Editor-in-Chief: Samantha Ratcliffe
Samantha Ratcliffe is an educator, editor, poet, and community organizer devoted to expanding free and accessible writing opportunities throughout Kentucky. She is the founder of Hill Writers Collective, a reading series and writing collective dedicated to uplifting southern voices. Her work appears in Yearling, Pegasus, White Wall Review, Untelling, Discarded, as well as a forthcoming publication from the University Press of Kentucky. She's honored to be an Oak Ledge Residency recipient, and a two-time graduate winner of the King Library Press Broadside Contest. 

Poetry Editor: Victor Unachukwu
An Imo State-born writer, Victor Ihechiluru Unachukwu, is a poet who fervently addresses social issues in his work. His work spans themes of place, identity, and people. He is a first-year graduate student at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches creative writing to first-year undergraduate students. His poems have been published in Adelaide Magazine, DLit Review, and Spillword Press, and are forthcoming in Promised Magazine and the Best African Poets Anthology. He was a recipient of the 2023 and 2024 Achievement Scholarship from the Department of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is also a recipient of the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award (2025/2026). He was a finalist in the Poetry category of the 9th Annual Adelaide Literary Magazine Award Contest 2025. He was also a finalist for the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest 2025.

Fiction Editor: Lora Smith
Lora Smith (she/her) is a M.F.A. candidate at the University of Kentucky. Her work focuses on memory, ecology, and Appalachian futurism and has appeared in The Oxford American, Untelling, Bon Appétit, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of the Appalachian foodways collection, “The Food We Eat, The Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables” (Ohio University Press). Lora is a member of the Waymakers Collective, an artist-led fund and community focused on BIPOC, rural, working class, and queer artists in Central Appalachia. 

Creative Nonfiction Editor: Carissa Schutzman

Editorial Assistant: Crystal Little
Crystal Little earned her bachelor's degree in print journalism from the University of Kentucky and is a lifelong defender of the Oxford comma. She also has education and experience in the legal field, having earned her post-baccalaureate certificate in paralegal science from Eastern Kentucky University and worked nearly seven years as a legal assistant and paralegal for a renowned Lexington law firm. She is currently a first-year MFA candidate focusing on creative nonfiction. With her work, she intends to explore the institutional complications of the American criminal justice system.

Editorial Assistant: Anthony Ukwuoma
Anthony Chibueze Ukwuoma is a first-year graduate student at the University of Kentucky’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Anthony has served on the editorial boards of Stripes Literary Magazine, Ngiga Review and Griots Lounge Publishing Nigeria, as reader, features editor and assistant editor, respectively. His work appears in Lolwe, World Literature Today, African Writer Magazine, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere.

Editorial Assistant: Elizabeth Von Mann
Elizabeth Von Mann earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Morehead State University and a master’s degree in publication from The George Washington University. She grew up in Richmond, Kentucky and has been interested in creative writing since she realized putting the stories in her head down on paper was a viable career option. Currently, she lives in Lexington, KY and is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky while also working in the university's Professional Development Office.