The Loft Blog

Jack Harris is a fiction MFA candidate at Minnesota State University, Mankato who also holds degrees in creative writing and graphic design. He has previously served as co-editor-in-chief of SAGA Art & Literary Magazine and has had work appear in Ligonier Valley Writers and Wisconsin People & Ideas.

Austin Allen is the author of Pleasures of the Game (Waywiser Press), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. His poetry has recently appeared in the Yale Review, the Sewanee Review, the Missouri Review, Verse Daily, and the Hopkins Review.

Pacyinz Lyfoung is a French-born, Hmong American woman poet. She currently resides in Washington, DC; however, she is Minnesota-grown, especially in her poetry. She has published in several journals and anthologies and is still working on her first poetry manuscript.

Roxanne Sadovsky, MA, MFA, is a Twin Cities freelance writer, teacher, and therapist. At 19, she fled her hometown in LA to study writing and psychology at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She later earned her master's in counseling psychology from Antioch University Seattle.

Starrla Cray is an English composition instructor and creative writing MFA candidate at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and spent 10 years working as a reporter and editor.

Vaughn A. Foster Jr. exists as an author, editor, musician, and mental health practioner. He is the author of the dark fantasy novel When We Were Still Human (2021). Foster has served the writing world for over five years as a consultant, instructor, and editor for fiction authors and businesses.

Salt Houses is a novel that follows multiple generations of a Palestinian family. It opens during a wedding, in the perspective of Salma, who is the bride's mother. Against her own mother's advice to never do a reading for family, Salma is about to read her daughter's fortune in coffee grounds.

I wrote my first poems when I was 14 sitting on the stoop of my dad’s girlfriend’s garden apartment in central New Jersey. My family was falling apart, each parent barricaded in part of the house, and our relatives were choosing sides and joining in the chaos.

Halima Hagi-Mohamed is a Minnesota based Somali-American writer. She was born in Kenya and grew up in California. Her work deals with themes of identity, culture, and rediscovery. She is the author of Amilah, a collection of short stories, and Warda Means Rose, a novel.

The Wolf of Oren-Yaro is a fantasy novel about a young queen traveling in a hostile land. Queen Talyien is the narrator—she's messy and violent and also cunning and sometimes vulnerable. Her tone is conversational, and her approach to storytelling seems straightforward—until it's not.

Kaitlyn Greenridge’s beautiful historical novel, Libertie, opens with magic. The protagonist and title character, Libertie, witnesses her mama pry open a cabin, feed the man therein thirty magical seeds, and then whack him until he sputters back to consciousness.

Our community in the Twin Cities has been engaged for nearly a year in the uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd—an uprising that keeps rising in wave after wave. In a moment of transformation like this, good books, true books, often become guides and illuminators.