SmokeLong Quarterly

Staff

• Editor and Publisher

  Christopher Allen

  Christopher Allen is the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press, 2018). His work has most recently appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2019, Booth, and Gone Lawn. 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 divides her time between Singapore and Indianapolis.

• 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.

• Art Director

  Paul Bilger

  Paul Bilger’s photography has appeared at Qarrtsiluni, Brevity, and Kompresja. His work has also been featured on music releases by Dead Voices on Air and Autistici. When not taking pictures, he is a lecturer in philosophy and film theory at Chatham University.

• 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.

• Quarterly Guest Editor, Issue 75

  Hananah Zaheer

  Hananah is a writer, editor, improvisor and photographer. She serves as a Fiction Editor for Los Angeles Review, and as senior editor for SAAG: a dissident literary anthology—a project that seeks to not only lay claim to revolutionary ideas and avant-garde traditions, but to make space for radical and experimental South Asian art and writing in the literary world. She is the founder of the Dubai Literary Salon, an international prose-reading series. She is the author of Lovebirds (Bull City Press, 2021). Other writing has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as Kenyon Review, Best Small Fictions 2021, Waxwing, AGNI, Pithead Chapel, Smokelong (Pushcart nomination), Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, South West Review, Alaska Quarterly Review (with a Notable Story mention in Best American Short Stories 2019) and Michigan Quarterly Review, where she won the Lawrence Foundation Prize for Fiction. She was awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for 2019, was a finalist for the Smoke Long Fellowship 2019, the Doris Betts’ Fiction prize 2014 and a recipient of residencies and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Rivendell Writers’ Colony and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. You can find her at www.hananahzaheer.com or on Twitter @hananahzaheer

• Quarterly Guest Editor, Issue 74

  Dustin M. Hoffman

  Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collection One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His second collection No Good for Digging and chapbook Secrets of the Wild were published by Word West Press. He painted houses for ten years in Michigan and now teaches creative writing at Winthrop University in South Carolina. His stories have recently appeared in Faultline. 

• Quarterly Guest Editor, Issue 73

  Jasmine Sawers

  Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University. Sawers’s fiction has won the Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest and the NANO Prize and can be found in such journals as The Offing, AAWW’s The Margins, The Conium Review, Sycamore Review, Barren Magazine, and more. Sawers serves as Associate Fiction Editor for Fairy Tale Review and debuts a collection of fairy tale flash through Rose Metal Press in 2023. Originally from Buffalo, NY, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis. Find out more at jasminesawers.com.

• Senior Editor, SmokeLong en Español

  María Alejandra Barrios

  María Alejandra Barrios 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.

• Senior Editors

  Sherrie Flick

  Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and two short story collections, Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Her stories have been performed for Selected Shorts and appear in Ploughshares, New World Writing, and wigleaf, as well as the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, and New Micro. She served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 with guest editor Aimee Bender and is co-editor for Flash Fiction America, forthcoming from Norton in 2022.

• 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 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 is currently studying part time for an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she is the 2019/20 Annabel Abbs Scholar.

• 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

  Sharmini Aphrodite

  Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Sabah. She was raised – and still lives – between the cities of Johor Bahru and Singapore. Her short fiction has appeared online and in print, and has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Australian Book Review Jolley Short Story Prize, and the Singapore National Art Council’s Golden Point Awards. Her art writing can be found online.

• Submissions Editors

  April Bradley

  April Bradley is a Durham, North Carolina-based writer of short-form fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize as well as for The Best of Small Fictions and the Best of the Net Anthologies. Her writing appears in CHEAP POP, Hypertrophic Literary, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Narratively, NANO Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Thrice Fiction, among others. She earned a MAR in Ethics from Yale University and is an MFA student at Sewanee. Her research and writing interests focus on experimental and hybrid narrative forms that explore trauma recovery, memory, mothering, and grief. She serves as a submissions editor at both SmokeLong Quarterly and Pidgeonholes. On hiatus.

• Submissions Editors

  Nancy Au

  Nancy Au is a genderqueer, bisexual artist and educator with a degree in sociocultural anthropology from U.C. Berkeley and an MFA from San Francisco State University. Au is the co-founder of The Escapery, a collective of artists dedicated to diversity, and to writing and art as a form of resistance. Au’s short stories, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and essays–which have appeared in over thirty literary journals–often center on the experiences of the elderly, the young, immigrants, and first-generation US-born characters. She endeavors to write about (and to amplify, diversify, complicate) the voices that have been historically ignored (or stereotyped or diminished or demonized) within academia and literature. She is particularly interested in exploring the lives of American-born Chinese and Chinese immigrants. Au’s full-length collection, SPIDER LOVE SONG AND OTHER STORIES, (Acre Books, September 2019), is longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for debut short story collection. Au is currently working on a second collection of short fiction.

• 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’.

• 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

  Farhana Khalique

  Farhana Khalique is a writer, voiceover artist and teacher from London. Her writing has appeared in Reflex Press, Visual Verse, Lighthouse Literary Journal, Litro, Popshot Quarterly, The Good Journal, sister-hood magazine, and has been anthologised in The Brown Anthology: Language, City of Stories, Dividing Lines, and Happy Birthday to Me. Farhana has been longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, shortlisted for The Asian Writer Short Story Prize, and won a Word Factory Apprentice Award. She has also written for the stage and performed her work at Tara Theatre in London. Find Farhana @HanaKhalique.

• 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

  Tim Craig

  Originally from Manchester, Tim Craig now lives in London. In 2018 he won the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction and has also placed third — and been commended — in the Bath Flash Fiction Award. His stories have also appeared in the Best Microfiction Anthology and the BIFFY50. Oh hiatus.

• Submissions Editors

  Jemimah Wei

  Jemimah Weiis a writer and host based in Singapore and New York. She’s a Singapore National Arts Council Scholar and was recently named a 2020 Felipe De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y Literary magazine, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and Math Paper Press anthology “From the Belly of the Cat”, amongst others. She is a columnist for No Contact magazine, and is presently at work on a novel and several television projects. Follow her on Twitter at @jemmawei.

• 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

  Shreya Vikram

  Shreya Vikram is a writer based in India. A Dorothy West Scholar, she has been recognised by the Adroit Prizes for Prose. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, Rumpus, Up the Staircase Quarterly and elsewhere. Oh hiatus.

• Submissions Editors

  Gillian O'Shaughnessy

  Gillian O’Shaughnessy is a short fiction author from Fremantle in Western Australia where she lives by the sea with her husband, her labrador, Huey and the ghost of her beloved terrier, Jo. She is a Pushcart-nominated writer with work in SmokeLong Quarterly and Night Parrot Press. 

• Submissions Editors

  Jiksun Cheung

  Jiksun Cheung is a short fiction writer and postcard designer from Hong Kong. His stories have been published in many journals and nominated for Best Microfictions. He was a 2020 Smokey finalist.

• Submissions Editors

  Patricia Q. Bidar

  Patricia Q. Bidar hails from San Pedro, California, with deep family roots in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. She is an alum of the UC Davis Graduate Writing Program. Patricia’s stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Sou’wester, Little Patuxent Review, and Pidgeonholes, among other places. Patricia’s work has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. When she is not writing fiction, Patricia reads, enjoys nature, and ghostwrites for nonprofit organizations. She lives with her DJ husband and unusual dog in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit Patricia at www.patriciaqbidar.com or on Twitter (@patriciabidar).

• 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 is forthcoming in Sept. 2021 with Valley Press. 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.

• Readers in Residence -- Issue 75

  Jo Gatford

  Jo Gatford is a writer who procrastinates about writing by writing about writing. Her work has been published by SmokeLong Quarterly, Litro, [PANK], Aesthetica, and elsewhere, as well as winning the Flash500 Prize, the Bath Flash Fiction Prize, and The Fiction Desk Flash Fiction Contest. Her first novel, White Lies, was published by Legend Press in 2014. She is one half of Writers’ HQ and tweets about weird 17th century mermaid tiles at @jmgatford. She feels very strongly about puns and Shakespeare.

• Readers in Residence -- Issue 75

  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

• Readers in Residence -- Issue 75

  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

• Readers in Residence -- Issue 75

  Kaya Dierks

  Kaya Dierks is a mixed-race, Korean-American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her prose is published in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, GASHER Journal, and elsewhere. The Fiction Editor of GASHER Journal, she will attend Yale University in Fall 2022. Find her on Twitter @kayadierks

• Readers in Residence -- Issue 74

  Emma Kernahan

  Emma Kernahan lives in Gloucestershire, UK. Her work has featured in Ellipsis Zine, New Flash Fiction Review, The Occulum, Writers’ HQ, Stroud Short Stories, The F Word, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and the BIFFY50. She won the 2018 Gloucestershire Writers Network Prose Prize, the Funny Pearls Short Story Prize 2019 and has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award.  She spends far too much time on Twitter @crappyliving

• Readers in Residence -- Issue 74

  Sarah M Jasat

  Sarah M Jasat grew up believing her family was very strange but later discovered she was Indian. She lives in Leicester, UK, and writes short fiction about the strangeness of family. She dreams about writing a novel for older children if only she could get her own child to go to sleep.

• Readers in Residence -- Issue 74

  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.

• Readers in Residence -- Issue 74

  Grace Q. Song

  Grace Q. Song is a Chinese-American writer residing in New York. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Passages North, PANK, Waxwing, The Offing, The Journal, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Recent works have been selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. She will be attending Columbia University in Fall 2021.

• Readers in Residence -- Issue 74

  Joshua Jones Lofflin

  Joshua Jones Lofflin’s writing has appeared in The Best Microfictions 2020, The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Cincinnati Review, CRAFT, Paper Darts, SmokeLong Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Maryland. Find him on Twitter @jnjoneswriter or visit his website: https://jjlofflin.com/

• Founding Editor (Emeritus)

  Dave Clapper

  Dave Clapper is the founding editor and 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.

• Issue 73 Cover Artist

  美撒郭 (Mei Sa Guo)

  美撒郭 (Mei Sa Guo) is a photographer living and working in Hangzhou, China. His work explores the way in which deception and illusion have become dominant phenomena in the contemporary world, from the nature of the food we eat to the pollutants we’re exposed to in the air we breathe. In a world characterized by surveillance and unknown intentions, his work nevertheless expresses a message of love.