Fellow 2025.

DeMisty D. Bellinger is the author of All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere, an award-winning collection of short fiction from the University of Nebraska Press's Zero Street Fiction series (2024). Her other books include the poetry collections Peculiar Heritage (Mason Jar Press) and Rubbing Elbows (Finishing Line Press), and the novel New to Liberty(Unnamed Press). She has published many short works in journals online and in print. A Bread Loaf alum, Vermont Studio Center fellow, and a graduate of Southamptom’s MFA program and the University of Nebraska’s PhD in English, DeMisty now teaches creative writing at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts and plays viola in the Fitchburg State University Community Orchestra. She lives in central Massachusetts with her husband and twin teens. (more)

Fellow 2025.

LySaundra Janeé (she/her) is a multidisciplinary storyteller and musician. Her artistic practice leverages themes around Black feminism, magical realism, and African spirituality to amplify the stories of historically excluded and underrepresented women and femmes. Her literary writings and poetry are featured in the New York Writers Coalition anthology Common Unity, midnight & indigo, The New Territory Magazine, Rewire News, Sojourners, Chasing Justice, and more. (more)

Fellow 2025.

José is an ex-academic who traded primary source research in Rio de Janeiro for writing literary fiction on his couch in Bushwick. A Brooklynite-to-the-bone, yet a Jersey boy by heart, born in Newark. Jose's journey has included community college, food stamps, rent strikes, as well as an exhaustive list of stints as a barista, barback, busboy, and more in the Big Apple. Though he made it to Duke University as a Ph.D. student in history, he is eager to explore a writerly and intellectual life outside the ivory tower. He is now a Periplus Fellow with acclaimed novelist Bryan Washington as a mentor. His work has been recited at readings such as Limousine reading series, as well as publications such as Jacobin and n+1. Naturally, he has recently started a Substack.

Fellow 2024.

Benjamin Niespodziany is a Chicago-based poet and folklorist. His fairy tales and fables have been published in Fairy Tale Review,Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y, Gone Lawn, The Ekphrastic Review, HAD, Post Road, puerto del Sol, and various others. Along with two published books (one of poems and one of microfictions), he is currently working on a novel that takes place in the forest. (more)

Fellow 2024.

I’m a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor who has previously worked as a senior editor at The Atlantic, Them and The Body. My work has been featured in Teen Vogue, Slate, The Village Voice, SELF,Out, The Advocate, INTO, TheBody, POZ, Remezcla and Mic. I have had essays published in two anthologies: Modern Loss and A Great Gay Book. I am represented by Natalie Edwards at Trellis Literary. I am currently writing a young adult graphic novel through Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, as well as a memoir that is being published by Abrams Books. (more)

Fellow 2024.

I’m Lauren Theresa, a 10th house scorpio stellium divergent visual artist & writer, plant witch, trauma therapist, psych professor, queen of all trades, mom of 2, author of 3, and co-founder-instrument-of-chaos at Icebreakers Lit, who hates writing bios in 3rd person. (more)

Fellow 2023.

Before becoming a writer, Dr. Mike McClelland worked as a gravedigger, wedding singer, antique salesman, and as a strategic planning director for clients like Toyota, MillerCoors, and Buffalo Wild Wings. Like Sharon Stone and the zipper, Mike is originally from Meadville, Pennsylvania. He has lived on five different continents but now resides in Illinois with his husband, two sons, and a menagerie of rescue dogs. He is the author of the short fiction collection Gay Zoo Day and his creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, WIRED, Electric Literature, Boston Review, Vox, The Baffler, Fairy Tale Review, and a number of literary magazines and anthologies. His fiction has been recognized as a winner or finalist in competitions given by Salamander, Passages North, Booth, Grist, NYC Midnight, and the Agnes Scott College Writers' Festival, where Pulitzer Prize winner and National Poet Laureate Rita Dove chose his work as the winner of the festival's annual fiction prize. His essay “When Lies Turn to Prophecies” was recently named one of The New York Times’ seven favorite summer love stories, and his collection What Used to Be Caracas was the 2022 runner-up for Hub City Press’s C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize. He is a graduate of Allegheny College, The London School of Economics, the MFA program at Georgia College, and University of Georgia's Creative Writing PhD program, and currently teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University. (more)

Fellow 2022.

I am a writer, developmental editor, teacher, and disability advocate in the Washington, DC area. You can read my work in The Washington Post, The Week, Al Jazeera, The Independent, Huffington Post, Craft Literary, Brevity, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Poet Lore, Fairy Tale Review, and many more newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. My writing has been included in the Wigleaf Top 50 and has been nominated for Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. (more)