Amy Lee Lillard has been writing for a long time, for herself and for other people. She’s worked as a marketer and copywriter for over twenty years, but she’s also placed her own work—both fiction and nonfiction—in Atlas and Alice, Barrelhouse, Epiphany, LitHub, Off Assignment, Entropy, Electric Lit, and more. In addition, she was “shortlisted…

Debut author Keema Waterfield had a different sort of upbringing: she was born in a trailer in Alaska and then chased “music with her twenty-year-old mother on the Alaskan folk festival circuit, two small siblings in tow.” But the story she tells of that upbringing in her debut memoir, Inside Passage, which released in May,…

Gordon Bonnet and I would have a lot to talk about should we ever meet in person. He’s a former science teacher and a runner and “is never without a piece of fiction in progress.” Kindred spirits, I tell you! All that writing has been fruitful—he has nineteen published novels, and two of them, Descent…

Debut author Lindsay Merbaum released The Gold Persimmon, her queer feminist horror novel, just in time for Halloween. Paul Goat Allen wrote that the book is “a nightmarish vision quest through alternate New York City hotels that ultimately leads both characters and readers to enlightenment,” and it landed on a list in Harper’s Bazaar as…