SmokeLong Quarterly

Masthead

• Editor and Publisher

  Christopher Allen

  Christopher Allen is the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press, 2018). His work has appeared widely and is forthcoming in The Best Small Fictions 2022 and Flash Fiction America (Norton) in February 2023. Allen has judged The Bath Flash Fiction Award, Micro Madness, the Cambridge Flash Fiction Award, and is the 2023 flash fiction judge for the Bridport Prize. He has a BA in music business from Belmont University and an MA in English from Middle Tennessee State University. Allen is a nomad.

• Coordinating Editor

  Shasta Grant

  Shasta Grant  is the author of the chapbook Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home (Split Lip Press, 2017). She won the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest and the 2016 SmokeLong Quarterly Kathy Fish Fellowship. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project and was selected as a 2020 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow. Her work has appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, Hobart, wigleaf, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Indianapolis.

• Senior Editor for Workshops and Outreach

  Helen Rye

  Helen Rye lives in Norwich, UK. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Reflex Fiction contest and third place in the Bristol Short Story Prize. Her stories appear in The Best Small Fictions 2020 and have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, nominated for The Pushcart Prize and published in many journals and anthologies. She has an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia, where she was the 2019/20 Annabel Abbs Scholar.

• Senior Editors

  Sherrie Flick

  Sherrie Flick is the author of four books, including two short story collections, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc.,both published by Autumn House Press. Co-editor for the 2023 anthology Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton), she also served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018, and is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. She lives in Pittsburgh where she is a senior lecturer at Chatham University. Her debut essay collection, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in 2024. 

• Senior Editors

  Jan Elman Stout

  Jan Elman Stout’s fiction has appeared in Pure Slush, Literary Orphans, Jellyfish Review, Midwestern Gothic, Pidgeonholes, 100 Word Story and elsewhere. Her flash was nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. Jan’s flash appears in the Best Microfiction 2020 anthology. Jan is currently working on a story collection. She can be reached on Twitter @janelmanstout.

• Senior Editors

  Jasmine Sawers

  Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and Indiana University MFA alum. Their work has won awards from Ploughshares, NANO Fiction, Fractured Lit, and Press 53, and has appeared in such journals and anthologies as Norton’s Flash Fiction America, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf. Their book, The Anchored World, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives outside St. Louis.

• Senior Editors

  María Alejandra Barrios Vélez

  María Alejandra Barrios Vélez is a pushcart nominated writer born in Barranquilla, Colombia. She has lived in Bogotá and Manchester where in 2016 she completed a Masters degree in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester. Her stories have been published in Hobart Pulp, Reservoir Journal, Bandit Fiction, Cosmonauts Avenue, Jellyfish Review,  Lost Balloon, Shenadoah Literary, Vol.1 Brooklyn and El Malpensante. Her poetry has been published in The Acentos Review. Her work has been supported by organizations like Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Arts Center and the New Orleans Writing Residency.

  On hiatus

• Interviews Editor

  Michael Czyzniejewski

  Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of three collections of stories, Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc Books, 2009), Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions (Curbside Splendor, 2012), and I Will Love You For the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2015). He is an assistant professor at Missouri State University, where he edits Moon City Review and serves as both Literary and Managing Editor for Moon City Press. In 2010, he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

• Associate Editor, French

  Michelle Bailat-Jones

  Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Her novel Fog Island Mountains (Tantor, 2014) won the 2013 Christopher Doheny Award from the Center for Fiction. She has translated the work of C.F. Ramuz (Beauty on Earth, Onesuch Press, 2013; What if the Sun…, 2016) as well as Julia Allard Daudet, Claude Cahun, Laure Mi-Hyun Croset and others. Her short fiction, poetry, translations and criticism have appeared in various journals including The Kenyon Review, Cerise Press, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Two Serious Ladies, Spolia Mag, PANK, The Rumpus and The Quarterly Conversation. 

• Submissions Editors

  April Bradley

  April Bradley is a Durham, North Carolina-based writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Blink Ink, CHEAP POP, jmww, and Narratively, and her work has been honored by residency support from Vermont Studio Center and Rivendell Writer’s Colony. She is the founding publisher and editor of Ruby Literary Magazine and Press and serves as an associate editor for fiction at Pidgeonholes and as a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. She has a master’s degree in Ethics from Yale Divinity School.

• Submissions Editors

  Nancy Au

  Nancy Au’s full-length collection, Spider Love Song and Other Stories, (September 2019, Acre Books), was a finalist for the 2020 CLMP Book Award for Fiction and the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Short Fiction Collection, and listed among Entropy Magazine‘s Best Fiction of 2019. She won Redivider‘s Blurred Genres Contest, The Vestal Review‘s VERA Flash Fiction Prize, and her flash fiction is included in the Best Small Fictions anthology. She is a lecturer at San Francisco State University and California State University Stanislaus, and a submissions editor with the marvelous SmokeLong Quarterly.

• Submissions Editors

  Elisabeth Ingram Wallace

  Elisabeth Ingram Wallace is the winner of the Mogford Short Story Prize, Writing the Future, and a Scottish Book Trust ‘New Writers Award.’ Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, Flash Frontier and other journals and anthologies including Best Microfiction 2019. A founding editor of ‘BIFFY’, the Best British and Irish Flash Fiction series, she is currently the Senior Editor for Flash Fiction at TSS Publishing. She has a Creative Writing M.Litt. with Distinction from the University of Glasgow, and was awarded a Dewar Arts Award for Fiction as one of ‘Scotland’s Brightest and Best’. On hiatus.

• Submissions Editors

  Daniel DiFranco 

  Daniel DiFranco lives in Philadelphia and is an Arcadia University MFA alum. His novel, Panic Years, was published in 2018 by Tailwinds Press. His short stories can be found in SmokeLong Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Drunk Monkeys, and others. He tweets @danieldifranco.

• Submissions Editors

  Alicia Bakewell

  Alicia Bakewell is a short fiction writer from Western Australia. Her work has appeared in Ellipsis Zine, Spelk Fiction, Moon Park Review and others. Her flash fiction piece ‘Barely Casting a Shadow’ was a winner of Reflex Fiction. She is trying to give up writing poetry.

• Submissions Editors

  Farhana Khalique

  Farhana Khalique is a writer, voiceover artist and teacher from south-west London, UK. Her writing appears in Best Small Fictions 2022, 100 Voices, This is Our Place and more. She’s been shortlisted for The Asian Writer Short Story Prize and she’s a former Word Factory Apprentice. Farhana is also a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, a fiction editor at Litro Magazine and she’s taught writing workshops with Flash Fiction Festival, Crow Collective, Dahlia Publishing and more. Find Farhana @HanaKhalique and www.farhanakhalique.com

• Submissions Editors

  Zainab A. Omaki

  Zainab A. Omaki is a Nigerian prose and screen writer. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where she was the recipient of the Miles Morland African Writer’s scholarship. Her work has appeared from The Rumpus, Afreada, TSS, Ake Review and other spaces. She was selected by Chimamanda Adiche for the Purple Hibiscus Trust writing workshop in 2018. She was longlisted for the Show Me Yours Prize and the BBC Comedy Writersroom. She is working on a novel.

  On hiatus.

• Submissions Editors

  A W Earl

  A W Earl is a poet, novelist, and storyteller. They studied English Literature with Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and hold an MA in Medieval and Early Modern Textual Cultures. They have written for the LGBTQ+ crowdfunding platform Pride Pocket, and their work has appeared in Bloodbath Literary Zine, Lighthouse Journal, and The Selkie. They were a judge for The Dracula Society’s 2021 Children of the Night Award, and Time’s Fool, their debut novel, was published by Unbound in 2018.

• Submissions Editors

  Josh Denslow

  Josh Denslow’s debut collection, Not Everyone Is Special, is available from 7.13 Books. His recent stories have appeared in Catapult, Pithead Chapel, wigleaf, BULL, Bending Genres, apt, and Split Lip. He plays the drums in the band Borrisokane and spends a lot of time eating pizza with his three boys.

• Submissions Editors

  Gillian O'Shaughnessy

  Gillian O’Shaughnessy spent 25 years as a journalist, broadcaster and senior editor with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and has curated the literature program for Perth Festival. She is a Pushcart-nominated writer with work in or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Jellyfish Review, Splonk and Moonpark Review, among others. Find her on Twitter @GillOshaughness

• Submissions Editors

  Jiksun Cheung

  Jiksun Cheung is a short fiction writer from Hong Kong. His work is published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Atticus Review, The Molotov Cocktail, and elsewhere. He was a Smokey finalist, and has been nominated for Best Microfiction and The Shirley Jackson Award. He and his wife share their home with two boisterous toddlers and enough playdough to last a lifetime. Find him on Twitter @JiksunCheung and http://jiksun.com.

  On hiatus

• Submissions Editors

  Patricia Q. Bidar

  Patricia Q. Bidar is a writer from San Pedro, California, with family roots in New Mexico, Southern Arizona, and Utah. She is an alum of the U.C. Davis Graduate Writing Program and also holds a BA in Filmmaking. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, Little Patuxent Review, Jellyfish Review, and Pidgeonholes, and in anthologies including the Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton, 2023) and Blue Bob: an anthology of grit lit incited by Bob Dylan (Cowboy Jamboree, 2022). Patricia’s stories have garnered numerous nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. Visit Patricia at https://patriciaqbidar.com

• Submissions Editors

  Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar

  Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Reflex Press, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. Her work has been highly commended in National Flash Fiction Day Microfiction Competition, earned an honorable mention in Flash Fiction Magazine Editor’s Choice Award, and shortlisted in the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro Contest. She has been nominated multiple times for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. She is currently an editor at Janus Literary. More at https://saraspunyfingers.com. Reach her @PunyFingers

• Submissions Editors

  Anna De Vaul

  Anna De Vaul writes both poetry and prose. Her first book, Volcano (Unsolicited Press 2019), is a collection-length sequence of poems published under the heteronym Elosham Vog. Her chapbook Cosmonaut was published by Valley Press (UK) in 2021. Anna is a winner of Eyewear Publishing’s Fortnight Prize and is a Pushcart Prize (fiction) and Forward Prize (best single poem) nominee. She is a founding editor of the literary journal Lighthouse (UK) and an editor for Nimrod International Journal.

• Submissions Editors

  Clarie Gor

  Clarie Gor is a Kenyan creative writer and journalist. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Equipoise, the 2020 anthology of the Nairobi Writing Academy, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Audacity, Kalahari Review and others. Her flash creative nonfiction essay, ‘This Song My God, I Have Wept!’ won the February 2019 Igby Prize for nonfiction. All her work is archived on https://clariesramblings.com.

• Submissions Editors

  Vincent Anioke

  Vincent Anioke is a software engineer at Google. He was born and raised in Nigeria but now lives in Canada. His short stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Carve, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and MIT Tech Review, among others. He was also shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and is currently working on his debut anthology. Find him on Twitter at

• Submissions Editors

  Hema Nataraju

  Hema Nataraju is an Indian-American writer and mom, currently based in Singapore. Her work has most recently appeared in Booth, Wigleaf, 100-word Story, Ruby Literary, and Nurture Literary, among others. One of her flash pieces made it to the 2022 Wigleaf Top 50 longlist. She tweets as

• Submissions Editors

  Janna Miller

  Librarian, mother, and minor trickster, Janna has published in places like SmokeLong Quarterly, Andromeda Spaceways, F(r)iction, and Cheap Pop. Her first novel, Ivy in the Age of Falling Ash, makes rude faces at her while she works on her second. Nominated for Best Small Fictions. Generally, if the toaster blows up, it is not her fault. You can reach her on twitter @ScribblerMiller

  Starting September 2022

• Submissions Editors

  Eliot Li

  Eliot Li lives in California. His work appears or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, The Pinch, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pidgeonholes, AAWW’s The Margins, and elsewhere. He can be found on twitter @EliotLi2.

• Submissions Editors

  Melissa Llanes Brownlee

  Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has work published or forthcoming in Reckon Review, The Hennepin Review, Cheap Pop, Five South, Astrolabe, Parentheses Journal, Empty House Press, and Indiana Review. She is in The Best Small Fictions 2021, Best Microfiction 2022, and Wigleaf Top 50 2022. Read Hard Skin from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua from Alien Buddha. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.

• Submissions Editors

  Julia Strayer

  Julia Strayer has stories in, or forthcoming at, The Cincinnati Review, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review Online, SmokeLong Quarterly, Atticus Review, and others, including The Best Small Fictions. She teaches at New York University. www.juliastrayer.com

• Submissions Editors

  Marcus Tan

  Marcus Tan is a writer from Singapore residing in Hong Kong. His latest story, ‘All This is Yours to Lose’, was a finalist for the 2021 Masters Review Short Story Award and was shortlisted for the 2021 Exeter Story Prize. His fiction has been anthologized in The Best Small Fictions 2021 and published in Prime Number Magazine, No Contact Magazine, and elsewhere. Find him at marcus-tan.com.

• Submissions Editors

  Brendan Stephens

  Brendan Stephens is a writer hailing from western Maryland. His work has appeared in Pinch, Epoch, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Southeast Review, and elsewhere. His awards include multiple Inprint Donald Barthelme awards, an Into the Void Fiction Prize, and a Sequestrum Emerging Writer Award. Brendan earned his MFA from the University of Central Florida and his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston.

• Submissions Editors

  Abby Feden

  Abby Feden is a fiction writer living in Stillwater, Oklahoma. She is the winner of The 2020 SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, Third Coast, Superstition Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, and elsewhere. Feden received her MFA in Fiction from Western Washington University and is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Find her on Twitter @aefeden. 

• Submissions Editors

  Erin Vachon

  Erin Vachon is a gender-fluid writer and editor. Their work appears in Black Warrior Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, and Brevity, among others. They were a recipient of the SmokeLong Fellowship for Emerging Writers, a Writer-in-Residence at Linden Place, and an alum of the Tin House Summer Workshop. Their writing appears in the Wigleaf Top 50 and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and Best Microfictions. Find them at www.erinvachon.com

• Submissions Editors

  Sabrina Dudgeon-Swift

  Sabrina Dudgeon-Swift is descended from the Bardi people from north of Broome, and the Gija people in the East Kimberley. Sabrina grew up in Darwin, and now lives in Western Australia, Perth. Her short stories and flash fiction writing have been published by Margaret River Press, UWA Westerly and Night Parrot Press. Sabrina especially enjoys writing for children, where her work can be found at Fremantle Press and has presented at the Perth Writers Festival and the Kimberley Writers festival. 

• Consulting Editor

  Tara Laskowski

  Tara Laskowski is the author of the debut novel, One Night Gone, which won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. She has also written two short story collections, Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and Bystanders. She won an Agatha Award in 2019 for her short fiction and was the longtime editor of the online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly. A graduate of Susquehanna University and George Mason University, Tara grew up in Pennsylvania and lives in Virginia.

• Founding Editor (Emeritus)

  Dave Clapper

  Dave Clapper is the founding editor and former publisher of SmokeLong Quarterly. He founded the journal in 2003 with the vision to provide an expansive, international space online for flash fiction, free to read and free to submit to. We are proud to carry on this mission.