In Short – Issue 2 (Winter 2025)

Kyoko Mori (she/her) is the author of three other nonfiction books and four novels. Kyoko Mori teaches creative writing at George Mason University and the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University. Her most recent nonfiction book, CAT AND BIRD: A MEMOIR was published by Belt Publishing in March 2024. She lives in Washington DC with her cats, Miles and Jackson.

Ira Sukrungruang (he/him) is the author of four nonfiction books This Jade World, Buddha’s Dog & other Meditations, Southside Buddhist, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist; the short story collection The Melting Season; and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the recipient of the 2022 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year in Nonfiction, 2015 American Book Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com), and is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. For more information about him, please visit: www.buddhistboy.com.

Alice Lowe (he/her) writes about life, language, food and family in San Diego, California. Her essays are widely published, including this past year in Big City Lit, Bluebird Word, New World Writing, Bridge VIII, Skipjack Review, BurningWord, Stoneboat, and Bookends Review. She has been cited twice in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Alice has written extensively on Virginia Woolf’s life and work and is a regular contributor at Blogging Woolf. She’s part of the contributing collective at Bloom and a peer reviewer for Whale Road Review. Read and reach her at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

Dawn Tasaka Steffler (she/her) is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the October 2023 Bath Flash Fiction Award, and selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 long list. Her work appears in Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, Iron Horse Literary Review, Moon City Review and more. She is working on a collection that explores the challenges of parenting transgender kids. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on X, BlueSky and Instagram @dawnsteffler.

Allison Field Bell (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY, forthcoming 2025 from Finishing Line Press and the creative nonfiction chapbook, EDGE OF THE SEA, forthcoming 2025 from CutBank Books. Allison’s prose appears in Best Small Fictions 2024, Best Microfiction 2024, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Passages North, THRUSH Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.

Adam Cheshire (he/him) is a writer and bookseller living in Hillsborough, NC. His work has appeared in a variety of publications. A collection of linked prose pieces, 90s Kid Plays Games, was published in December 2022 by NifytLit. Adam received his M.A. in literature from The University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Diane Shipley (she/her) is based in the UK, where she’s a creative writing PhD student at Lancaster University. Her previous work has been published by The Guardian, The Rumpus, Literary Hub and Longreads, among others. In her spare time, she looks at photos of miniature dachshunds.

Jesse Lee Kercheval (she/her) is a writer, translator, and artist. Her most recent poetry collections are I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada (Editorial Yaugurú, Uruguay, 2023) and America that island off the coast of France (Tupelo Books, 2019), winner of the Dorset Prize. She is also the author of the memoir, Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and the graphic memoir, French Girl, which the Washington Post named one of the Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2024.

Andrew Bertaina (he/him) is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus Books), and the short story collection, One Person Away From You. (Moon City Press). His essays have been listed as notable in three editions of the Best American Essays.

Holly Karapetkova (she/her) is Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virginia, and recipient of a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work with young poets. She is the author of three books of poetry, Dear Empire (Gunpowder Press), winner of the 2025 William Meredith Prize and the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize; Towline (Cloudbank Books), winner of the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize; and Words We Might One Day Say, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Prize for Poetry.

Vani Kannan (she/they) is an Atlanta-based writer and Associate Teaching Professor in the Emory University Writing Program. Her journalism and creative work appear in publications including Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Revealer, National Catholic Reporter, and Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry.

Callie B. Dean (she/her)  is a program evaluator and community artist living in Shreveport, LA, with her husband and three sons. Her essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming at Coffee + Crumbs, Unbroken, JMWW, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and elsewhere. She serves as an editorial assistant at Literary Mama and blogs for the STEM Tuesday team at From the Mixed-Up Files … of Middle Grade Authors. Her first picture book, Marvelous Mistakes: Accidents That Made History, will launch in 2026. Find her online at calliebdean.com.

Michelle R. Brady (she/her) is a writer, editor, and attorney. Her fiction is included in The Forge Literary Magazine, Arts & Letters, Lunch Ticket, Fractured Lit, and others. She has been awarded a Gold Circle Award for fiction from the Columbia University SPA and is currently nominated for two 2025 Pushcart Prizes. She holds a BFA in fiction writing and is EIC of House of Arcanum. Find her at www.MichelleReneeBrady.com

Karen Baumgart (she/her) lives in Australia and adores beautiful quotes, pink things, cats, and chai tea. She loves working in human services policy, especially when it enables marginalised people to have a voice. Karen used to be an English teacher, and is quite certain that writing is, indeed, the best therapy.

Elena Zhang (she/her) is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, Ghost Parachute, Your Impossible Voice, and Lost Balloon, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024.

Deborah K. Shepherd (she/her) is a retired social worker who spent her career working with survivors of interpersonal violence. She is the author of the novel, So Happy Together, published by She Writes Press in 2021. Her memoir, An Old Man’s Darling, will be published by Heliotrope Books in 2026. Deborah’s writing has appeared in Herstry, Fauxmoir, Motherwell, Oldster Magazine, and other publications. Mother of two and grandmother of two, she lives with one husband and one rescue dog on the coast of Maine.

Sean Bw Parker (MA) (he/him) is an artist, writer and musician specialising in art, cultural theory and justice reform. Since gaining a Masters degree in Fine Art from the University for the Creative Arts in 2003 he has published a number of books, albums and articles, lived in Istanbul for ten years, performed at or curated many festivals, given a TED talk, been played on BBC Radio, and had work exhibited at London’s South Bank. He was born in Exeter in 1975, and currently lives on the West Sussex coast.

KJ Hannah Greenberg (she/her) tilts at social ills and encourages personal evolutions via poetry, prose, and visual art. Her images have appeared as interior art in many places, including Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Les Femmes Folles, Mused, Piker Press, Stone Lake Gallery, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, and Yellow Mama and as cover art in many places, including Angime, Black Petals, Five on the Fifth, Impspired [sic], Pithead Chapel, Red Flag Poetry, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, The Broken City, and Torah Tidbits. Additionally, some of her digital paintings accompany her poetry in Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks (Seashell Books, 2024), Word Magpie (Audience Askew, 2024), Subrogation (Seashell Books, 2023), and One-Handed Pianist (Hekate Publishing, 2021).

Camille Rimbawa (she/her) currently serves as the Senior Editorial Intern for In Short. She is a junior at George Mason University studying English with a concentration in Creative Writing. She also works as an Editorial Intern for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and enjoys reading, cooking and beading in her free time.

Jasmine Haskins (she/her) served as the Editorial Intern in Spring 2024 and then as Senior Editorial Intern in the Fall semester of 2024. She earned her BFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University, with a minor in Professional and Technical Writing. In her free time, she enjoys reading, watching anime, playing with her dogs, and writing.