Ashley Bullen-Cutting is a prosaic scribe concerned with the Weird, Gothic and queer. He likes painting his nails and the chaotic dreams that reading Lovecraft before bed produce. He is a transitory inhabitant of Rushden, Northamptonshire.
Joy Grace Chen is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at The Ohio State University. Her essay “Fermentation” was awarded the 2015 Norton Writer’s Prize. She is an associate poetry editor for The Journal and has previously served in editorial capacities with Measure Press and The Evansville Review.
Lois Cuckson is a novelist and short story writer currently residing in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Her work is inspired by towering cultural figures such as Billy Bragg, Sailor Moon and that man who used to do the Flash adverts, and then played a King on Game of Thrones. Her aims are to challenge your preconceptions on life, the harmful British class system and which crisps can be added to a Nutella sandwich. Answer: Almost all of them.
Upamanyu Das is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Sheffield after obtaining a BA (Hons) in English Literature from Hindu College, University of Delhi. His literary influences include the magical realist greats like Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Every now and then, he can be seen in bookshops. When not writing he likes to jam to some great tunes, cook food that is mostly gorged on by himself, and is a connoisseur of the greatest artistic tradition of this day and age: memes.
Peter Dorey is a prose writer from Sheffield and current PhD student, working on a creative disability studies project on digital psychogeography. He mostly writes about shifting cities, mismatched memories and existential unease. Peter likes cats, is bad at writing biographies, and his favourite colour is orange
Emily France is Yorkshire crustacean born and bred, cut her open and you’ll find steel, garlic butter and bicarbonate soda. She often salts her bait by angling the real and the unreal, dapping the streets of cities like Sheffield and London with their colourful pasts, and using preconceived art as a diving board from which her own endeavours ripple. Emilys are generally spotted on the ill-lit paths beyond West Street Live after bouts scuttling up the steep gradient of the Seven Hills.*
Kevin Fox at 23 years old has kept things together remarkably well. Maintaining the rose-tinted world view has got out of hand, though.
Loma Jones, poet, writer, something-or-other, who writes about identities that she can never quite settle and coastlines that won't stay still. She finds bleak views the most enjoyable.
Samuel Kendall is a Nottingham based poet who is the lovechild of Nikolai Gogol and Ted Hughes. He wears his leather jacket as a defence mechanism against the cruelty of a world that has never fully included him. Seeking: canonised erotic food narratives, Beckett’s interred ashes and something more tangible than the end to simply start again.*
Molly Rideout is a fiction and nonfiction author and community-focused artist. Her large-scale writing installations and community-based publications have engaged towns across the United States Midwest. She is a past commissioned artist of Wormfarm’s Farm/Art DTour and a current Spillways Artist Fellow at Antenna in New Orleans. For the past seven years she ran the artist community Grin City Collective. Her work has been recently featured in: Flyway Journal, Poets & Writers, Bluestem, Front Porch Journal and Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland. Visit her at www.mollyrideout.com
Rebecca Sandeman is a writer who wears bobble hats in inappropriate weather conditions and has been known to purchase questionable English wine. She is allergic to plot, chapters, delineation, genre, tropes, narrative and character arcs. Her writing often concerns food or its consumption and her PhD explores the concept of Crime-Comedy; a malformed murder-mystery sans murder at a wedding sans bride and groom where, despite the escalating pre-Cluedo paranoia, everything might simply be as it seems.*
Jacob Scheier is the author of two poetry collections with ECW Press: Letter From Brooklyn (2013) and The Governor General's Award winning More To Keep Us Warm (2007). His poetry has also been nominated for a (Canadian) National Magazine Award and longlisted for the the CBC Poetry Prize. He is also the author of The Toronto Star nonfiction ebook, My Never Ending Acid Trip (2013) and has published personal essays in Brick and Fixional. Scheier's image to accompany his poem In Praise of Loosing Things in Cicatrice is copyrighted as his own..
Lorenza Shabe is a poet, fiction writer and fanfic queen with a vicelike grip on the ever-beating pulse of contemporary culture, gathering influence from Los Angeles to South Korea. Her work spans worlds from the fantastical to the everyday, exploring identity when paired with heritage and place and garnishing with more than a little sprinkling of sexual tones. From her ongoing research into idols to her deeply personal musings on her own family history she questions what it might mean to love, to be someone in the world, and most importantly simply to be.*
Katie Smart completed an English Literature MA at the University of Sheffield in 2017. She previously worked as part of the poetry editorial team for the University’s creative writing journal Route 57. She has recently had poetry published by Three Drops from a Cauldron. Katie’s work often explores identity, gender and sexuality.
Dayvii Walker is an author, poet and blogger. She writes contemporary prose and poetry exploring the twists of a life as a young adult. Dayvii occasionally performs her pieces as Spoken Word performances, and having studied a Master’s degree, Dayvii has proven herself to be an accomplished and gifted writer with an astounding grasp on the English language.*
Nicola Wallace is a part time enigma who lives in the hilly wilds of the Peak District. She writes, she reads, and she eats cake. She has never lived in the Victorian era but likes to write about it.
Ollie Hayes is a designer, cartoonist, Sheffield English graduate and university defector, now studying for an MA in Design & Illustration at Hallam. Creative, but not a writer - unless it’s in speech bubbles.