sheree Shatsky
Sheree Shatsky is the author of the novella-in-flash Summer 1969 (Ad Hoc Fiction 2023). She is a contributor to MAINTENANT 17: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art ‘PEACEFIRE’ (Three Rooms Press 2023). Her work has appeared in a variety of journals including Cowboy Jamboree and BULL. Ms. Shatsky attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop summer session 2021 and was selected by the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program as a Spring 2018 mentee for flash fiction. Her microfiction was nominated for Best Microfiction 2022 (Splonk Flash) and Best Microfiction 2020 (Fictive Dream and MoonPark Review). She calls Florida home and is a Tom Petty fan. Read more of her work at shereeshatsky.com and connect with her on Twitter @talktomememe
Ilyn Welch
Ilyn Welch (she/her) is an Inland Empire resident. She writes crime stories, horror, and creative nonfiction. Her stories have been published with Vautrin, PANK, Shotgun Honey, Pomona Valley Review, in Step Into the Light, a Bag of Bones Press Anthology, and in the 2022 Writing From Inlandia anthology. Her debut crime fiction novella SIGNS OF PAIN was published in 2023 by Shotgun Honey. Connect with @IlynWelch on Instagram.
Extended Family
