The Loft Blog

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.

Chris Negron is the author of Dan Unmasked (HarperCollins July, 2020) as well as the forthcoming The Last Super Chef (HarperCollins, July 2021). His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals. He grew up outside Buffalo, New York, and attended Yale University.

Kareem Tayyar’s novel The Prince of Orange County (Pelekinesis) received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Award for Young Adult Fiction, and he is a recipient of a 2019 Wurlitzer Poetry Fellowship. Previous books of his include the poetry collections Immigrant Songs (2019) and Magic Carpet Poems (Tebot Bach).

The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang, is a romance novel about an autistic woman, Stella, who hires a professional escort to teach her how to have sex. And it's sexy. It also uses some really great strategies in its depiction of sex.

Taylor Zhang is a teaching fellow at Columbia University, where she recently received her MFA in nonfiction. She runs a small Risograph press (Choo Choo Press) that publishes literary zines and chapbooks with an emphasis on queerness, nostalgia, obsession, and states of liminality.

Matthew Salesses's Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear is a novel about doubling and disappearing. It's funny and frightening and sad. It's also very much interested in what is real and what is imagined, what is said out loud and what is merely thought.

Jessica Mattson is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She enjoys writing middle grade and young adult and likes to play video games in her spare time.

Maria Burns Ortiz is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and video game studio founder. Her book My Fight/Your Fight with Ronda Rousey hit No. 5 on the New York Times list, was named U.K. Sports Book of the Year, and has been translated into nine languages.