The Loft Blog

Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, opens in a strange and magical way. Not only is the POV “we,” the narrators are not yet born and might be magical. When we first encounter this voice, it's hard to tell what is happening—what is "real," what is human, what is something else.

Marginalization is often magnified by societal invisibility for the disabled individuals. Even initiatives and organizations committed to championing inclusivity often overlook those who have different access needs.

Shirley Jones Luke is an educator, poet, and writer. Ms. Luke lives in Boston, Massachusetts, in the Lower Mills section of Dorchester. Shirley has an MFA from Emerson College. She works as a freelance writer, doing book reviews and pieces on educational issues.

Troy Wilderson is a New Orleans–born writer, senior prose feedback editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine, and a manuscript reader for a local independent publisher. She teaches the art of short story writing online. Her short fiction has appeared in Roanoke Review, the Tishman Review, and more.

Lyndsey Ellis is a fiction writer and essayist with work that has appeared in Kweli Journal, Catapult, Electric Literature, Santa Monica Review, Joyland, Entropy, the Offing, Shondaland, and several anthologies. She has led several creative writing workshops.

Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn is about a Hawaiian boy with special powers and the rest of his family. I'm interested in how the specific language choices make us understand those powers, creating a thrilling sensation, and also resonating with the book's bigger themes.

For most of my writing life, I’ve participated in critique-based workshops. I still do. They go like this: You write a story. A week before your workshop date, you send .docs of your story to your fellow writers in the class. (Back in olden times, you prayed your ink was full.)

Robin McLean was a lawyer and then a potter before receiving her MFA at UMass Amherst in Massachusetts. Her first short story collection Reptile House won the BOA Fiction Prize, was twice a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize, and was named a best book of 2015 in Paris Review.

Shannon Takaoka’s Everything I Thought I Knew is full of mystery and love. The novel begins with a teenage girl, Chloe, running during track practice with her best friend. As the novel progresses, her life takes a turn, and she needs a heart transplant.

Leesa Cross-Smith's This Close to Okay is a novel about a recently divorced therapist who stops a man from jumping off a bridge and then befriends him. One of the ways Cross-Smith makes the characters both real and compelling is through her deployment of setting and subtext.

Rachel Zarrow's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, BUST, Bon Appétit, Epiphany, the Atlantic, and the Coachella Review. She is a creative writing instructor at Polyphony Lit and a graduate of the MFA program at UC Riverside Palm Desert.

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest. He has presented writing, performance, installation, and video work at diverse literary, art, and public spaces in the US and Canada with support from the Banff Centre, Pillsbury House, the Joyce Foundation, and more.