Abby Bassett (she/her) is a fiction writer from the coast of New Hampshire.  In her twenties, she roadtripped across the United States in her cherry red Honda Fit looking for adventure, before settling back down in New England.  She is a reader first and writer second, and has enjoyed all the places she has travelled to in books and stories.  In her writing she likes to tackles the ideas that grief and loneliness are some of our most common experiences, and yet they are also the feelings that make us feel most isolated.  Abby believes that writing and reading can bring people closer to one another, and aims to create community through her writing.  She is currently part of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, writing both fiction and creative nonfiction.

Ivy Jones (he/him) is a trans masculine storyteller from the American south who currently lives in Ohio with his partner and cats. He holds a BA in English from Oglethorpe University and is an MFA candidate at Stonecoast in Fiction. Ivy’s published work can be found in trampset, BAM Quarterly, beestung, and dadakuku, among others. He was Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine, Zero Readers, for two issues, and his university’s undergraduate magazine, The Tower, for four. When not putting words on a page, Ivy enjoys watching apes & monkeys at the zoo, making Freud jokes, and presenting in-depth PowerPoints on Bluebeard adaptations—all of which are, in many ways, related to writing.

t love smith (they/them/their) is a queer and non-binary poet from unceded Wabanaki land currently seeking an MFA at Stonecoast. they are a Curator for the Trans Poetics Archive, Poetry Editor at Stonecoast Review, 2026 OLLI Scholar, and Assistant Development Director at WMPG where they host a trans poetics podcast. they have had a few poems and essays published in online literary journals and are working on a poetry collection.

Jessica Bayne (she/her) has been a nurses’ aide, a waitress, and an actor, but has spent most of her working life as a video producer, editor and writer.  She is the co-author of two textbooks about human development.  Her fiction and reviews have been published in Commonweal, the New York Law Journal and the Green Mountains Review. Currently a student in the MFA program at Stonecoast, Jessica lives with her family in South Portland, Maine, the beautiful land taken from the Abenaki people.

I am a Two Spirit artist, an author, and enrolled member of the sduk"albix™/Snoqulamie Nation located in Snoqualmie, Washington. My published work and artworks include Prayer of Silence with Island Ink, sales with Salish Lodge and private collections.
I am a highly regarded visual artist who has received public and private commissions and had work widely displayed in galleries and museums, both in the United States and Canada. Addition-ally, l've led visual arts workshops with schools and am an active contributor in tribal community on various committees.
My work focuses on representing those with disabilities, indigenous, queer and two spirit groups within my writing and artwork. You can follow me on instagram @mistletoetrex.

Alice Helen Casey (she/her) is an editor and writer from Lowell, Massachusetts. After working in the field of veterinary medicine for 13 years, (and a brief stint in the corporate world) she returned to her first love of writing, and now writes speculative fiction and creative nonfiction from inside the attic of a 150-year-old Victorian house which really ought to be haunted, but stubbornly isn’t. An avid reader of a wide variety of genres, Alice’s writing interests lean towards fantasy, horror, and “the weird,” particularly drawing inspiration from fairy tales and folklore. Among her many influences are authors like Kelly Link, Mariana Enríquez, Karen Russell, and T. Kingfisher. She writes primarily for adults, but also has an interest in middle-grade fiction, and is slowly working on a middle-grade fantasy novel. Alice is a current student in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She lives with her neurotic rescue dog, Freyja, and a cat called The Future. (Both animals have confirmed the unacceptable absence of any household ghosts.)

Mary Sawyer is a poet | artist from Seattle, WA. They want to stay in school forever and teach for at least half that time. Enjoyer of beauty and terror. 

Michelle Dussault received her MFA in visual art from the University of Tennessee in 2003. Her background in painting and drawing has taken her on adventures from the Horn of Africa to the Arctic sea. She also holds a B.A. in Anthropology and African Studies from Rhode Island College. Michelle is currently writing an eco-fiction novel about evolution during the collapse of civilization that combines a speculative future with a mythical paleo-past to explore ancestral memory and the illusory nature of spacetime. She employs phantasmagorical prose with psychedelic undertones to depict the mystical currents of embodied life. She has been awarded multiple art and writing residencies including the Arctic Circle residency, the Hambidge Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Turkeyland Cove Foundation. She has collaborated on projects in Ethiopia, Norway and Vermont. Recent collaborations include, The Clean House Show, plant medicine ceremonies and home funerals.