Abigail Bokaer (she/her/hers) is a writer and MFA student at Stonecoast, University of Southern Maine. She was a resident at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Abigail resides in her hometown, Ithaca, New York, with her husband, and where much of her extended family also lives. As a public elementary school teacher for twenty-five years, Abigail has found joy in teaching literacy to children. She loves hiking, bicycling, and year-round lake swimming.

Jessica Bayne (she/her) has been a nurses’ aide, a waitress, and  an actor, but has spent most of her working life as a video producer, editor and writer.  She is the co-author of two textbooks about human development.  Her fiction and reviews have been published in Commonweal, the New York Law Journal and the Green Mountains Review. Currently a student in the MFA program at Stonecoast, Jessica lives with her family in South Portland, Maine, the beautiful land taken from the Abenaki people.

Ruth Towne is the author of So the Sadness Could Not Hurt (Kelsay Books, 2025). She is a graduate of the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA. Her poem “So the Sadness Could Not Hurt” received the second-place Grantchester Award from The Orchards Poetry Journal, and her poem “S@lv@d°r D@l!’s Mannequin,” published in BAM Quarterly, Issue III, was nominated for the 2025 Best of the Net Anthology. Her poetry has also appeared in Stanford’s Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation. Her full-length poetry collection, Resurrection of the Mannequins, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025). Visit her online at ruthtowne.com.

Growing up in Chicago, Sarah Meierdirks always wished there was a way she could combine her two greatest loves: acting and writing. It only took her eighteen years to realize there was, and so "playwright" was added to her long list of aspirational career titles, right next to "novelist" and "eternal student." She is currently pursuing all of these things at the Stonecoast MFA Program after receiving a BA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. When she's not spending her time writing in the dark, she can be found crocheting little stuffed animals or befriending all the dogs in her neighborhood.

Dinah McCahan (she/her) writes dark fiction about whatever is currently at the forefront of her brain, which has included everything from avalanches to taxidermied pets. She has her undergraduate degree from University of Colorado, and is pursuing her MFA with the Stonecoast program. She is currently living in Colorado and works in the ski industry. When she’s not writing, she can be found skiing, bouldering, and going on long rants about which Scream movies are the best (the correct answer is I, IV, and V, in that order).

Ivy Jones (he/him) is a trans masculine storyteller from the American south who currently lives in Ohio with his partner, cats, and gerbil. He holds a BA in English from Oglethorpe University and is an MFA candidate at Stonecoast in Fiction. Ivy’s published work can be found in trampset, BAM Quarterly, beestung, and dadakuku, among others. He was Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine, Zero Readers, for two issues, and his university’s undergraduate magazine, The Tower, for four. When not putting words on a page, Ivy enjoys watching apes at the zoo, making Freud jokes, and presenting in-depth PowerPoints on Bluebeard adaptations—all of which are, in many ways, related to writing.

Balancing roots from central Illinois and the Maine coast, Ryan Schmidt spent most of his adult life living across New England, earning degrees from Saint Anselm College (BA), the University of Massachusetts (MBA), and Gonzaga University (PhD). He is currently enrolled in the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Southern Maine where he continues to explore the intersection of self-awareness, conceptualization, and the mystery of life. Having enjoyed a variety of leadership roles in financial services and technology organizations, Ryan now lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine with his wife, two growing daughters, and his thoughts.

t love smith (they/them) is a queer poet stewarding unceded Wabanaki land, a graduate student at Stonecoast MFA, a Publications Intern at The Telling Room and a Content Creator/Podcaster at WMPG.  As a GRO Scholar, t is curating a series of events for the Trans Poetics Archive which will culminate Spring 2025 with the publication of Monster Beauties:  A Maine Transgender Poetry Anthology.  Their poetry has been published in new words press vol. 3, Island Ink issue 2, Oddball Magazine, the Free Press, as well as presented on local radio podcasts: Transgender Poetics on WMPG and Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio.

Margaret McLeod Leef is a regular contributor to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Charleston Gazette-Mail newspaper in her hometown of Charleston, West Virginia. She also produces audio stories for the acclaimed podcast Inside Appalachia. She has worked as an editorial assistant at Eating Well Magazine and as Managing Editor for West Virginia Quarterly Magazine, where she earned several awards for her profiles of West Virginians. Margaret holds an English degree from the University of Vermont and specializes in narrative journalism that explores Appalachian culture and identity.

Michelle Dussault received her MFA in visual art from the University of Tennessee in 2003. Her background in painting and drawing has taken her on adventures from the Horn of Africa to the Arctic sea. She also holds a B.A. in Anthropology and African Studies from Rhode Island College. Michelle is currently writing an eco-fiction novel about evolution during the collapse of civilization that combines a speculative future with a mythical paleo-past to explore ancestral memory and the illusory nature of spacetime. She employs phantasmagorical prose with psychedelic undertones to depict the mystical currents of embodied life. She has been awarded multiple art and writing residencies including the Arctic Circle residency, the Hambidge Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Turkeyland Cove Foundation. She has collaborated on projects in Ethiopia, Norway and Vermont. Recent collaborations include, The Clean House Show, plant medicine ceremonies and home funerals.