[Image Description: A white woman with dark brown, chin-length hair smiles at the camera. She is in a wheelchair, and is wearing a black, scoop-neck dress.]

Brianna Albers

Brianna Albers is a storyteller, located in the Minneapolis suburbs. In 2016, she founded Monstering, a magazine for disabled women and nonbinary people; she currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in DIALOGIST, TYPO Magazine, and The Offing, among others. Contact her via email at briannahopealbers@gmail.com.

[Image Description: A white man with short, brown and gray hair, and a white mustache and beard, smiles into the camera. He's wearing a tan suit on top of a light gray oxford shirt, and standing outside in what appears to be tundra. Behind him, in the faraway distance, are blue mountains.]

Timothy Allen

Timothy Allen is a native of upstate New York. Much of his childhood was spent in Arizona, though, which whetted his interest in geology and, especially, in rock formations. He studied geomorphology as an undergraduate, and worked as a surveyor’s assistant, resurveying the original boundaries of the Daniel Boone National Forest in Eastern Kentucky.  Pressing social and political concerns eventually drew him into a graduate program in philosophy; adventitious vision loss, however, has more recently kindled an interest in poetry and literature. He lives in the Allegheny mountains in upstate New York.

[Image Description: A Mexican man with tan skin and dark brown hair with blue and purple dreads looks up into the camera. He has a dark mustache and dark brows. He's sitting in his office/studio wearing a black sweatshirt with multi-colored pins, whose designs and words are illegible. Behind him are his computer, keyboard, and speaker on his wooden desk.]

Steven Archer

Steven Archer is a multifaceted musician, artist, and writer. He is best known for his work with the electronic rock band Ego Likeness (Metropolis Records) as well as his abstract electronica project ::Hopeful Machines::. His music has been used in several feature soundtracks including the recent award-winning documentary Small Small Thing. He has also been commissioned to score a video for NASA on the upcoming OSIRIS-REx mission.

[Image Description: In this black and white photograph, a white man with blond hair (long on top, buzzed back and sides) and a short blond beard looks slightly to the side of the camera. He is visible only from the shoulders up. His head, in ¾ profile, is angled toward the head of a black cat, who is also leaning in toward him and glancing toward the camera out of the corner of one eye.  The man’s rectangular black eyeglasses and black t-shirt echo the cat’s black fur. The two seem to be sharing a secret.]

Jay Besemer

Jay Besemer is a poet, performer, artist and editor whose books and chapbooks include the forthcoming Crybaby City (Spuyten Duyvil), Telephone, Chelate (both Brooklyn Arts Press), A New Territory Sought (Moria), Aster to Daylily (Damask Press) and Object with Man’s Face (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions). He is a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Jay is a contributing editor with The Operating System. Look for him on Twitter @divinetailor and on Tumblr http://jaybesemer.tumblr.com.

[Image Description: A young white woman with her arms raised. She is smiling and standing in front of a mural of wings painted various shades of pink, purple, blue, and white. She is wearing a green cardigan, jeans, and a T-shirt with triangular prints.]

Marlena Chertock

Marlena Chertock's first collection of poetry, On that one-way trip to Mars, is available from Bottlecap Press. She is the Poetry Editor for District Lit. Her poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Fat, Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction, The Fem, The Little Patuxent Review, Paper Darts, and Wordgathering. Find her at marlenachertock.com or @mchertock.

[Image Description: A man sits on a high backed tan couch. The picture contains only his head and shoulders. He has medium length scruffy brown hair with long wisps protruding from the back. His eyebrows are thick in the middle by the bridge of the nose and thin along the outside of the brow ridge. Full cheeks push up against his eyes, which bulge slightly with light bags. He has a warm smile with his top teeth showing, which are straight and large, especially the front two teeth.]

David Flexer

David is an entrepreneur with Sojourner's Tent, where he practices writing, editing, publishing, community organizing, wild herb collecting, and herbalism along with his wife, Hilary. He is father and home schooler of three children, with a focus on learning techniques for alternative neurotypes. Intense writing practice has been part of his life since college, and includes techniques of automatic writing, Jungian active imagination, and letter permutation to channel fertile subconscious energy into poetry and narrative. His writing, therefore, often resides within overlooked aspects of humanity.

[Image Description: A large white woman is sitting in a yellow wheelchair. She’s wearing a blue top and red trousers, and in her hand is a poetry collection. She’s wearing pink glasses, has a bald head, and is smiling somewhat enigmatically into the camera.]

Petra Kuppers

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She is a Professor at the University of Michigan, and she teaches on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Her most recent poetry collection is PearlStitch (2016).  Stories have appeared in Drunken Boat, The Sycamore Review, PodCastle, Future Fire, Capricious, Wordgathering, and Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction. Her Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction (2014) offers practical exercises for classrooms and studios.  She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias disability culture collective. She lives in Ypsilanti with her collaborator, Stephanie Heit. Website: 
petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com.

[Image Description: A hand-drawn recreation of Disney’s Pocahontas, but with real tribal markings, Pride Flag-colored long hair, tattoos, and "Saulteaux Cote First Nation" in red script on a black t-shirt. This is the image most commonly known to be associated with the elusive Mari.]

Mari Kurisato

Mari Kurisato is the pen name for a disabled, LGBTQIA, tribally enrolled Cote First Nations Ojibwe woman who lives in Denver, Colorado with her wife and son. She has written two self-published books, and her short fiction has appeared in LOVE BEYOND SPACE AND TIME, the THINGS WE ARE NOT anthology, and ABSOLUTE POWER, TALES OF QUEER VILLAINY by Northwest Press. She is currently hard at work on her next novel, seeking an agent, and spending too much time on Twitter & in MMO's. Find her on Twitter at @CyborgN8VMari and at polychromantium.com. Be warned, she cusses like a motherfracker.

[Image Description: A white-presenting, brunette woman wearing red glasses and a long-sleeved black shirt with a gray vest hunches over a worktable to focused intently on a painting she is working on in the left-hand corner of the picture. To the right of her is a white palette of paints. Behind her, a portrait adorns the wall, and in front of the portrait is a vase of pink flowers and green plants.] 

Holly Morningstar

Holly, like many people, fell in love with fairy tales (and all things fantasy and animated) as a child and never outgrew them. As an adolescent, she developed an admiration for portraiture and figurative art. The portraits she paints today are snapshot celebrations of perseverance, hope, love, and sexuality. She embraces a pallet of bright colors to echo the zesty and playful approach she still takes to life as an adult. Through portraiture, she explores the faces people present to society and exposes pieces of humanity that sit just below the surface. She doesn’t believe people have skeletons in their closets, rather, they have dragons under their skin. (http://www.archaicsmiles.com)

[Image Description: In this blurry, sepia-toned photo, a white-presenting man with a dark mustache stands next to what appears to be a robot wearing a hat. The robots "parts"--its head and chest--could be made of a washer-dryer, but it's unclear. The man is also wearing a hat--a fedora, to be precise--dark glasses, and a dark trench coat.]

Derek C.F. Pegritz

Derek C.F. Pegritz is a musician (producer/composer), freelance graphic artist, and occasional fiction author living in the haunted ruins of southwestern Pennsylvania's coal country, from which he derives much of his Lovecraftian-inspiration. His website exists.

[Image Description: Photo is of a bigender black person making an awkward face while sporting a black bowler hat.]

Ivoriania Phillips

My name is Ivoriania Phillips, a bisexual Black being diagnosed with Depression and Anxiety. Ever since I could remember, I’ve been writing until my fingers were sore and my ideas exhausted, yet still write beyond that. Writing has been many things for me: a career, a hobby, and a means to cope, and like Stephen King said, if you write for joy, you’ll write forever. And I intend to write forever.

[Image Description: A queer Black mixed non-binary person in an open plaid shirt, with a black tank top underneath, stares at the camera with their face tilted slightly to the right. They have large eyes behind cat’s eye glasses and dark brown curly hair in an afro that surrounds their face.]

Ciel Sainte-Marie

Ciel Sainte-Marie is an elusive catdeer who likes to bite, romance, and talk about symbols & personal myth. She is a Black, Caribbean, mixie queer spoonie who is slowly venturing out of the wilds of liminal spaces. Faerie is dead, long live Faerie.

[Image Description: A half-grin, graying goatee, blue eyes, high-haired forehead, dark hair, simple silver loop ring in left ear, a few freckles, and crow's feet about the eyes from the grinning.]

Larry D. Thacker

Larry D. Thacker’s poetry can be found or is forthcoming in more than ninety publications including The Still Journal, Poetry South, Tower Poetry Society, Mad River Review, Spillway, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Mojave River Review, Mannequin Haus, Ghost City Press, Jazz Cigarette, and Appalachian Heritage. His books include Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia and the poetry books, Voice Hunting and Memory Train, as well as the forthcoming, Drifting in Awe. He’s presently working on his MFA in both poetry and fiction. Visit his website at: www.larrydthacker.com.

[Image Description: A selfie of a brown Indigenous woman with a black buzz cut and fuschia-lipsticked smile. Her high cheekbones have a sheen, and she appears to be sitting in a car with one hand behind her head. She's wearing a light gray blouse.]

Se'mana Thompson

Se'mana Thompson is of the Red House People (mother's clan) and born for the White People (father's clan). Her maternal grandfather's clan is the Hopi People and her paternal grandfather’s clan is the Flat Foot People (Pima a.k.a. Akimel O'Otham). In this way she is a Navajo woman. Se'mana is enrolled with the Gila River Indian Community which is comprised of the Akimel O'Otham and Pee Posh indigenous peoples and located on the southern boundary of the Phoenix metropolitan area. She is the editor and creator of the zine queer indigenous girl as well as the editor of the zines Decolonizing P@renting and Black Indigenous Boy. Se'mana lives with her children (creators of Black Indigenous Boy zine) and mother in Glendale, AZ.

[Image Description: A man with olive skin and short, dark brown hair with glasses grins into the camera. He's wearing a plaid, blue and purple oxford shirt, and appears to be standing outside of a building that has several columns.]

Pasquale Toscano

Pasquale Toscano just graduated from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where he won several writing prizes and was published in campus journals. Four years ago, he suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed below the waist. But with physical and occupational therapy, he slowly relearned to walk and now uses a cane and ankle-foot-orthotic brace. Toscano recently was awarded the Beinecke Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in English with a focus on disability studies after two years of graduate school at Oxford as part of the Rhodes Scholarship program. His work is forthcoming in Breath & Shadow and The Deaf Poets Society.

[Image Description: This photo shows the profile of a white-presenting person with blonde hair sitting behind a piano. Behind her, toward the center of the picture, is a window or door with sunlight shining through. Above the door/window is a red-lit sign that reads EXIT. Past the door/window to the right of the picture is a set of wire shelves with objects on them.]

Ulfgrim

Self-creation and education with a history of rejecting traditional education and methodologies is the hallmark of the members of Ulfgrim. They can be found in performance environments, conventional fine art exhibitions, experiments in social interaction or through their academic research and outreach into religious and cultural spaces.

The feminine force of Ulfgrim: Cass Luger cut her teeth as a musician in 2009 with the goth/ EDM act The Crüxshadows, studied for a time at Florida State University in their Fine Arts department before choosing to pursue her own avenues and paths as Ulfgrim. She has shown her traditional work in New Orleans, Atlanta, and South Florida; as well as performing up and down the eastern seaboard as Dire with her partner, Skll in alternative lifestyle events and outreach. Her academic and anthropological research has been featured in a number of religious journals and projects.

Ulfgrim currently resides in Tallahassee, Florida with their two four-legged canine companions where Cass works in the stage industry to continue building material for her PTSD project, Tactical Bartending.