In Short – Issue 3 (Spring 2025)
Contributors
Flash
Sue William Silverman (she/her) is an award-winning author of nine works of nonfiction and poetry. Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul is the 2024 IPPY Silver Award Winner. How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences won the gold star in Foreword Reviews INDIE Book of the Year Award and the Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature. Other works include Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, made into a Lifetime TV movie; Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, which won the AWP Award; and The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew. Her flash essay collection, Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader, is forthcoming September, 2025. She co-chairs the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her media appearances include The View, Anderson Cooper-360, and PBS Books. www.SueWilliamSilverman.com.
Brian McGuigan (he/him) was born and raised in Queens, NY and now lives with his wife and two sons just outside of Seattle. His work has appeared in Gawker, The Rumpus, Salon, The Stranger, and elsewhere, and has received grants from 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. He was the co-creator of Seattle’s best reading reading series, Cheap Wine & Poetry, and for many years, he directed the literary programming at Hugo House. He’s currently at work on a memoir, from which “Crack” is an excerpt. He also occasionally writes about his 90s rap CD collection at my90srapcds.substack.com
Shoshana Ray (she/her) is a somatic psychotherapist and writer whose work centers on posttraumatic growth. She’s published for The Keepthings and has forthcoming prose in Hippocampus and TrashLight Press. Beauty, Terror, & Everything In Between, her fortnightly letter on Substack, is the best place to connect with her. Currently, she’s editing a memoir. Shoshana lives in the Twin Cities with her husband, son, and geriatric tuxedo cat. She is an aspiring tea sommelier and analog enthusiast, with two typewriters to boot.
Vani Aadhya (she/her) is a 1998 born, writing through the mystical in and around us. Her days are spent in Jaipur, India, sipping on historical aesthetics and admiring a cup of chai. You can find her on the bird app, @vaniadyawrites or on her balcony, silently staring at the moon.
Amy Barnes (she/her) is an award-winning writer and editor with words at a wide variety of sites including The Rumpus, X-R–A-Y Lit, and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her third collection Child Craft was published by Belle Point Press in 2023. She’s an editor at Fractured Lit, Ruby Lit, and Gone Lawn and reads for The MacGuffin and Narratively. She also creates and teaches courses for the Narratively Storytelling Academy. Her writing has been included in the WL50 Longlist in 2021-2024, Best Small Fictions 2022, and the Best Microfiction 2025 anthology. She’s a recent empty nester with two kids in college and a new dog at home.
Molly Wadzeck’s work has been published in X-R-A-Y, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among others. Her creative nonfiction, an Editor’s Choice Award winner, was nominated for a Best of the Net award in 2022. She is working on a memoir.
Brandi Handley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road, The Laurel Review, Moon City Review, The Dodge, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Nature Writing. She teaches English at Park University, a small liberal arts college in Parkville, Missouri.
Micros
Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019) and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men (2022. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Best American Essays, The Times Literary Supplement, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review, among other places, and his essay “La Bohème” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Thompson’s book Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2025. Additionally, his novels Miles from Home and Let Us Go Then, You and I are forthcoming from Running Wild Press. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City.
Darby Price (she/her) is a poet and hybrid writer. She teaches in the Composition Program at UC Irvine and as a Teaching Artist with WriteGirl Global. Her work has previously appeared in Zócalo Public Square, RHINO, Cimarron Review, and No Contact, among others. Her debut, the lyric memoir All the Lands We Inherit, is available for presale at Black Lawrence Press. Darby lives in Southern California and makes her digital home at www.darbyprice.com.
Matthew E. Henry (MEH) (he/him) is the author of six poetry collections, the editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal, the creative nonfiction editor at Porcupine Literary, and an associate editor at Rise Up Review. MEH’s recent publications include Anti-Heroin Chic, Had, Identity Theory, Mom Egg Review, Presence, The Prose Poem, Stone Circle Review, Terrain, and Whale Road Review. MEH is a high school teacher who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. He writes about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground at www.MEHPoeting.com.
Timothy Smith (he/him) is a writer based on the southwest coast of Michigan, and is the author of Crashproof Your Kids: Make Your Teen a Safer, Smarter Driver. His stories, articles, and essays have appeared in a variety of publications. Excerpts from his memoir-in-progress will appear in forthcoming issues of Passages North, The Brussels Review, and Chicago Story Press.
Elizabeth Rose (she/her) was born in Pittsburgh, PA but has lived in the Carolinas, Turkey, Spain, Thailand, California, and Washington, DC. Her academic work on eco-anxiety, ecofeminism, and the history of women in higher education has been published by Duke University, Georgetown University, and The Herald-Sun. She won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story competition while serving as a Lannan Fellow for creative writing at Georgetown, where she also taught graduate-level writing workshops. She is currently working on her first novel. Find her on Instagram: @elizabethrosewrites
Short-Shorts
Melissa Hung (she/her) is a writer and journalist who grew up in Houston, Texas, the eldest child of immigrants. She is the founding editor in chief of Hyphen. Her essays and reported stories have appeared in Longreads, Catapult, wildness, Vogue, NPR, and the anthologies Body Language and Disability Intimacy. She is at work on a collection of creative nonfiction about her mother and inheritance. Find her at melissahung.xyz.
Donald A. Ranard’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New World Writing Quarterly, Vestal Review, The Los Angeles Review, 100 Word Story, The Best Travel Writing, and elsewhere. In 2022, his prose poem “5/25/22” was longlisted by Wigleaf as one of the year’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions and his one-act play, ELBOW. APPLE. CARPET. SADDLE. BUBBLE., placed second in a national playwriting contest. Before settling in Arlington, VA, he lived and worked in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
Michelle La Vone (she/her) is a Nashville native currently living in the Pacific Northwest. She loves exploring creative nonfiction, salsa and bachata dancing, hiking, Zillow-browsing, and snacking right before dinner. Her work has appeared in Five Minute Lit, where she placed as a finalist in the fall 2024 “Flirt” contest. Occasionally she designs whimsical animal stickers for her small brand, doodlemaus.
Art
“Callypigeon” | “Silvester” | “Roller System” | “Dragon Wood”| “Wise Ol’ Owl Sat In An Oak” | “The Raven”
Camellia Paul (she/her) has a Masters in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, India. She is also a member of the Association of Canadian Studies in Ireland. She has presented award-winning research on “Bengal owlscapes” in an international conference at a South Korean university. A former Senior Instructional Designer in an ed-tech MNC, Camellia has worked in print media and publishing houses of international repute, and been part of various academic translation projects. Her works of translation, fiction, and nonfiction have been published by The Antonym, San Antonio Review, and Pink Disco Magazine. She is an award-winning visual artist with her poetry and art regularly appearing in magazines, anthologies, and online journals such as The Fabulist, Livewire, The Passionfruit Review, Solstitia, The Fantastic Other, among others. She also has published photographs in The Telegraph, Kolkata, The City Key, and Setu. She has designed academic book covers and posters for international conferences, published by educational and research institutes, including Sahitya Akademi, Jadavpur University, and Ashoka University. She has won the “Best Artist Award” from KPR International (India, Bangladesh, and Nepal). As an independent practitioner of the visual arts and photography, she extensively works on the interface of narratives from the everyday in a pre- and post-pandemic world across rural and urban spaces. Apart from being passionate about Nature, art, and owls, Camellia loves reading, listening to music, and exploring cultures.
“Feathered Friends” | “Call of the Wild”
Claudia Tong (she/her) is an artist, quantitative researcher and football coach based in London, creating at the intersection of physical and digital art. Her practice spans from painting and illustrations to mixed media, visual computing, photography and music. With a background in computer science and psychology, she has lived, studied, worked and exhibited internationally. Her art can be found at https://linktr.ee/claudiaxt.
“Friday Flowers” | “City of Eyes”
Alexis E. Jacobson is originally from a suburb thirty minutes outside Minneapolis. She moved to Montana five years ago to attend Montana State University and pursue an undergraduate degree in English writing with minors in psychology and global studies. In her degree, she loved
reading and writing historical fiction, creative nonfiction, memoirs, and micro-essays. Outside academia, she enjoys anything outdoors, from backcountry skiing to hiking to whitewater rafting, dinner parties, painting, sewing, long walks, and knitting.
Tytti Heikkinen (she/her) is a Finnish visual artist working across photography, painting, and digital media. Based in Finland, she has exhibited internationally, with work appearing in Amsterdam Review, Arkana, The Ana, and Ex-Puritan, among others. She lives in Hämeenlinna. She is also an author with three poetry books in Finland and a translation collection, The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal (Action Books, 2013), released in the USA. Her writings has appeared in Europe, North America, and New Zealand, in publications such as Siècle 21 Littérature & Société, Precipice, The Offing, Acumen, and Poetry Magazine. In 2023, she was awarded second prize in the Singapore Poetry Contest, and her chapbook World Undressed (After Hours Editions, USA), translated by Niina Pollari, was released. This work was supported by Kone Foundation.
Tinamarie Cox (she/her) lives in Arizona with her husband, two children, and a one-eyed cat. Her written and visual work has appeared in numerous publications under various genres. You can explore more of her work at tinamariethinkstoomuch.weebly.com.
ENGH 456: Publishing Flash Nonfiction
A special thank you to the students in my Spring 2025 ENGH 456: Publishing Flash Nonfiction course at George Mason University, who read for this issue and helped select pieces for publication. They include: