Founding editor Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have been published in journals and anthologies including Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Oxford Poetry, Asymptote, RHINO, The Malahat Review, carte blanche, Going Down Swinging, The Lake, Ambit, Banshee Lit, among others.
Serea’s poem My Father’s Quiets Friends in Prison, 1958-1962 received the New Letters Readers Award in 2013. She won the Levure Littéraire 2014 Award for Poetry Performance, the 2011 Franklin-Christoph Merit Award, and several honorable mentions and short lists for her poems and books. She was nominated 9 times for the Pushcart Prize and 5 times for the Best of the Net. Her poems have been translated in French, Italian, Arabic, and Farsi, and have been featured in The Writer’s Almanac.
Serea’s most recent book is Twoxism (8th House Publishing, Montreal, Canada, 2018), a poetry-photography collaboration with visual artist Maria Haro. Serea’s other full-length poetry collections include Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs from the Sky (8th House Publishing, Canada, 2013), To Part Is to Die a Little (Cervená Barva Press, 2015) and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, 2016). She also has published the chapbooks The Russian Hat (White Knuckles Press, 2014), The System (Cold Hub Press, New Zealand, 2012), With the Strike of a Match (White Knuckles Press, 2011), and Eternity’s Orthography (Finishing Line Press, 2007).
Together with Paul Doru Mugur and Adam J. Sorkin, Serea co-edited and co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House Publishing, 2011). She also translated from the Romanian Adina Dabija’s Beautybeast (Northshore Press, Alaska, 2012). In 2013, Serea co-founded and she currently edits
National Translation Month.
Claudia Serea belongs to the poetry group The Red Wheelbarrow Poets and is one of the curators of the Williams Poetry Readings at the Williams Center in Rutherford, New Jersey. She lives in New Jersey and works in New York.
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Founding editor Loren Kleinman is an American-born writer with roots in New Jersey. Her writing explores the results of love and loss, and how both themes affect an individual’s internal and external voice. She has a B.A. in English Literature from Drew University and an M.A. in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Sussex (UK).
Her nonfiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in Ms., Good Housekeeping, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, The New York Times, New York Daily News, Scary Mommy, Ravishly, Nimrod, USA Today, BUST, Ploughshares, Open Minds Quarterly, Honeysuckle Magazine, Romper, Marie Claire, The Huffington Post, Your Tango, The Rumpus, New York Magazine (The Cut), Gay Magazine, and Woman’s Day.
Kleinman is the co-editor of the book If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings (Skyhorse Publishing, Summer 2019) with Amye Archer. This book presents primary narratives written by survivors of school shootings from the last 55 years. Our book includes more than 75 personal narratives written by survivors, including doctors, lawyers, families of shooters, parents, students, etc. In addition to the book, there will be a corresponding digital archive, which will include more than 250 artifacts from survivors of school shootings. This archive will be free and open to the public, shortly, on our site.
Her memoir The Woman with a Million Hearts was published by BlazeVOX, and she co-edited a collection of essays with co-editor Amye Archer (Fat Girl Skinny) about the body, My Body, My Words (Big Table Publishing), which Bustle named as one of the “11 New Feminist Books That Could Totally Change Your Year.” My Body, My Words has also received media attention from Hello Giggles, BUST, Pop Sugar, WOW! Women on Writing, and more. More press listed at www.mybodymywords.com.
Her poetry appeared in Drunken Boat, The Moth, Domestic Cherry, Blue Lake Review, Columbia Journal, Stony Thursday Anthology (Arts Council Ireland) LEVURE LITTÉRAIRE, Nimrod, Wilderness House Literary Review, Narrative Northeast, Writer’s Bloc, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Paterson Literary Review (PLR), Resurgence (UK), HerCircleEzine and Aesthetica Annual. She was the recipient of the Spire Press Poetry Prize (2003), was a 2000, 2003, and 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee, and was a 2004 Nimrod/Pablo Neruda Prize finalist for poetry.
In 2003, Spire Press (NYC) published her first collection of poetry Flamenco Sketches, which explored the relationship between love and jazz. Her second collection of poetry, The Dark Cave Between My Ribs was released in March 2014 (Winter Goose Publishing), and was an Amazon Top 100 bestseller in Women’s Poetry and chosen as one of the best poetry books of the first half of 2014 by Entropy Magazine. Poems from The Dark Cave were also nominated for the 2015 Pushcart Prize. Her fourth collection of poetry (prose poems), Stay with Me Awhile, released April 2016 via Winter Goose Publishing and her novel, This Way to Forever released with Evatopia Press late August 2016.
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Monique Antonette Lewis is 
the founder of At The Inkwell. Her flash fiction and essays have appeared in My Body, My Words, American Writers Review (Summer 2018), Polarity eMagazine (Winter 2017), PoetryBay (Fall/Winter 2016), Fused Society and the digital storytelling project, The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste.
Monique has read her writing across the U.S. notably for This is My Brave, a national U.S.-based storytelling series ( New York City, 2015), and Mortified, an international podcast and live show (Boulder & Denver, Colorado, 2015). She was the principal organizer of the annual Denver Lit Crawl festival (2016-2018), read submissions for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship (2011-2018), served on the board of the New York Writers Workshop (2012-2015), and previously taught fiction workshops in New York City. She was also the fiction editor for City Lit Rag (2014).
A former journalist for 14 years, Monique’s articles have appeared in Mergermarket, Dealreporter, Agence France-Presse, the Financial Times, Forbes, HuffPost, Press & Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY, 2007), The Daily Times (Salisbury, MD, 2005-2006) and more. Monique has an M.A. and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University, and a B.A. in Journalism from Colorado State University. She is currently the MBA Communications Program Manager for HEC Paris and lives in Versailles, France.
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Translation Editor Dana Serea is a senior at Rutherford High School in Rutherford, NJ. She loves competitive swimming and writing. Her work has been published in Canvas Literary Journal, Lunch Ticket, Bluefire, and in the Poetry Society of Virginia anthology. She is the winner of a Scholastic Art & Writing National Gold Medal, as well as a Gold Key winner for the state of New Jersey three years in a row. She won the 1st place in the 2020 Renee Duke Youth Award Poetry Contest for Human Rights for poetry, the 1st place in the 2020 Ringling College for Art and Design “Storytellers of Tomorrow” Writing Contest for a short story, as well as several third places and honorable mentions in national contests for her poetry and prose.
