Laura Stanfill is the founder of Forest Avenue Press, a small press based in Portland, Oregon. With her leadership, the press has acquired and published books recognized by major awards like the Nautilus Book Award, New American Voices, and…
By Kristine Langley Mahler • Some of the most fascinating creative nonfiction lives on the fringes of genre-play, borrowing from both fact and fiction, both poetry and prose. Essayists, memoirists, and nonfiction hybridists frequently use tools from fiction to create…
The Best People is Robert Lopez’s third and final installment of his novels-in-stories triptych continuing on from Good People and A Better Class of People. The form and point of view shift, chameleon-like, throughout the work, driving the reader…
By Lexi Lilly • Growing up, I was scared to swim in Kentucky Lake, a reservoir created after the construction of Kentucky Dam, just outside my hometown of Murray. One day, my fiancé wanted to go cliff jumping, having…
Essay by Paul Chuks • As far as immigration stories go, Salutation Road is about as political as can be in the way that it anchors readers into the realities of immigrants in Britain and applicably the Western world.…
There are few subjects that demand more courage like illness does; not just to endure it, but to write about it with clarity and truth. To write on illnesses is therefore to not only capture the slow, intimate undoing…
By JB Andre • Not all speculative fiction is equally speculative. While much engages with the unreal (vampires, superpowers, ghosts), or the possibly real (future technologies, alternative timelines), a very small sliver of speculative fiction will try to capture something…
What do a mermaid burlesque matriarch and a newly divorced mom coding her dream AI partner have in common? More than you’d think. Lara Ehrlich (Bind Me Tighter Still, Red Hen Press, September 2025) and Amy Shearn (Animal Instinct,…
Grant Faulkner, who will serve as our guest judge for the CRAFT 2025 Flash Prose Prize, recently told me that he dislikes conventional bios and prefers to find something odd on the internet about writers he’s asked to introduce.…
Essay by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif • What do short stories have in common with jazz? Like the innately improvisational quality of jazz, the nature of the short story genre—constrained by the need for a high amount of drama in a…
