Masthead

Jessica Denzer is a writer and educator. She received her B.A. in English Literature from Fordham University and her M.F.A. in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a researcher in residence at the New York Public Library and writes fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Number Magazine, the Unpublishable Anthology, and West Trade Review, among others. Her short story “The Silence” was selected for Alternating Current Press Best Small Fictions of 2023. That same year she was involved with the launch of Iron Oak Editions, a new independent publisher of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, where she serves as Prose Editor and provides full novel critiques. Having previously served as an Associate Fiction Editor for West Trade Review, she is currently a contributing editor and writer for Four Way Review and teaches writing and literature at Fordham University.

Jessica is particularly drawn to winding, language-driven narrative that is both risky and well constructed. In other words, she likes the risk that takes the long road. Her own writing mixes the personal and historical with fiction to develop long winding narratives that stumble around the raw parts of human nature. She writes fiction and non-fiction, as well as scholarly essays, mostly on monsters and strange Edwardian literature. She has a finished novel, Mythologies, which spans the last decade of the 19th century through WWII, following a family who emmigrates from Europe only to be sent back a generation later to fight WWI. She is currently working on several essays and another novel, currently untitled. The second novel follows a 30-something adjunct lecturer, living in New York City and coping with the death of her closest friend while simultaneously having an affair with her friend’s ex-husband. It’s about grief and sex, it’s very juicy but also extremely literary. 

Some of Jessica’s favorite books as representative titles include Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God and The Autobiography of Red, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Roberto Bolaño’s 2066, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon. Her personal site is here and she can be found on social media @jessdenz.

Dan White is a current Ph.D. Candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. A graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles, he was a Fellow at Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program for the 2020-2021 year. He teaches fiction workshop and introductory writing courses at UIC, as well as a graduate course on narrative theory and the work of Rachel Cusk in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University. His project at both graduate school and his fellowship was The Seachamber, a literary work exploring a young woman’s consciousness as her inner ambition collides with the constraints of family at the wedding of her younger sister in 1994 Santa Monica. The Seachamber was longlisted for the Electric Book Award from Alternating Current Press. His second novel project, The Winemakers, asks questions about the price of memory and the possibilities of art across a single night in contemporary Los Angeles.

His PhD work centers around a single protagonist, Emily, within a reimagined Hamlet. The first project in the progression, The Nunnery, is set in contemporary Chicago and California and charged by a search for the depths to which narrational movement can verisimilarly render lived inner experience. That manuscript is on submission. In the meantime, he is at work on a new manuscript, a campus novel following that same character, Emily, a bit earlier in life, when things weren’t quite so complex. In the critical realm he is working on a scholarly manuscript studying the use of narration in Rachel Cusk’s books, centered on narrative theory, Wittgenstein, and feminism.

In addition to his work with Indirect and L’Esprit, he has served as the Prose Editor for West Trade Review literary journal since 2020. He also serves as the Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions, which he helped launch in 2023. Outside of the novel form, he writes short fiction, book reviews, and critical essays. His work has appeared in Florida Review, 3:AM, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among several other publications.

His literary tastes gravitate towards fearless, verisimilar, consciousness-forward writing in the High Modernist tradition. While reading, he tends to keep the opening sentence of Mrs. Dalloway close at hand, as it is tattooed on his arm. He especially enjoys innovative, intelligent third-person fiction and is wary of first-person present tense. Literature that entangles philosophy, especially that of language and experience, often resonates. He is further drawn to unorthodox and sophisticated uses of free-indirect style and other techniques for rendering inner life; work that takes risks, that displays understanding of theory, and that plays with time, memory, and freely-associative thought; quotidian realities of life; and anything in the wonderfully chaotic stream-of-consciousness quartier.

Alongside Mrs. Dalloway, some of his favorite books as representative titles include Pride and Prejudice, The Sound and The Fury, Speedboat, Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, The Last Supper, and Parade, Annie Ernaux’s Passion Simple, Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, Lucy Ives’ Life is Everywhere, Marguerite Duras’ Emily L., Anna Burns’ Milkman, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, George Gissing’s New Grub Street, Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, Aysegül Savaş’ White on White, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds and, bien sûr, Ulysses.

A Chicago ex-pat, he lived in Long Beach, California for nine years, where he taught writing at Otis College and frequented the beach to hide from writer’s block. In an earlier life he earned his J.D. from Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. In an even earlier one he earned a B.A. in European History from Roosevelt University in Chicago, in the same building where Margaret Anderson founded The Little Review. He has returned to Chicago to pursue his Ph.D., proving that time is an illusory construct. His personal site is hereand he can be found on Instagram and Bluesky @dwhitethewriter.

Hallie Underwood is a writer, bookseller, and literary marketing and publicity specialist based in New York City. She graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in English Literature and an Emphasis in Creative Writing. She also served as the Marketing and Publicity Manager for Sunset Press, a student-run publishing press.

Since moving to New York in 2024, Hallie has worked in bookselling, sharing her love of literature and art while supporting events and author programming. 

As a writer, Hallie gravitates toward psychological narratives woven into strange, often overlooked details from history and pop culture. Her current projects, all under working titles, include a story about a young man obsessed with professional wrestling masks, a tale following a woman in the aftermath of a chimpanzee attack, and a gothic narrative about a secret society for young women in haunted Savannah, Georgia. Hallie’s favorite books include Middlemarch by George Eliot, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Just Kids by Patti Smith, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller, and nearly everything by Joan Didion and Jane Austen.

Samantha Stone is a writer, theatre artist, and educator. She received a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communications from the George Washington University and an MFA in Playwriting from Fordham/Primary Stages program. She currently teaches composition writing, literature, and oral communications at Fordham, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) and Writopia Lab. Her work focuses on creating literature and theatre for social change by shedding light on prominent issues through new lenses. She writes fiction, creative nonfiction, plays, and screenplays, and is currently working on a novel among various dramatic projects. 

In early 2025, Samantha published a children’s book, The Kitchen Magician, suitable for readers ages 4-8, with Nightingale Books, an imprint of Pegasus Publishers. Her award winning one-act play, Negative Space, made its world premiere at the Gene Frankel Theatre Festival in the summer of 2025 and her play, Finding Olive, premiered at the SheNYC Summer Theater Festival two years prior. While at Fordham, her play, Tommy’s Girls, premiered in April 2018 at the Walkerspace at Soho Rep. The previous year her one-act, Why I Don’t Sleep, was presented in the Primary Stages Studios. This play was also a finalist for the Ivoryton Playhouse’s POWER PASSION PROSE Women Playwrights’ Initiative for 2018. Her play The Third Space Theory was a finalist for the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers in 2019. Her first full-length play, The Muscle in Question, made its world premiere at the 20th annual New York International Fringe Festival in 2016.

Samantha is drawn to naturalistic and evocative text that prioritizes setting and character over action and plot. Some of her favorite books include A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, The Hour of the Star and Água Vive by Clarice Lispector, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, and the play W;t by Margaret Edson. She also loves the multigeneric work of Nora Ephron, Vivian Gornick, and Renata Adler, and the plays of Annie Baker, Rajiv Joseph, Martyna Majok, and Lillian Hellman.

Her website is samanthajunestone.com and she can be found on instagram @samanthajunestone.

Jessica Willingham is a writer and editor from Oklahoma, where she lives surrounded by a vast home library, wildflowers, and the electric hum of the plains. Her work is rooted in the interior feminine experience, exploring radiance, desire, and transformation amid the realities of rural life. A graduate of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project (2019–2021), she studied fiction under the mentorship of Erika Krouse, who described her novel manuscript as “a lyrical journey through the corrupt cultural mores of a small Oklahoma town, where laws are negotiable and the status quo must be obeyed. I connected with her wry, dark sense of humor, the wisdom in her observations, and her unflinching look at justice as it continues to conflict with our imagining of the American Dream. She taught us to stun with prose, to always chase the magic, and to turn settings into Shiva-esque angels and monsters that come alive, shed blood, and show us our humanity.”

While that first novel is now shelved, its obsessions remain central to her work. Her prose has been nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net Anthology (2023, 2024), appeared on the longlist for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions (2024), and received a nomination for Best Microfiction (2025). She was named a semi-finalist for the 2024 St. Lawrence Book Award by Black Lawrence Press. Jessica has served on the masthead of Five South and as a reader for The Masters Review, Fractured Lit, and Bi-Coastal Review. Her editorial work has also appeared with Brit + Co and Bustle.

She is drawn to writing that explores unique landscapes and heritage, especially the ways history informs contemporary life in places like Oklahoma, where reading and writing remain deeply political, and sometimes dangerous. She seeks work that is unflinchingly honest without exploitation, accessible while maintaining literary excellence, and capable of moving real-world conversations to a higher plane.

Jessica is a devotee of the almighty “We” first-person plural perspective and stories that blend mystery with modernity. She values rhythmic language, realism in dialogue, and the kind of restraint that pricks at the heart of grief, longing, and hope in readers. Irish American and Native American folklore, mysticism, and surrealism infuse both her reading and her own work. 

Her debut poetry collection, Catfish Belly, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press in 2026. She is proud to be an independent artist from a sometimes unexpected place, representing the stories of America’s MidSouth region. When not writing or reading, she tends her garden, studies regional ancestry and history, and curates small constellations of beauty in her home and online.

Her favorite books include Vice: New and Selected Poems by Ai, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, and Dracula by Bram Stoker.

Luke Alchin-Scolnick is a writer and communications professional. He received his B.A. in Communications Studies from California State University, Northridge and his M.A. in Communications Management from the University of Southern California. Luke writes fiction and nonfiction, and you can find his nonfiction writing on his Substack page, The Backshift. He is currently an Associate Editor at the Militant Grammarian and the Manager of Communications for a start-up in the alcohol industry.

Luke tends to favor media and societal analyses, as well as long and winding narrative structures. He’s drawn to both modernist and postmodern fiction (when he isn’t reading an Agatha Christie novel) and especially enjoys a well constructed satirical edge. His own writing attempts to reflect on personal feelings and cultural observations and uses those as tentpole ideas for each essay and story. He writes nonfiction political and cultural criticism, and mostly horror/thriller nonfiction. He is currently working on a number of horror shorts, with plans to write a novel with the working title Gin Mill. He is also currently working on several essays on the topics of basketball and American culture, mundanity, and modern influences on film. 

Some of Luke’s favorite books as representative titles include Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Charles Portis’s Masters of Atlantis, Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and, for good measure, Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House. His Substack is here and she can be found on social media @luukewarm.

Kayla Hassett is a writer and recent graduate of Skidmore College, where she received her B.A. in English with a concentration in Poetry Writing and a minor in Art History. Her senior poetry capstone, You Sound Just Like Your Mother!, received departmental honors and earned her the Frances Steloff Poetry Prize in 2025. Exploring themes of memory, lineage, and budding selfhood, her first manuscript considers the ways language itself acts as form, favoring lush imagery and meditative lines. Her poetic voice has been described by Academy of American Poets prize-winner Matthew Gellman as “remarkably vivid and lucid as she gazes out at the world… so that we may come away enlivened, reminded of the power of intimacy.”

During her undergraduate years, Kayla studied closely with poet April Bernard, whom she credits with shaping her rigor and discipline as a writer. In 2025, she was a resident at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, working with Rosanna Warren, Campbell McGrath, and Henri Cole.
She first encountered a passion for modernism with Through the Looking Glass: A Reflection in high school, later deepening her engagement while studying in Bath, UK, where she thoroughly explored Virginia Woolf’s discography. In her final year at Skidmore, she was introduced to James Joyce’s Ulysses and fell in love with Molly Bloom’s “Penelope” episode. Her essay “‘Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before’: Tarot, Theosophy, and the ‘Memory of the Earth’ in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” examines esotericism and the clairvoyant feminine power in the novel, and was awarded Distinguished Essay at the 300 Level in 2025.

Her inspirations include Louise Glück, Gertrude Stein, Etel Adnan, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery, though she considers The Waves by Virginia Woolf the ur-text of her life. More of her favorites are Orlando, Anne Carson’s Plainwater, Of Cities and Women by Etel Adnan, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Above all, she believes in writing with both devotion and defiance: swooning over language’s brilliance while also breaking its rules with reckless care—all the while caring too much to stop. She is currently based in Long Island, NY, where she continues to forge her path in literature, poetry, and the arts.

Aerin Ellard is a fourth year student at Fordham University, where she is studying English and Psychology. When she isn’t in class or reading slush pile submissions, Aerin serves as an undergraduate assistant at Fordham’s Compulsive Obsessive Anxiety Program Lab. She has conducted independent research examining perceptions of ideological difference and social class among American academics and undergraduate students. Apart from her own practice as a writer, she is interested in how language functions in contemporary political extremism, as well as how creative writing practices can be used to address sociopolitical conflicts. Spanning literary and empirically-oriented spaces, Aerin’s work is best described as an interdisciplinary exercise in narrative capabilities. In the words of critic A.S. Byatt, she believes that “narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.” 

With regard to her literary tastes, Aerin is drawn to work that takes risks at the formal level without sacrificing coherency. She is a fervent fan of the close third-person perspective, well-crafted dialogue, and sentences that showcase the musicality of language. Most of all, she appreciates literature that demonstrates intention; in other words, work that defies convention in pursuit of meaning, as opposed to the thrill of disobedience. Aerin’s own writing is predominantly non-fiction; she is currently working on a collection of essays that explore memory, grief, and belonging in young womanhood. 

Some of Aerin’s favorite books as representative titles include Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Magda Szabó’s The Door, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and Sophocles’ Antigone.

Anika Strite is a fourth year student at Barnard College studying literature and creative writing, French, and history. She is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, where she heads the publication in a direction that highlights exciting, rigorous undergraduate scholarship and provides a forum for interdisciplinary critique. She is a poet and writer with work appearing in print issues of Quarto Magazine, Barnard Echoes, and Wingless Dreamer. In 2024, her chapbook Volta was published by Quarto Magazine after winning its annual chapbook contest. She has received Barnard English departmental awards for her poetry writing, including the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Amy Loveman Memorial Fund Prize.

Anika was plunged into her modernism moment (which she is sure will last her lifetime) after taking a class with Ross Posnock at Columbia University. She is interested in literature that does not seek to serve intelligibility to its reader, and grapples with the paradox of confronting the insufficiency of language to capture experience while using language as its medium. Anika is a fan of cubism and the intersections of avant-garde visual and literary arts in the early twentieth century. Naturally, one of her favorite writers is Gertrude Stein. In her own work, Anika writes on themes surrounding the body, aesthetics, form, philosophy, and translation. Some of her favorite books include Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, Rachel Cusk’s Transit, and Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. Favorite poets include Stein, Carson, Wallace Stevens, Petrarch, and Ama Codjoe.