Our Better Angels

Katie Bernadette is an American Freelance Award-winning artist. She remains reclusive in her sacred space of creation where she finds solace and purpose. She is grateful to be able to share her art with the world and draws inspiration from the unseen and often overlooked emotions that ripple beneath the surface of our daily lives. Her art is a cacophony of traditional brushstrokes mixed with the vibrant, pulsating colors of the digital realm. The canvas is her confessional, the digital screen her oracle, each brushstroke and pixel an ode to the boundless capacity of human emotion. Each piece stands as a testament to the unspoken narratives that dwell within us all—those moments of ineffable joy, profound sorrow, and everything in between. She offers a glimpse into the beauty of our shared humanity, hoping to inspire others to embrace the full spectrum of their emotions and to connect more deeply with the world around them.

Rik Hoskin is a multi-award winning writer of novels, graphic novels, video games and animation. He's written comics for Star Wars, Doctor Who and various other properties, and won the Dragon Award for Best Graphic Novel 2018 for White Sand (with Brandon Sanderson), which also made the New York Times Bestseller list. He writes SF and horror novels and short stories under his own name and as "James Axler." He also writes video games, where he has served as head writer, and has written animation for BBC television in the UK. 

Keiraj M. Gillis is a gothic and spiritual poet whose works explore the mind and the esoteric. His poetry collections include St. Sagittarius, The Gentleman Vagrant, and Handsome for One More Day, which are projects that have allowed him to document his spiritual journey. He enjoys his work as a publisher and spends his time immersing himself in the culture of the American South and Southwest.

Toshiya Kamei (they/them) takes inspiration from fairy tales, folklore, and mythology. They attempt to reimagine the past, present, and future while shifting between various perspectives and points of view. Many of their characters are outsiders living on the margins of society.

Sherry Shahan is a teal-haired septuagenarian who writes in a small beach town in California. Her stories live in Hippocampus, Critical Read, december, F(r)iction, Progenitor, Antitheses, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize in Poetry.

Levi Abadilla is a queer Filipino author who grew up in the Cebu province and who enjoys all things weird and uncanny. Their work has been featured in Stories After Dark, Hominum Journal, and Last Syllable.

Marcelle Thiébaux has published stories in many literary magazines, The MacGuffin, DecomP, Delmarva Review and elsewhere. Her books on medieval themes include The Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature, The Writings of Medieval Women, and Unruly Princess, a novel. An award-winning writer, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City.

Lucretia Stanhope, a neurodiverse, relentlessly optimistic chronic illness warrior with less grace than determination, navigates her crone stage in a quaint Midwest town surrounded by cornfields. Amidst enduring medical trials that could rival horror stories, her pen never rests. When not lost in the wonderful lands of her imagination, she finds solace in doting on her three chihuahuas and her endlessly patient husband.

Caroline Misner was nominated in 2009 for the prestigious Writers' Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Anthology Prize as well a Pushcart Prize in 2010 and 2011. In 2004 her novella received Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. A short story was also a finalist in the same contest. A novel, The Glass Cocoon, was a semi-finalist for the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award the following year. Her novella The Watchmaker was published in November 2011 by Vagabondage Press and is selling well in e-book format. Her YA fantasy novel The Daughters of Eldox: Book I: The Alicorn has been released by Whiskey Creek Press to positive reviews and the sequel entitled The Daughters of Eldox, Book II: The Other was released in the spring of 2016. Her historical novel entitled The Spoon Asylum was released by Thistledown Press in May 2018 and has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award. Another novel entitled SEEDs of the Inside Straight was published in April 2024 by Austin Macauley.